Labor Day – Roswell UFO Museum

Three day weekend! You know what that means … Road Trip!

I know I’m still working on finishing up the posts from our epic trip back in July, and now I have another one to work on. We’ve got another trip this weekend back to Colorado and then another the weekend after that for the Ruidoso Rally. Just been too busy traveling to keep up with posting what all I’ve been doing heh. Dont worry, I’ll catch up.

We headed down to camp out in the Guadalupe Mountains and check out Carlsbad Caverns. On the return trip hopefully we can fit in White Sands and the tunnels on the way down from Cloudcroft too. We had intended on doing this trip earlier in the year as a last practice shakedown run before our epic July trip, but plans got put on hold with the bike down for a few months following the Close Encounter of the SUV kind.

Researching the Guadalupe Mountains for campgrounds I found Dog Canyon was pretty remote and isolated. Hopefully less crowded with tourists. I was a bit concerned that they didnt take reservations. With us traveling 400 miles first to get there on a holiday weekend and the few campsites they had being first come first serve only we might not get one.

So not a whole lot of pictures along the way, not that theres much to see. There are a lot of cool abandoned buildings in Vaughn and Encino that would make good photographic subjects sometime. There was even an abandoned garage with a 40’s era sedan still inside with the hood up covered with decades of dust, way cool. I’ll have to stop next time through.

We were in a rush so … 150 miles from Clines Corners to Roswell? I should be able to make that… Uh, yeah.. Perhaps if I wasn’t going 75 the whole way. I hit reserve at 110 miles with 40 miles to the next town, Oh Crap! Maybe I didnt top it off enough or maybe they already switched to that crappy winter mix gas with loads of ethanol. Whatever the reason, I’ve never gone 40 miles on reserve before and this is a very bad place to run out.

I still had extra gas in the lantern and a can on the side but I didnt know if that would be enough. So utilizing every hypermilling technique in the flat plains/wasteland I could think of we barely coasted into Roswell on fumes and I managed to put in 4.64 gallons! in a tank rated to hold 4.2, I think we may have had enough gas to go another 10 feet. My previous highest was 4.3 gallons. There was some other ADVers there who were coming from southern Colorado and on their way to texas too, wow and I thought we had gone a long ways already. One of them had the Safety Third sticker on the side from Hayduke, hehehe small world.

We found a Cici’s Pizza and just had to stop LOL. Unfortunately they didnt give Cece free pizza, isnt it her store? But the buffet was just $5.49 and not too bad, a pretty good deal.

And of course while in Roswell you have to check out the alien stuff so we stopped at the Roswell UFO Museum. We met these two guys outside on loaded down Goldwings on their way to Martha Texas outside. I thought it was funny that they also made extensive use of coolers for packing like some other long haul biker we know. We met up with them again in Carlsbad getting gas.

Inside the museum they have a lot of the history of the crash, the coverup and lots of documents and ephemera relating to events surrounding Roswell. Interesting but kinda dry. Who wants to spend hours reading old clippings and government documents. I’d lave that stuff in its own section for the researchers and hard core UFO buffs.

I figgured there would be more pictures and “stuff”. It was called the International UFO Museum afterall. Theres plenty of pictures and such floating around online and YouTube clips that are unexplained and havent been disproved, why not have some of that in there you know? So I thought it was all kinda disappointing. The wall on medical implants that have been found was interesting, if a little creepy though.

This is one of the paratrooper dummies the military claims were mistaken for little green men. I dunno, looks about as lifelike as a wooden Pinocchio to me 😉

The best thing in the whole museum was this replica of Pakal’s (Lord Shield) sarcophagus lid from Palenque. The whole thing was carved out of wood, pretty impressive. It must have taken a lot of work to create something like this. The replica on its own could be a significant work of art. I couldnt tell if it also had the inscriptions on the edges as well of if it was just the top face.

Their translations of this was completely bogus though (click for bigger image) and I do not agree with any of this at all. Hasnt this stuff been thrown out enough times? I guess if its interesting enough people will keep repeating it and it’ll stick around. I studied this piece in high school while researching Mayan for a super computer project, so it was real neat to see in person even with the incorrect info. We were working on a program to do visual character recognition of the glyphs, to catalog and categorize them to aid with translations. Little did I know that 10 years later the same techniques would make it super easy for cops to scan plate numbers with a camera, speaking of which I need to check if my registration expires this month or next heh.

Plenty of movie and tv series posters. I like these, Mulder and Scully from X-Files!