Got back from a week-long trip to Roswell, NM last week. It was interesting and surprising at the same time. I was expecting obvious commercialism, but I was surprised that everyone used the same “little green alien” image. There wasn’t a speck of difference from one shop to the next, or from one hotel to the next (almost all of which have a green alien welcoming visitors.
Even the street lights had alien faces. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of an alien face sporting an American flag for the Fourth of July. Do aliens dream of their own independence from …?
My friend Linda and I also visited the International UFO Museum and had a chance to study the details of the original Roswell crash. Some details we knew, of course, but there is always more to learn. Exhibits included transcripts of some of the actual radio traffic between the officers who were first dispatched to the scene and the operator back at base.
Our last stop was to the Robert H. Goddard Planetarium, where we saw an interesting presentation on the search for dark matter particles in the Hadron Collider in Cerne. Just days after we returned, there was breaking news about new particles discovered by scientists at Cerne, though not unfortunately dark matter. Also saw a news post about a research effort in a South Dakota mine where they are trying to capture the elusive dark matter particle.
For a science fiction writer it was a dream trip. The only thing that can top it will be if I finally get to visit the NASA research facility in California where one of my books takes place.
