My food-frakking deputy, Julia, and I took a four-day road trip up to Portland last week. Sometimes I forget just how huge America is. Basically there’s absolutely nothing between here and there, and it just goes on forever.
For instance, there’s this giant rock in the middle of Utah.
Just one rock among many.
I also found out that Salt Lake City is actually a large metropolitan area. I had always assumed that there was something on the order of 20,000 Mormons out that way. It seems that there is a non-trivial quantity of Mormons, which is a disconcerting thought.
But I insisted that if we were going to head out west, then I needed to stop by the Roswell UFO Museum and International Research Center.
Here is an authentic, un-re-touched photo of me and Julia standing together in front of the museum. Notice that the street lamps have alien eyes on them.
Most of the museum was just newspaper clippings and crazy rants pinned up on the wall. I remember visiting the museum in 1998 and they had a clipping of Carl Sagan interviewing the guys who did all the crop-circles in England. That’s gone now, replaced by an exhibit that claims that crop circles always take place near holy sites, and that high-frequency rays can boil the stalks causing them to bend over (which is a completely different effect apparently than just crushing them with a board).
There was not the slightest hint of skepticism in the museum anymore. I guess everyone was too busy dissecting those aliens to brook any dissent.
I did break from the museum proper to take a look at the research center. The first section looked a lot like a normal library with video viewing rooms and hardback books.
And then there was the spooky hallway.
And then the room stacked with binders filled with newspaper clippings of the strange and the occult.
Here’s a binder labeled "cattle mutilation" that for some reason has an article about a dog-faced boy.
Is there a connection? I’ll never read enough of the UFO material to tell.
