Dave'n'Kathy's Vagabond Blog: Roswell: An Out-of-This-World Experience!

October 30, 2018

Hi Blog!

We finally made it to Roswell, New Mexico, the mecca for tourists interested in UFOs, science fiction, and aliens. Roswell is most known for having its name attached to what is now called the "Roswell UFO Incident," although the crash site of the alleged UFO was some 75 miles from Roswell and closer to Corona. The investigation and debris recovery was handled by the local Roswell Army Air Field. Roswell is a popular town for tourists from around the galaxy because of its many alien-themed stores. You can't walk down the street without coming across an extraterrestrial.

Even the street lights have a little ET flair about them.

In order to learn more about the Roswell UFO Incident, we stopped at the International UFO Museum and Research Center. The Museum endeavors to be the leading information source in history, science and research about UFO events worldwide. The International UFO Museum's constituents are committed to gathering and disbursing, to all interested parties, the most qualified and up-to-date information available. While it's good to get some education, there's no harm in having a little fun along the way.

As the story goes, an unidentified flying object crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, sometime during the first week of July 1947. Rancher W.W. “Mack” Brazel said later he found debris from the crash as he and the son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor rode their horses out to check on sheep after a fierce thunderstorm and mysterious explosion the night before. Brazel said that, as they rode along, he began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal debris scattered over a large area. Upon further inspection, he said, he saw a shallow trench several hundred feet long had been gouged into the ground.

Meanwhile, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at Ballard Funeral Home, received some curious calls one afternoon from the RAAF morgue. The base’s mortuary officer was trying to get hold of some small, hermetically sealed coffins and also wanted to know how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days and avoid contaminating the tissue.

The next day, Dennis met with the nurse, who told him about bodies discovered with the wreckage and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad. Within a few days she was transferred to England; her whereabouts remain unknown.

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that personnel from the field's 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc," which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell. The military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed device – nuclear test monitoring – and instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon. Years later, when the military story of a downed weather balloon was debunked and UFO investigators pinned it down about the bodies, a test dummy was brought out with the explanation that it was a test for manned space flight.

In the 1990s, the US military published yet another explanation: two reports disclosing the "true nature" of the crashed object: a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. Nevertheless, the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist. There are loads of historical documents to review, as well as photos and artifacts. There are also lots of artist interpretations.

One theory reported an unnamed source as claiming that Josef Mengele, a German officer and a physician in Auschwitz, was recruited by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to be remotely piloted and landed in America in order to cause hysteria similar to Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds. Other alien invasion movies were also highlighted. "Klaatu barada nikto!"

As we made our way around the research center, there were a number of rooms devoted to photos of UFOs from around the world. We also spent some time exploring the information on ancient astronauts. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, and religions, and even human biology.

We loved the detail in this wood carving which recreates the stone sarcophagus lid of K'inich Janaab Pakal in the Temple of Inscriptions in southern Mexico. It is a unique piece of Classic Maya art. Around the edges of the lid is a band with cosmological signs, including those for sun, moon, and star. It appears as if the occupant is flying a spacecraft and about to take off into space.