Route 66, Aliens, and Spacewalks – Thoughts from September 18, 2024 – Roswell Part 1

Patti and I woke up in Roswell, New Mexico. This was the location she was most excited about visiting. We would be here two nights. She didn’t plan it this way, but we needed another day just to make up for arriving so late on the first night. At 3:00 pm, we were visiting the Roswell Visitor Center. Roswell has fully embraced their place as the alien capital of the galaxy. We took a picture with two aliens in UFO T-shirts and jeans. All of us looked like tourists from somewhere else. Being from California is like being from another planet. We vote differently than most of the other states on Route 66, have less extreme weather, and most of the people are fake compared to those in these small towns. Roswell embraces the same love of putting on a show as Hollywood, California.

Our first major stop was the UFO Museum and International Research Center. They truly set it up like a museum. There are displays with informative placards next to them. Top-secret documents, timelines of events, and re-creations of alien-related items abound. There were documentaries you could play at the touch of a screen. One display re-created an alien autopsy. Another section talked about NASA and their accomplishments. I’m sure they meant to lend some credibility to the museum’s other unconfirmed assertions. Like any museum, it was a good excuse to examine another time in history. That is entertaining on its own.

Patti was most interested in seeing the 1994 movie Roswell starring Martin Sheen and Kyle McLaughlin. It was about the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell. The biggest thing to remember about the museum and unidentified flying objects is that they are not proof of aliens from another planet. They mention the possibility of aliens without declaring that they exist. My favorite part of the museum was the art on the last walk near the exit. I took pictures of most of it because it was a mixture of alien lore with other imaginative depictions of other creative possibilities. Bigfoot appeared in several of the images.

Next, we went to Bricktown. It was basically a store that sold mainly alien-themed Lego sets. I was excited to go there until we went into the store and a man said we were lucky because this was the best Roswell attraction. His whole vibe was a cheesy car salesman. Patti listened to him, and I walked around the store. The Lego were even more expensive than Lego normally are. She asked me if I wanted to experience “Alien Attack!” I told her we needed to get to the other shops. It was almost 4:30 pm, and the town mostly shut down at 5:00 pm. The main reason was that I wanted to punish the man for over-selling his shop so hard.

Off the main street we were on was the Roswell UFO Spacewalk (a blacklight adventure). Alien footprints on the ground led us right to it. Just like the museum, it costs to go through, but it’s worth it. They asked if we wanted a light-up ray gun. It did nothing to the creatures in the walk, so, of course, we took one for each of us. They lit up and made zapping noises. To walk to each new section, you had to go through a black curtain. Patti made me go through first because it was like walking through a haunted house. On the walk, they depicted several different alien creatures. We zapped them all with our blasters. There were traditional aliens, giant eyeballs, a Sleestak from Land of the Lost, and other creatures out of a nightmare. It was cheesy and well worth the $12 we paid to walk through it.