the mainstream version of aliens was a complete mystery to me. Besides, I really had to go to the bathroom at the time, so I was willing to stop anywhere.
“Sure, grandpa,” I said, giving him a little smile. “Let’s go see some little green men.”
“Well, alright then,” He said with a self-satisfied smile when he turned his attention back to grandma. “See, grandma, see does want to go see some little green men.”
My grandma’s only response was her usual little string of under her breath curses that I would come to truly love over the years.
We pulled into Roswell about midday and grandpa followed the signs—and there were plenty of them—pointing to the Roswell UFO museum. He pulled right in front of the building and we all climbed out, paid the cashier our entrance fee—I was free because I was under 10, which grandpa really liked. Despite him being a very generous man, he was also a natural born skinflint—but before we began the tour, we all needed to use the bathroom. I remember sitting in my stall and there was this bald green man with huge black eyes painted on the back of the door. I kept giggling at it and thinking how weird it looked. I remember grandma kept asking me what was so funny, but I was laughing so hard at the painting that I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer her. Finally, she just had to pull me out of the stall and out into the lobby.
The tour started with a 15-minute movie about the history of Roswell. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Roswell incident, I’ll give you a quick primer. Back in 1947, a UFO supposedly crash landed on some ranch a little north of Roswell. The owner of the ranch was named Mack Brazel. Good old Mack was a simple, hard-working man, and he didn’t know much about anything else other than ranching, which was a good thing because he was pretty darn successful at it. Anyway, Mack and one of his employees were riding around the property when all of the sudden they saw something fall from the sky. Curious about, they drove to where the object hit and discovered a massive amount of debris with all kinds of strange and unknown writing on it.
The writing spooked Mack and his employee, so they gathered some of the debris and then decided to drive back to the main ranch house and call the local air force base at White Sands, figuring that the thing that crashed had to be one of their aircraft. Mack and his ranch hand drove back out to the site to meet the air force and show them what they had found. But as soon as they arrived, the air force men who were now out the site in force confiscated what Mack had collected and told them to be on their way. Confused, they drove back to the ranch house, and Mack and his ranch hand would obsess about the crash for the rest of their lives.
Now here’s where things get really weird. The same night of the crash, the air force contacted a young mortician named Glenn Daniels and was told that there had been a crash and some bodies had been recovered from it which needed his attention. Daniels drove out to White Sands only to be turned away by the entrance guards. Daniels thought it was a little funny to have driven all the way out to the base, but he really didn’t give it a second thought until the next day when an air force nurse who worked part time at the same mortuary as Daniels came into work.
From what Daniels said, the nurse was as white as a ghost and being concerned with her overall well-being, he asked her what was wrong? The nurse asked Daniels if he’d heard about the crash and he said yes, and that he’d been called out the base to examine the bodies but had been turned away when he arrived. Next the nurse told Daniels about the truckloads of debris that been hauled back to the base and the three bodies that they had delivered to the bases’ hospital. She couldn’t describe what the bodies looked like, so she drew them on a prescription pad,