Aliens, space and rocket-geekery is a thing in New Mexico. We decide to investigate. But there’s much more to overlanding New Mexico, so we do check out a bit of the other stuff too: some sand, a Chloride time-capsule, a ‘Truth or Consequence’ and some wolves. But for us in New Mexico, geekery is where it’s at.
Alien-nation?
After crossing from the east, our first stop in New Mexico is Alien-land, Roswell 👽. Here’s the brief story: in July 1947, a few good people of Roswell claimed to have seen “some kinda lights up in that there sky”. Then, a rancher found some strange wreckage of unusual light-weight materials “like nothin’ I’d ever seen in my whooole life”. Curious. Other witnesses to the wreckage reckon they saw some strange-looking corpses lying around too. Hmmm… the plot thickens… The military came in, secured the area, removed the wreckage and put, let’s say… ‘heavy pressure’ on anyone who tried to speak publicly about it until the 1970s. Locals now claim that during this period, they were too scared to speak out.
So it’s obvious then… it has to be an alien spaceship crash-landing. What else could it possibly be?
Well… it may assist your powers of deduction to know that Roswell just happens to sit amongst many of the USA’s most secret military testing facilities. 1947 was the start of the Cold War with escalation of military power and technology. All sorts of innovative ideas were being trialled and no whacky idea was too whacky. What might one say to the proposal that the US was developing some kind of new aerial/aviation technology that failed miserably in its mission that night? Might this explain the unusual wreckage, the haste with which the military appeared and the secrecy? On the other hand, it could be aliens… you never know 😉
Sand and the No-Go Rocket Land
As we said, there have been mucho military tests in these parts over the years. The White Sands Missile Range kind of does what it says on the tin – it’s a testing range… for missiles. The first ever nuclear bomb was tested here before use on Japan in 1945 and various smaller rockets continue to be tested. It’s a vast area of outstanding natural beauty, a unique habitat of dessert and stunning white gypsum dunes. They have kept aside a section of the desert as a National Park so we could wander around the dunes (great memories of our sand-pit time when we lived in Qatar). Just so you don’t get a nasty shock driving down the road with a lot of whooshing overhead, they do close the area on days that missile testing is active, which is kind of them.
There are two impressive looking museums in the area covering the geek-stuff. The first in Alamogordo was interesting, but the real ultra-geeky interesting stuff is apparently in the White Sands Missile Range Museum. ‘Apparently’? yes. They wouldn’t let us in 😯. US Nationals only. But we’re British don’t you know? NATO partners… ‘Special Relationship’… James Bond n’ all that. But no.
Going Galactic
It’s not only military testing that goes on in these parts. On the western side of the White Sands desert is Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America – the departure lounge of the future. If you have a bit of spare dosh (not sure how much, but we’d guess ‘quite a lot’) you could check-in here for some complimentary coke and peanuts before boarding one of Sir Richard Branson’s commercial space-tourism flights. Possibly as soon as 2020 you could be a Virgin Galactic astronaut. If you’ve got the dosh, that is.
Truth or Consequence
Just up the road from the spaceport we stopped in a small town called ‘Truth or Consequence’. “Wow… there must be story behind that” you might think. And you’d be right. There is.
Once upon a time, there was a small town with several natural mineral springs. It had the somewhat predictable name of ‘Hot Springs’. In 1949, the popular national radio show ‘Truth or Consequences’ asked if any town wanted to be renamed in honour of the show’s 10th anniversary on the air. A poll was carried out and on 31 March 1950, the townsfolk of Hot Springs voted 1,294 to 295 in favour of the name change. The very next day om 1st April 1950, the name officially changed. Now they call it ‘T or C’ for short.
Chloride Time-Capsule
In T or C we were advised to check-out a story in the nearby one-horse town of Chloride. The settlement formed in the wild-west days when silver chloride ore was found there. It all fell apart in the early 20th Century, so the village store was boarded-up in 1923. Over 80 years later, a snow-bird retiree bought the property and opened it up to find the store of the wild-west days totally intact as it was. All the goods were still on the shelves, money/credit notes in the till and safe, the detailed accounting books, clothes and personal items lying around. A regular museum collates pieces from various places and creates a reconstruction of how it might have been. Not this one. This is an actual store, just as it was on the day it was sealed, like a time-capsule of the era. Billy the Kid was a local ‘round here, he could’a moseyed-on in any minute!
Contact
Next… more geekery at the Karl Jansky Very Large Array. Remember the Jodie Foster film, Contact? Those huge satellite dishes she used for listening-in? That was here – a remote, high, desolate plateau in central New Mexico… west of lost and north of nowhere.
Now don’t fall off your chair, but it may surprise you to learn that in reality, things don’t happen exactly as portrayed in the movies. There isn’t some young, attractive scientist sitting with a head-set alone out in the sun listening to alien noises.
What really happens here is a way beyond my (failed) O-level school science. But from what I learned here, the 27 dishes intercept high frequency radio waves that are emitted from space. The data is passed to geeks sat at computers somewhere in the world, who analyse it with data from optical telescopes like Hubble. Together, this allows the geeks to have a bit more than a wild stab-in-the-dark at what happened to stars, galaxies and black-holes millions of light years away. Hey… maybe these guys should get together with the guys at Roswell to prove the alien theory 😂
Breaking Bad Geeks
Albuquerque wasn’t only an 80s pop song, it was the setting for Breaking Bad, too. We loved the show and wondered if any of the sights from the show are there to visit. The Pollo Hermanos café is there but, rather disappointingly, not actually called Pollo Hermanos. Shame ☹. Then we remembered a scene in the show where Walter ‘Heisenberg’ White met the drug-chaps at the Nuclear Science museum. Aha… a chance for more geekery!
And what an outstanding museum it is. Even for non-geeks like me, it tells brilliantly the story of nuclear physics, weapons and power from so many angles: scientific, military, historical and geo-socio-political. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and conscience of creating this new world science, or pondered what a real nuclear missile or bomb looks like, it’s all here. They have partially disassembled and laid out Minuteman, Titan, Thor, W177 etc. Really a must see in Albuquerque.
Out with the Wolves
Finally, after overlanding New Mexico we’re on our way west across the high and cold dessert plateau. We end our time here, about as far from geekery as is possible to get… at a remote wilderness wolf sanctuary. 65 creatures: various types of wolves, foxes, dingos and so on… have all been rescued from crazy people who tried to pet them, or from illicit importation. A guided tour to see these beautiful creatures is absolutely fascinating, learning about their characters, how and why they differ from dogs, watching them eat and play. Hopefully we won’t bump into any in the wilds of our State No.14… Arizona!
