Outer Space Aliens greet visitors in Roswell, New Mexico.
Outer Space Aliens are everywhere in Roswell, New Mexico, even at Walmart.
We strolled between a small cluster of antique adobe buildings whose extremely thick walls were clearly visible in the windows and door frames. Lincoln was once at the center of the three-year-long Lincoln County War that erupted when a monopolistic ranching, banking, and mercantile operation was challenged by an upstart rival outfit. The political battles of this conflict reached all the way to Washington, D.C. President Rutherford B. Hayes replaced New Mexico's corrupt Governor Samuel Axtell with Governor Lew Wallace, and the new governor promptly threatened to impose Martial Law to calm things down. The gunfights were so brutal that one was fought while galloping on horseback for five miles and another was fought at a house that had been deliberately set ablaze, the occupants shot dead in their tracks as they ran out of the burning building. When all was said and done, the Lincoln County War took the lives of 19 people, and it ended with the death of Billy the Kid. The story reads like a movie script, and it’s hard to imagine the brutality of these events while gazing at the picturesque serenity of the little settlement of Lincoln today. After enjoying this history of the gun-toting inhabitants of the old Wild West in Lincoln, we made our way east along U.S. Route 380 to catch a glimpse of the wide-eyed
inhabitants of outer space in the city of Roswell. Roswell first landed on the map in a big way in the summer of 1947 when rancher W. W. "Mac" Brazel found some odd debris scattered across his ranch land. Newspaper accounts of his discovery conflicted with each other as soon as the first stories were reported in the press and, to this day, the facts of what really happened are few while the possibilities of what might have happened are many. Between military assurances as recently as the late 1990s that the debris was from a weather balloon, to eyewitness accounts in 1947 that the debris seemed otherworldly and possibly revealed a UFO crash scene, the tantalizing implications of what actually took place just outside Roswell nearly 75 years ago are endless. Today, the International UFO Museum and Research Center offers artifacts, replicas of original news articles and many other kinds of intriguing materials for the curious to ponder. For those who simply get a kick out of the tongue-in-cheek antics of little green Martians, the town is absolutely riddled with funky outer space creatures. Statues of aliens adorn every street corner, paintings of aliens fill countless store windows, and even at Walmart we found the huge almond eyes of green Martians were staring at us from the front windows and following our every move as we got a shopping cart and headed inside the store. We had a blast walking
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COAST TO COAST SPRING MAGAZINE 2021
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