We hadn’t planned to go to Roswell on our US road trip, but when we realised it would only add a couple of hours to our drive from White Sands, Lauren pestered the hell out of me until I gave in I happily agreed to make the detour. I mean, it’s not every day you get to visit the site of an alleged UFO crash landing, right?
No, no it isn’t.
I don’t know whether it was some kind of alien time distortion field at play or just never-ending roadworks on the US 70, but the drive there seemed to take forever. Once we finally hit the town limits, though, it became apparent that Roswell was, well, a little different to other places we’d been.
There was this.
And this.
And, well, whatever the hell this is.
There was no time to stop and find out, though. We were on a mission. To the International UFO Museum And Research Center we must go.
And so, indeed, we went.
Entry to the museum costs a mere five dollars for an all-day pass. That’s right, an all day pass, folks. You can come and go as you please with this bad boy. It’s exceptional value, really, given the high quality of the exhibits.
Exhibits that include, but are by no means limited to:
A picture of either a post-apocalyptic universe or several marbles being flushed down the toilet.
A picture of an alien with a skull.
A picture of aliens on the hunt for aforementioned skull.
What I can only assume is a saucepan lid that has fallen into a cat litter box.
A blurry picture of the saucepan lid before it fell into the cat litter box.
This. Because nothing says aliens are amongst us like a newspaper horse. Nothing.
A little light relief. Very little.
What I believe is a photo of a man explaining how he had to grow a marijuana plant this big to deal with the excitement of his time at the Roswell International UFO Museum And Research Center.
What is almost certainly a photo of a man explaining how he had small votive candles implanted in his hand by aliens.
And, I’m guessing, what happened to him after he removed them.
Much like many of the other visitors at the Roswell International UFO Museum And Research Center that day.
I’ll admit, by this point I was starting to ask myself the same question.
Fortunately, though, even more excitement was in store. The highlight of the museum. The grand finale. The pièce de résistance, if you will.
Loud music started to play, undoubtedly suggestive of aliens in some way. The lights… well, they didn’t dim, exactly, but they did flicker a bit. Tensions were high. Excitement was palpable.
And then…….
This.
DRY ICE ALIENS.
If that isn’t worth the price of admission by itself, well, I really just don’t know what is.
Somehow resisting the urge to make the most of those all-day passes and go round again, we dragged ourselves out of the museum and back into the slightly less alien surroundings of Roswell’s main street.
The fun wasn’t over, though. Oh hell no. In fact, the best was yet to come, in the form of the perhaps-not-entirely-world-famous Alien Zone.
Out the back of a non-descript shop, though an unmarked door, lay… well… something very special.
There were Upside-Down Aliens.
There was BBQ Alien.
Don’t forget good old Culturally-Inappropriate Alien. He made an appearance too.
Based on the waxy complexion and glazed expression, I’m guessing this was Travel Blogging Alien.
I had no idea what the bejesus these things were, so I went for a closer look…
… which didn’t help in the slightest. The end result of a really bad acid trip, perhaps.
Any scientist looking to do that kind of “Biological Analysis” on me deserves a medal. A posthumous one, probably.
That look on my face is confusion at why this spacecraft seemed to have landed on a large pile of leaf-covered vomit.
And then the place started to get to me a bit. I’ve no idea what I’m doing here, but it’s definitely not good.
And then, like all good stories do, this one finished in a bar.
And I mean, really finished.
Back on the highway a little later, I realised that I had actually had no better idea whether a UFO had crashed there in 1947 than before I arrived. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Maybe aliens were, in fact, flying into litter boxes and dispensing margaritas all over the place.
There was one thing that I had definitely learned, however.
Roswell is a really freaking weird little town.
You should go there.