The Domesticated Primate

It's hard to think of a town more quintessentially 20th-century American than Roswell - there is a WWII/Cold War tie-in, and also a fringe culture helping to boost the town - when I was talking to one of the many tourist shops' proprietors, it quickly came to light they were California hippies out to get in their kicks, and more power to them.

The town is on the map due to early work in rockets; later it garnered more fame due to the UFO story - and now there is a tie-in to aliens and UFOs throughout the whole town - the lamp above is what all the downtown lamps look like at night. Even huge MNC's like Wal-Mart and McDonald's had their UFO/alien tie-in.

We had a blast there checking out the Roswell conspiracy museum, and buying up various alien doodads and checking out some of the elaborately done tourist trap type stuff - crashed UFOs, alien autopsies and all. Unfortunately, we just missed out on going to the Goddard museum. We may have to do a "rocket tour" of NM in a coming vacation as there is so much to see - I'd like to see the Trinity site, too, but that's only twice a year, by tour only. We were able to get onto the White Sands (below) but we had to wait a bit, as the site opened a bit later that day due to military tests.