Saturday, August 30, 2008

Friday, August 29, 2008 -- To Believe or Not To Believe...

Kathy greeting a neighbor at the RV park.

After a fairly leisurely morning at the Trailer Village RV Park, we headed to downtown Roswell and first stopped at Munchies for pizza. (We even added anchovies!)

Our main goal for the day was to tour the UFO Museum. There is plenty to keep visitors busy for a long time because many of the displays consist of affidavits by individuals connected to the 1947 Roswell "incident" or official government reports or other communications. It takes a while to read these, if you are so inclined (Kathy usually is).





Quite frankly, both Chris and Kathy thought they made a good case for the view that something was really found at Roswell in 1947 that the government covered up. Actually newspaper reports from the daily paper vary from the first days when the Air Force actually announced that a "flying saucer" was found, etc. and then the story changed to a "weather balloon" was found.

We really enjoy this poster that was part of the exhibits!


Movies and other videos are shown all day in a small theater in the museum. We didn't take the time, but earlier in the morning they had shown the movie done by Showtime called Roswell: The U.F.O. Cover-Up. Some of the staff of the Museum told us it was the closest to the "real story". We'll have to get it and see it sometime.

After we had toured the museum, we went into the Research Library at the Museum. We had fun talking to the two staff members, Andrea and Karen. They are both fairly new to the Museum and to library/archive work and we did a little "consulting" from force of habit. They told us that working there begins to make you a believer.

Kathy checked out the Sightings database and copied some of the data for the sightings reported within the borders of the Central Kansas Library System. The towns included Beloit, Concordia, Delphos, Ellis, and Great Bend. Our original goal was to see what they had about the 1971 incident in Delphos, Kansas. They had citations to several books and articles that Chris photocopied. We are planning to share this with Sharon at Delphos Public Library, in case she doesn't have all this "local history" information. Some of the articles are about the soil analyses that were done in at the site near Delphos. The articles were in the Journal of UFO Studies.

We talked to one of the librarians about the TV series Roswell, which was our inspiration for going to Roswell this year. If you haven't seen it, we recommend it. Although it sounds totally science fiction, it's really about people and their relationships. When we discovered it was about a bunch of teenagers in Roswell (some of whom are alien/human hybrids) we didn't think it would be that appealing. But it hooked us and we watched the entire series. We also recently watched the mini-series, Taken, which also includes a lot during the whole Roswell incident era.

Karen told us that the nearby store called Starchild looked like the front of the Crashdown Cafe as portrayed in he TV series. Sure enough, it has the same flying saucer coming out of the building. However, she said the series was not shot in Roswell at all. The museum portrayed in the show, however, looks very much like the actual Museum's exterior.

We ran down the street to the Area 51 where you can take pictures with aliens, etc. (with your own camera!) It was fun and was just $2.00 each! here's a couple of our favorite photos.


We ate at Red Lobster for supper and then decided to take in a show at the local theater. They had eight films to choose from, but by the time we got there we were limited to one unless we wanted to wait a couple of hours. We watched Mummy 3. It was entertaining enough in the "over-the-top" sort of way and kind of a knock-off of the Indiana Jones movies. We prefer the Indiana Jones movies.

Tomorrow we head home to Kansas and plan to be in Great Bend on Sunday.

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