It’s 1993. A heady time for an almost eleven year old Mellzah, filled with beanie babies and skorts. If the previous descriptors of the year didn’t give it away, I was a particularly naive ten year old, not yet tuned into the more exciting world of grunge and Beverly Hills, 90210 like my peers. 1993 also marked the release of Fire in the Sky and its accompanying press barrage, and at some point while watching afternoon television, I learned that this movie was based on a true story of alien abduction and experimentation, including something called an ‘ocular probe’. 

1993 was also the heyday of Unsolved Mysteries* and the Weekly World News, both of which had a not-insignificant alien focus, and additionally, I had gotten my hands on the first book in the “Mysteries of Mind Space & Time: The Unexplained” series** which, being alphabetical, covered alien contacts. All of these converged into what was, for me, a minor alien obsession. Not the usual “wow, space aliens are so cool, I wish they’d take me on their ship to explore the universe” kid alien obsession, but a “I have just learned space aliens are real (because how could a movie say it was based on a true story if it wasn’t true?) and they are definitely out to hurt people and I need to learn everything about them so I can protect myself” kind of obsession. The same kind of obsession that led me to ask for an emergency window ladder for Christmas, not because I wanted to use it for preteen shenanigans (which is what I have to assume my parents thought, because Santa definitely did not come through) but because I was genuinely terrified that a fire would block the only set of stairs in the house in the middle of the night and my whole family would perish in flames due the the lack of emergency ladders***. But there’s no emergency ladder for aliens, so I would just lie awake in terror, every flashing light from the road an indicator of imminent ocular probage.

So it’s safe to say that I am more than a little familiar with the UFO crash and subsequent coverup in Roswell, New Mexico. In the intervening years, I’ve grown a lot more skeptical, the sense of utter devastation and betrayal being too real the day that I learned that anyone can claim anything is true and thus any media about it can also claim to be “based on a true story”. Now when I lie awake at night, any flashing lights from the road mean those little bastards are out behind my house again, maybe starting fires, and why haven’t I bought an emergency ladder yet, goddamnit!? Ahem. But even though I don’t believe-believe in aliens anymore (like ghosts and demons and footgrabbing monsters under the bed, they grow more plausible in the darkest hours when I don’t have more realistic, important shit to worry about (I basically haven’t had a single demon worry since early November or so, and I will know shit is back to normal when my mind turns back to demons hovering over me in the dark or potential ghosts in my shoes)), there was no way I was going to plan a road trip through New Mexico that didn’t involve a stop in Roswell.

Roswell. The town that turned a probable weather balloon crash into into an alien identity that would remain strong seventy years later, though not strong enough to open a UFO themed hotel, much to my chagrin. But lack of star-patterned sheets aside, I was beyond pumped to spend some time in Roswell. Alienville, USA. The Little Town That Could…n’t Identify A Once-Flying Object. Or as the French call it, Alie,NM. A place housing not one, but multiple discrete alien-themed attractions. I couldn’t wait to dive in. 

The International UFO Museum and Research Center

My first stop was at the International UFO Museum and Research Center. This visit got off to a bit of a rocky start–there was an error at the credit card machine which is always awkward because you have to tread that line between assuring the cashier that no, this is not an awkward situation at all, you are assuredly not spending your last dollars of credit to purchase entry to a UFO research center, and thinking “oh shit, was my card stolen and canceled or am I somehow spending my last dollars of credit to purchase entry to a UFO research center?” and the cashier, for her part, made noticeable strides to make the entire transaction more awkward to the point where I just kind of wanted to slink out the exit even though I’d just paid to get in.

To be perfectly honest, even without the card snafu I didn’t really dig this place. The whole front area is walls filled with page after page of solid print material: it’s like trying to read a novel when at any moment someone could step in front of the next few pages, and it’s also in the loudest, most heavily trafficked area in the museum as it is right at the entrance. In other words, it’s a kind of frustrating and irritating reading environment and as a consequence my eyes began to skim over the text more and more and I walked away with only the barest impression of the facts. “Facts”. When I got a bit further in, my brain started registering some bold claims such as “Encoded in each of these [crop circle] designs are systems of knowledge referencing no less than the angles and alignments of the Gizeh(sic) Pyramids, the earth’s processional rate, its equatorial circumference, and the geometry that facilitates the imprinting of the soul into the human body.” I’m sorry, I’m gonna need to see some sources on that. Especially that last one.  And no, I don’t accept the Weekly World News.

Alien Zone

Alien Zone was the other solely alien-based business I visited in Roswell, and based on some of the interior signage I have to assume they are in fierce competition with the International UFO Museum as they do not allow anyone to wear International UFO Museum entry stickers into their displays. But believe me, it’s worth losing readmission to the UFO Museum to play in the Alien Zone. Why? Because Alien Zone is full of alien dioramas into which you can insert yourself. And insert myself I did, vigorously, with aplomb. The only place I didn’t cram myself was the playground area because it turned out that was for children only.

