Aliens!

Awakening to clear skies in Amarillo, I continued my Texan adventure with a sojourn to Cadillac Ranch, a public art installation created in 1974. Basically this looks like ten Cadillacs buried halfway into the ground, as if they have been pushed nose first off a high cliff, out in an empty field, in a perfect row. Perfectly surreal.

They are also covered in lurid graffiti and spray cans are littered around for visitors to use if they want to get all art interactive.

After paying homage to this strange sculpture we continued traversing the northern tip of Texas, passing billboards for cowboy churches, jeans in ‘cowboy fit', and rodeos.






Country music on the radio set the scene and continued to impress with a rich variety of themes (i.e. women, booze).

I’ll include two representative favourites:

“Baby if you're in the mood you can settle for a one night rodeo,
You can be my tan-legged Juliet,
I’ll be your Redneck Romeo.”

and

“I ain’t much for mowin thick grass
I’m too slow for workin’ too fast
I don’t do windows so honey don’t ask
But I’m pretty good at drinkin’ beer”

Love it.

We continued on past mile long trains, silos, cattle ranches, dusty towns and ironic sounding establishments like ‘Oasis Nightclub’. As the New Mexico border loomed, I noticed a transition in the landscape and the radio-scape toward Spanish and Mexican influences.

And what do you think I saw right near the border? Fittingly, spectacularly, an enormous UFO shaped object, all wrapped up, on the back of a truck and guarded by a local Sheriff.

We drove past twice for pictures, wouldn’t you?

As ‘Only in America’ played on the radio, we drove into Roswell, primed for a close encounter and into what I can only describe as Alien Fun Land. The town is adorned with alien critters on every shop front and sign with alien merchandise spilling out onto the streets.

I think the saying goes something like ‘milking it for all it’s worth’. But hey, we’ve driven all the way there to see aliens haven’t we!

We had primed ourselves for Roswell by watching ‘Ancient Aliens’ and a few documentaries about ‘The Roswell UFO Incident’  so I was very excited to overhear a local discuss it with his date behind us at the local Mexican restaurant (where the staff wore t-shirts of aliens playing in a Mexican band).

“it definitely happened, and there were bodies” he states matter of factly, “but the government covered it up in order to secretly use the advanced alien technology that was discovered.”

Now I know it’s all true!

We spent a few hours at the International UFO Museum and Research Centre (in the company of other visitors wearing tin foil, getting into the spirit of things). I have to admit there was some pretty fascinating and compelling stuff in there, especially all the eye-witness testimonials.

I loved checking out the photographs of UFOs, the abduction stories seemed a bit more dubious, but the crop circle exhibit was damn intriguing!

Sadly, I didn’t experience an alien visitation, yet.

Leaving you with a cloud image - arrow shaped - pointing us onwards! No Photoshop, it was just like that!