The long driving days through the Southwest are really cutting into my sightseeing time, but such is life. Today there were two sightseeing stops along the 480+ mile drive from Roswell to Tucson - the UFO Museum in Roswell, and White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo.
The UFO Museum is located in downtown Roswell, and takes credit (on its early-90s-style website) for sparking the tourist and alien boom in the town. Signs of Roswell's image are pretty clear just by checking out the signs in the area:
(Notice, particularly, the alien eyes on the streetlights)
The museum itself is rather small and focuses on the "Roswell Incident" - the purported crash-landing of a flying saucer in Roswell in 1947, and subsequent government cover-up. Most of the exhibits consist of newspaper clippings, printed interviews (conducted by the museum), photographs, and reproductions (of unknown veracity) of secret government documents:
There were also a few exhibits on more general alien and UFO phenomena (as opposed to just the Roswell incident), including close encounters, alien implants, and crop circles. Overall it was an interesting exhibit (though I remain unconvinced), but could certainly have used more interpretive signage, rather than just taking a wall-o-text approach to the exhibits. It also would have been more interesting if they hadn't reproduced the same Army picture of weather balloon debris at least five times in the museum. Still, it's probably the essential Roswell destination.
After leaving Roswell, I headed out towards I-10 on US-70, which passes through the White Sands Missile Range and White Sands National Monument. 70 occasionally closes down temporarily (with a sign advising delays of over an hour) because of missile test firings on the range, which can pass on or over the highway. Luckily, there were no firings today. White Sands National Monument is a huge deposit of white gypsum sand, formed by evaporation from a (mostly) dry lake bed at one end of the monument. Most sand is made of quartz; gypsum sand is rare, and White Sands is the biggest deposit around.
Walking out on the dunes is an interesting experience. They stretch out nearly as far as the eye can see and, once you get past some border areas with vegetation, are very sparsely populated by any visible life:
Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm.
Not even that far away and the car looks quite small already.
After leaving White Sands, I made a beeline for Tucson. Even with the high speed limits on the desert roads, it took a while to get there - not for an hour or so past sunset. Dinner was Mexican again, because I just can't resist Mexican food in the Southwest.
Tomorrow: Tucson, AZ to San Diego, CA
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