Biggie Biggie Biggie, can’t you see? Sometimes your words just hypnotize me.

Oh no, there’s been a horrible accident!

He’s okay, folks!

Roswell At Large

After Alien Zone, I checked into my hotel and took a quick swim in the outdoor pool in the afternoon sun. Refreshed, I decided to walk back down the main drag and see how many aliens I could spot.What I learned on my way is that the fastest way to spot a tourist in Roswell is if they are on foot. Roswell is not a walking town. Not due to lack of sidewalks–sidewalks were plentiful and in good repair. Not because it has hills that make your thighs scream and require a sherpa to navigate, no–it’s flat as a board. People just don’t walk in Roswell. It’s a car town. Every few minutes there’s the sound of furiously revving engines and squealing tires as yet another vehicle races away from an intersection. Huge groups of motorcycles swarm through. The air smells like hot exhaust and burning rubber.

When I said that Roswell embraced aliens as their town identity, I mean they really embraced it. Almost everywhere on the main street either had alien in the name or some type of thematically appropriate alien displayed prominently on the building or in the window. Their baseball team is the Invaders. Their credit union’s logo prominently features a UFO and tractor beam. Their streetlamps have alien eyes. There are tiny green paint footprints leading to a business. A UFO presumably brings abducted books back to book reseller Books Again. There are murals and murals and murals. Even chain restaurants play along, an Arby’s sign advertising that aliens are welcome (though I don’t know why we’d immediately want to sour our relationship with said aliens with one of Arby’s patented Gross Beef Sandwiches™) and McDonald’s going full UFO outside and in, a McNugget astronaut bobbing near the ceiling near his friend and murderer/wholesaler of his corpse, Astronaut Ronald.

We ended up eating dinner in that UFO McDonald’s, not because either of us particularly wanted McDonald’s but we were also reaching our exhaustion tipping point, considering all we’d crammed in our day, and neither of us really had the energy to try to find a decent restaurant. We just wanted to shove some food at the general food hole and sleep the sleep of the dead. Hopefully, aliens wouldn’t strike in the same place twice.

*To this day, the theme music makes me uncomfortable and a little afraid.

**The back of this very first volume, which I do still possess, posits that too much skepticism is a form of obsessive mental disorder that stops the sufferer from seeing the world as it really is, which is funny to me on so many levels. Obviously, the first one is that they’ve clearly done a “you smelled it/you dealt it, I’m rubber/you’re glue” thing to the skeptics who have made that exact claim about conspiracy theorists, AND maybe they get people to continue paying for the remaining 25 volumes in the series even if they read the first one and said “eh, I don’t know, this seems kind of vague and bullshitty” because they’d hate for the book people to think they’re not being open-minded enough. I’m dead, I love it.

***I’m not saying my biggest fear at the time was that my little lungs might not have had the power to squeeze out a “Damn you, Santa! Why couldn’t you branch out into emergency supplies?” at the very end, as the thick smoke filled my powder blue room, but I’m not NOT saying it.

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Not that I was, uh, mad-rid to begin with. I had a belly full of waffles, it was a gorgeous day, and I was on the road from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Sure, I could have taken the highway and gotten there faster, but I was keen on taking the Turquoise Trail and getting a peek at Madrid. Formerly a bustling mining town named Coal Gulch, it was left mostly abandoned in the 1950s when demand for coal died in favor of natural gas. And then in the 70s, the hippies came. These artists and craftspeople revived the town, setting up shops, galleries, and services for locals and passersby, and thus the town of 300 or so people has a funky, arts-y, welcoming vibe. Their shops showcase local turquoise jewelry and pottery, they have their own artist quarterly, and they host events like mailbox painting contests to bring their community together.

I had a grand time in Madrid, shopping around (I bought an ammolite ammonite at a really reasonable price, the ammolite I saw when I last wandered into the Gastown museum in Vancouver cost the Earth), taking silly photos in Connie’s Photo Park, and soaking in that much-needed sunshine. I also was able to grab a few photos from the road of the Turquoise Trail Sculpture Garden & Studio, which was unfortunately closed–but fortunately, it gives me a reason to go back. Aren’t those origami sculptures cool?!?

