Roswell, UFOs and VFC.

Rather than venture north to Santa Fe with reported temps of 20 & snow, we spent Sat. night at the Karlsbad KOA and Satur-day driving 60 miles north to explore Artesia then Roswell, NM. Both were pretty un-exciting.

The Roswell “UFO Museum and Research Center” (nice positioning of their brand) was mainly a tacky series of displays housed in a former movie theater. Exhibit after exhibit, each requiring a day and a half to read, had all the information and reports, press clippings, etc. from that fateful night and the ensuing cover-up. Personally, I want to believe something extraterrestrial really did crash in the rancher’s field that night of 1949, but I don’t believe I want to spend all day ferreting through the data and displays.

The, ahem, “Research Center” needs some help from a real museum/exhibit design firm to streamline and dignify the presentation of this vast accumulation of info; maybe when they get the funds they are hoping for to build a Bilbao-esque looking new “Research Center” up the road. Right now all they have is an artist’s rendering and my hunch is that’s about as far as it will ever get. Unfortunately, the rest of downtown Roswell looked pretty ragged and run down, too. A lot like the tattered displays and aging alien mock-ups we saw.

We then stopped at the Roswell Museum & Art Center. A small, quiet space on a cold Saturday with few visitors. But we enjoyed it. Dioramas seemingly straight out of “Blood &Thunder.” An extensive tribute to the life and brilliance of Robert Goddard, who pioneered rockets before they were cool. A Georgia O’keefe piece, several other local artists-made-good, and the big surprise: an exhibit from their Artist-in-Residence program, one Janice Jakielski, artist/seamstress/sculptor whose fun work widened our eyes and made us chuckle. Google her. Really quirky, fresh stuff.

We returned to the ‘Spud, had dinner and played Scrabble. (BB slightly ahead when we got too sleepy to talk let alone spell.) Over night it got Very Frigging Cold: i.e. 25 degrees. That is nippy enough to freeze, among other things, any hose left out that’s full of water like, say, one running from a spigot to an Airstream. So next morning we had zero water. I unscrewed our white 25’ hose, brought it inside and we coddled it with heat from the furnace and KB added hot air from the hair dryer until it finally coughed up 25’ of small, round, elongated ice cubes.

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