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Published: March 18th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: The sheltery thing at Fort Sumner Lake State Park worked nicely, though it didn't really matter at all, since it wasn't raining and the wind died down a lot. We both slept pretty well, and woke up at a decently early hour. We hit the road and headed for our first planned stop, Roswell, NM. Roswell, as you may recall, is home of one of the biggest alien cover-up conspiracy stories of the 20th century.
As the story goes, in July of 1947, a flying saucer crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell. A few people eventually claimed to have witnessed the crash. The rancher went out to investigate the next day, and found wreckage. He brought it back to his home, and a few days later, went to town and showed it to the Sheriff. The Sheriff didn't know what to make of it, and so called up his buddies at the Roswell Army Air Field. From there, things get a bit murky. The military came and picked up the wreckage and cordoned off the crash site.
A few days later, the press officer at the base issued a statement saying that they had recovered a
flying saucer. Somewhere in there, the wreckage was flown to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and that's where the story gets even murkier. The conspiracy story says that the wreckage was secreted away for further study, and for public purposes was replaced with weather balloon wreckage. Within a couple of days, it was declared by all military sources that what had been recovered was just a more or less ordinary weather balloon.
The stories vary a bit in other ways too. Sometimes they recover four alien bodies. Sometimes they recover three and one that was still alive. According to one witness, the military was there cordoning off the area the very next morning after the crash. There's a lot of question as to who said what when, and what witnesses were threatened into silence by the military and government.
On our way into Roswell, we passed by the alleged crash site. It's marked by a big sign, but all we could do was pull off the road to take pictures, since the actual crash site and wreckage area are closed except for private tours. From the roadside, there isn't much to see. It's sort of a
hilly, rocky, ranch type land. We continued on to Roswell, where after a brief stop to get a few items at the Wal-Mart (Onaxthiel adds: Roswell: the only place you can probably find where even Wal-Mart sells UFO related merchandise,) we found ourselves at a big museum that had a name like “The International Museum of UFO Studies” or something. It's a pretty cool place, with a lengthy exhibit on the Roswell crash, as well as exhibits on other famous crashes, crop circles, the three types of alien encounters, and the many photos of UFOs. There's also a neat “research center” attached to the museum, which is pretty much a library full of books and films about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.
When we were done at the museum, we decided we had really seen the gist of the town, and we pushed on to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Unfortunately, by the time we were pulling in the gates for the park, it was already after 2:00 PM, and the last time they let people down for the full tour is at 2:00. We drove on to the Visitor's Center and reassessed our options. I had read earlier that
there was backcountry camping at the Park, and on asking about it, we were told of a fairly nice, easy hike we could take to camp the night, hike out the following morning, and hit the caverns at that time. Seeing as the permit was free, and camping options in the immediate area were otherwise quite limited, we figured this was a good option, and headed out for our trailhead.
Allow me to mention now, that the scenery around Carlsbad Caverns is actually quite pretty. I don't know what you might think the area there looks like. I guess I never really gave it much thought, I just figured we should see the caverns which are so well known. Carlsbad Caverns are in the Chihuahua Desert, and in this part, are in a mountain range. Like a good deal of the other deserts we've seen in the U.S., the Chihuahua is actually rather green. Sure, there's a lot of brown too, but there's a lot of cactus, scrubby vegetation, and tall grass. We took a bit of a scenic drive, and began our hike at Guadalupe Ridge, an old jeep trail that's not in vehicular use any more. After
a bit more than mile, we turned onto the Rattlesnake Canyon trail, which would eventually take us back to our car. Somewhere out there, we selected a patch of fairly clear ground, and dropped packs. The nice thing about backcountrying here was that there are very few regulations. Pack your garbage out. Don't start fires. Cool.
We hiked a bit further ahead on the trail, and up to a tall mesa flat where we could survey the canyon nicely. It gave us some great views, since all the mountainy-bits look green and aside from the really high wind, we had no reason to complain. It was a good temperature, and the forecast looked nice and clear. We sternoed our dinner for a while, and enjoyed the sunset and bright moon of the night.
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