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I don’t think I’ve ever been cagey about how badly the winters in Seattle affect me: the days themselves are surpassingly short and spots of sunlight among the nigh-constant cloud cover are fleeting at best. From the moment the holiday lights snap off in January, I feel dragged down emotionally and physically. Light therapy doesn’t help, exercise doesn’t help, a healthy diet doesn’t help, a junk food diet doesn’t help. I don’t want to write, I don’t want to make art, I don’t want to go outside. All I want to do is sleep, like a form of hibernation for the modern useless person. And this winter has been particularly difficult, as it’s been hard to feel hopeful about, well, anything since late January.  So this year for my birthday, instead of throwing a massive party like last year, I wanted to get out of town for a while, feel the sun on my face, experience an emotion other than anxiety and despair. I decided that the timing would be ideal to head back to New Mexico to do all of the things we ran out of time for on the Harpies road trip last summer, plus a plethora of other things across a larger swath of the state that were entirely out of reach previously.

My first stop was Tinkertown, via the “singing road” on eastbound Route 66 outside of Tijeras. I’d read that as you drive over it, you hear the strains of “America the Beautiful”, but only if you’re driving the speed limit of 45mph. Neither Jason nor I believed it would be all that impressive, potentially just a series of rumble strips that you could convince yourself was “America the Beautiful” if you were singing it in your head at the same time, the same way you could click a pen in time to Katy Perry’s “Firework” and hear different tones out of that pen click, that it was all about the power of suggestion. Nope.

This musical rumble strip was funded and put in place by National Geographic in 2014 as part of a show aimed at changing public behavior. Speeding is a factor in a lot of accidents, so this was a way to incentivize people to drive the speed limit, at least for that small stretch of road. It’s one of only a few musical strips of road anywhere in the world–there’s one in Lancaster, California that plays the William Tell Overture, and another in South Korea that plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. I’m not certain that National Geographic approved of me whipping around so I could drive it twice but they’re going to have to build something else to prevent that particular human behavior. A spike trap, maybe.

Then it was on to Tinkertown, a museum collecting the life’s work of Ross Ward. Ward, an admirer of roadside attractions, set out to construct his own: collecting, carving, and painting everything during the time, as he was known to say, “while you were watching TV”. I do watch a lot of TV, Ross. Particularly in the winter. In my defense, it’s pretty good. Or, you know, not good but beats wandering out into the soggy gray wasteland or trying to write about all the nothing I’m doing–it’s not like I’m a TV blogger.

For a mere $3.75 per person, you gain admission through the gates into the circuitous route of rooms packed to the rafters with stuff, surrounded by walls made of over 50,000 glass bottles. I spotted at least one bumper sticker from House on the Rock inside and even if I hadn’t seen it, it would have been clear to me that Ward was inspired by that notable Wisconsin attraction. Although touring through Tinkertown was not nearly as arduous an experience as House on the Rock (owing to the fact that Ward made many of the exhibits, whereas Ross mainly purchased/commissioned them) the feel is remarkably similar. At various locations throughout the exhibit, you can insert a coin or two to bring the dioramas to life. A grandmother bursts through a window to tell some musicians to stop making such a racket. God and the Devil play tug of war over a mortal soul, complete with flashes of lightning. A maquette equipped with a cleaver chases a chicken around and around a wooden box. There’s so much packed into each diorama that one could easily note a new detail every single time they look–and from a quick peek at the guestbook, some people had been back for more than one gander, noting that the displays were currently in better repair than their last visit.

Tinkertown also shares some common themes with House on the Rock–there’s a sizeable sideshow and circus display in both places. Among his many other talents, Ross Ward also used to paint circus and sideshow banners as well as carousel horses, and so at least a portion of the banners on display were painted by Ward’s hand.

Here I’m stepping into the shoes of Louie Moilanen, of Calumet, Michigan, who stood at a whopping 7’9″. His promo photograph and the Tinkertown tag have him listed at 8’4″, which is not terribly surprising as many people in the circus had their stats exaggerated to better sell tickets.

At a time when at least two world leaders are actively jazzed at the idea of using nuclear weapons on a populace, this quote feels particularly apt. 

My trip to Tinkertown happened on a fortuitous day, as local notable figure Anand Naren Oma and his tarot reading goose, Princess Esmeralda, were on site plying their trade.  There was absolutely no way I was not going to have a goose divine my future, because if there’s any creature on this earth who can know the future, it’s birds. How else can you explain how they know exactly when a shiny clean car will pass directly underneath them to use as their personal toilet? You can’t.

So how does goose tarot work? The cards are shuffled, and each of us chose two. Upon flipping a card over, Princess Esmeralda would make various goose sounds (and also bite at Oma and Jason, just because she knows the future doesn’t mean she’s not a goose) and Oma would translate for her, telling us the meaning of the cards we chose and how they might relate to our lives.

The cards we chose were Abundance, Existence, Mind, and Healing. Of course, any card based divination can be applied to any situation if you reach hard enough, but considering I came to New Mexico to do some soul searching and mental healing, these felt particularly apropos. I left Tinkertown feeling truly lighthearted for the first time in months.

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