Sonya's Blog - Day 244 - Artesia and Roswell

Sonya’s Blog - Day 244 - February 21st - Artesia and Roswell

The kids want to see some aliens, or evidence of aliens, so we are heading to Roswell today. It is about an hour drive from our campground.

Our first stop was the town of Artesia. They have some wonderful bronze statues, that help to tell the story of Artesia. We walked up main street and saw a few of the statues and read the plaques. We thought we might get a coffee, while roaming around, but forgot that it was Sunday. There wasn’t one shop or restaurant open on Main Street. Ah well, such is life. They had some cool statues, here are some pictures:

A drilling rig, circa 1950's:

Businessmen that found the first oil well in New Mexico:

We then drove to Roswell. As you enter the town, there are lots of alien statues on display. It is kind of like when you drive into Drumheller and see a whole bunch of dinosaur statues. We headed straight to the Alien Museum and Research Centre. We decided to walk Kizmet first and explore the couple of block dedicated to the purported crashing of an alien space ship in the desert near Roswell in 1947. It was a cheese fest. Blake popped into the museum to find out about admission, cheap ($5 for adults and $2 for each of the kids). The best news was that they were dog friendly and Kizmet could come in with us!! Hooray. She was pretty excited to go in.

The Museum is small and mostly newspaper clippings and sworn testimonials by witnesses. There are also a lot of cover-up scenario’s presented and explanations for what really happened!! Dum, dum, dum. Ah, it was good times. Of course, this is because the original reports coming out of Roswell were that an UFO had crashed, but then the story quickly changed. We heard the original ABC broadcast, and they were sure it was aliens. The changing of the story brings out the conspiracy theorists and they have been digging for the “real answers” ever since. We did enjoy the aliens with their spaceship behind them:

Some of these photos are from Calgary:

A replica of a Mayan sarcophogus that depicts a person in a spaceship:

An aritst's replica of the spaceship crash site:

In the gift shop:

We stayed for about an hour, reading through some of the stuff and looking at the pictures and displays. It was pretty amusing.

We drove back to our campground, with a quick stop at Walmart in Artesia on the way back. We drove down Main Street for a bit, to look at the statues we may have missed. We did miss this cool one, it was a block off of Main Street:

We got back to the campsite and had some supper. I then grabbed the computer and headed to the main office building so I could post some blogs, book campsites and plan the next part of our trip. It took a long time, but I got everything done that I wanted to.

Sonya