Day 6

Traveled from Gallup, NM to Roswell, NM today. Didn't see a single alien the whole day. At least no non-human ones. It rained most of the way. Luckily the rain stopped about 40 miles north of Roswell. The folks at the RV park said that a big storm passed through yesterday. It snapped off several telephone poles. I can't say I'm sorry we missed it.

The drive is singularly boring. There are some red rock features near Albuquerque. Other than that the land is featureless. It's just dry range land. There isn't anything growing that's higher than a low bush. The only thing interesting is that we passed through Lincoln county. That's the site of the Lincoln county war and Billy the Kid's exploits. I'm really glad we didn't have to travel through Lincoln county on a horse like they did.

Roswell is a surprisingly large town. It seems to be a service town with many car dealerships, equipment dealers, a large hospital, big box stores, etc. It's also home to the New Mexico Military Institute which is a fairly large college. There's a two block area in the middle of the old downtown that's oriented towards the UFO story. Lots of blow up little green men, and every sort of item (coffee cups, golf balls, towels, t-shirts, etc) with images of the big eyed alien on them.

There's one establishment called the UFO museum that is a fairly honest portrayal of the incident. Apparently there was a secret Air Force project to use high altitude balloons as part of an early warning radar system (remember, this was 1947). One of the balloons crashed near Roswell. Of course the Air Force didn't want to admit anything. Some really neat detective work done years later traced the "spaceship fragments" to a factory in the East that had contracted to make the balloons. The factory also made party balloons. The "alien markings" on some of the debris turned out to be designs on some surplus party tape that the contractor used in the construction of the balloon.

Of course the conspiracy people would say that all of this was cleverly set up by the government to cover up the truth. I doubt that the government is anywhere near clever enough to pull something like that off.

Tomorrow is a relatively short (212 mi) drive to Midland. I think I'll leave the alarm off.