Sunday, October 17, 2010

Roswell - Extraterrestrial Hwy 285 and city

From the Great Sand Dunes NP we took Highway 285 to Roswell, the city where (allegedly) an UFO crashed in 1947. The part of the highway that goes through New Mexico is sometimes called "extraterrestrial highway" as, apparently, there were many UFO sightings along that road. (Second, more famous, extraterrestrial highway is Hwy 375 in Nevada.)

Driving along lonely Route 285 we could definitely imagine why aliens would decide to land there. For miles and miles we did not see any cars, and all in all during 300-mile drive we might have seen maybe 10 cars going in the same direction as we did, and maybe 25-30 in the opposite. It definitely felt a bit eerie to be driving on such desolate road. Still, to our great disappointment, we did not see any UFOs. But at least we learned that our little car can go 100 miles per hour :) (Maybe even more, but I was not too keen on testing it further...)

The sole reason that we decided to go to Roswell was to visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center located there. But since we were staying in the town for a night anyway, we decided to go for a short ride and see how people live there. Of course, I took pictures of all aliens and UFO's that I encountered :) Unfortunately, there were not too many of them...

I was positively surprised to see Roswell's Walmart decorated with UFOs:


Specialized "alien" shop in downtown Roswell:


Even some cars were decorated with aliens...