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She said it softly, a burden shared with a stranger in a museum: “It happened to me.”
She was standing behind me when I overheard this quiet revelation. It rooted me to the spot. The remaining exhibits, I thought, could wait. I would loiter instead and listen to her story. Casually, of course.
OK – eavesdrop, then. Not my finest hour, but we were in the middle of the International UFO Museum and Research Centre in Roswell, New Mexico.
How did I get there? I was on a road trip across America with friends, and it was my must-see detour on that coast-to-coast journey. A pilgrimage of sorts my companions didn’t exactly embrace or understand, but indulged nonetheless.
America was different then. It was a few years before 9/11, before that date became an inflexion point, when the world held its breath and history turned.
Bill Clinton was still in the White House, the US federal budget was comfortably in surplus and the president was on the road to being impeached.
The truth, it seemed, was out there, but it hadn’t yet been splintered into silos.
And I wanted some, even if it was just for a laugh.
Growing up in an outback town meant ABC TV was my entertainment staple. Sure, a local commercial station filled some gaps – hello JR and Bobby – but as a kid it was all Goodies and Time Lord adventures. The absurd and the fantastical – Ecky Thump and giant kittens followed by Egyptian demigods and Daleks. All brought to heel with black pudding or Venusian karate.
The Goodies – Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden – encounter Twinkle the kitten, while Jon Pertwee’s Doctor deals with the Daleks. Credit: Aresna Villanueva
Fast-forward into the ’90s and we enter the era of The X-Files and a rebooted Star Trek franchise brewing up spin-off series with the regularity of a nice afternoon tea. (Earl Grey, of course.)
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And then I got an invitation to the US.
The plan to drive across America came from My Very Cool Friends. They met at a Nick Cave concert and are stylish in a way that looks effortless.
Their US adventure pirouetted through great museums and galleries, savoured Americana cool, and unearthed music you don’t forget in obscure clubs across the country.
We shared the awe over natural wonders – Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley – and touching the warm waters of the Atlantic for the first time.
But I was also on a different tour. Each place opening into a sideshow alley of delights and distractions. In LA, it was hunting original movie posters of 1950s sci-fi classics (too far out of my price range), and marvelling with my friends at Dennis Hopper’s home (a Blue Velvet moment).
The vistas of Death Valley? The heat in that endless landscape, the light and colour dancing through the canyons. Such stark desert beauty. It was also where a droid went looking for his master on Tatooine. Only the wildflowers in bloom stripped away the imaginings of that place far, far away.
Alec Guinness with director George Lucas on set. Some of the scenes in Star Wars were filmed in Death Valley.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images
But David Lynch was there too, on that lost highway, absurdism through a dark, fractured mirror.
When we hit Las Vegas, I skipped off to the Hilton – a solo trek to the Star Trek Experience.
From the bridge of the Enterprise to a Bird-of-Prey battle over the famous Strip, finally emerging to promenade on a space station and visit Quark’s Bar. (Yes, I know, the klaxons are blaring their nerd alert.)
But it was a fitting place to end – the exit-through-the-gift-store run by an imagined alien race that worshipped the most rapacious form of capitalism. It was an American morality tale foretold through the lens of a sci-fi franchise. A race governed by “Rules of Acquisition” – the art of the deal.
We stayed at the Tropicana – a bargain on weekdays in that era. It had a pool area that was 2.5 hectares, and a history of Mob connections, real and imagined. The Godfather’s Las Vegas scenes were filmed there. Maybe they made an offer they couldn’t refuse.
The Tropicana was “imploded” last year. In the city of the shiny and the new, it was judged past its use-by date. That demise became a production number, all fanfare and fireworks. It’s Las Vegas, after all.
Monument Valley, then, after Vegas was a warm, silent balm. The red earth of the desert, the sandstone monoliths. It is in the land of the Navajo Nation and it has an otherworldliness that is breathtaking.
I remember thinking Mars – this surely is what the red planet would look like.
The otherworldly beauty of Monument Valley.Credit: Annie Dang
NASA had sent the Mars Pathfinder there the year before, landing on July 4, 1997. The images sent back by Sojourner, its rover, could have come from this Arizona national park.
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I would have loved to have camped there, under that sky of endless stars. I don’t think I would have slept.
An artist I met in New Mexico was inspired by its bounty – the Milky Way stretched out over the adobes of Taos Pueblo, his home. His name was Wings and he made jewellery. One piece was in the shape of a flying saucer. He made it in honour of the many sightings there had been in New Mexico, he said. “Just remember to look up.”
I bought it – the piece of jewellery and the hope. In that timeless landscape, it was impossible not to feel the possibility of something more.
And then came Roswell – and the wonderment faded.
But first – the origin story. In 1947 a UFO crashed near Roswell and the US government covered it up, claiming it was a weather balloon. They retrieved the alien body and craft, shipped it off to Area 51, and have spent decades reverse-engineering the technology.
That’s the conspiracy theory.
The reality is probably closer to the weather balloon explanation, except this was the start of the Cold War and the US government was sending up far more sophisticated “balloons” to detect Soviet atomic testing. It was top-secret and known as Project Mogul.
By the early ’80s, however, the conspiracy had gathered pace – the weather balloons debunked, of course – and the “Roswell Incident” became embedded in popular culture. It took the ’90s to glue it firmly into place, X-Files marking the spot. And so Roswell embraced its destiny.
The UFO museum opened and an annual UFO festival began. Businesses bowed down to their new alien overlords – gray, elongated faces adorned shops everywhere. It was where kitsch collided with conspiracy in a fevered mind meld of consumerism: everyone could live long and prosper.
I regret to this day not buying the “alien roadkill”, tyre treads over the torso of that ubiquitous being. A Roswell memento. The museum itself was disappointing, even with Exhibit A – the alien prop laid out in the autopsy room.
An alien model on display inside the International UFO Museum and Research Centre in Roswell in 1997.Credit: AP
But people came. One of them was a woman seeking answers for an encounter she had trouble articulating. She found a gentle listener in the woman beside her. No judgement there.
For me, she was the punchline in my detour into the bizarre. So yeah, not my finest hour.
I wonder now how many others had made that pilgrimage, seeking a community, understanding, sometimes sanity. Something had happened to her; she believed it. She wanted to know more and find others.
I hope she did. I ended up walking away, my journey decidedly less fraught.
I spent the day in Roswell madly taking photos. My friends mainly did their washing. The next day we hit the road.
