Throughout my travels over the last several months, I keep running into places that are stitched into the fabric of American identity as being hotspots for extraterrestrial activity. Aliens. One of the first places I passed through was Roswell, NM. In Roswell, they leaned hard into the rumors of alien spacecraft. The sign outside town says something about “Home to 30,000 Friendly Folks and 4 Aliens.” The tally of the number of aliens inhabiting Roswell was oddly specific. It’s a joke, right? The city has embraced the rumors of extraterrestrial visitors so wholeheartedly it can’t possibly be real! Or can it?
I thought about taking pictures. The signs with the flying saucer and beam of light, the big-eyed greys and little green men. Instead, I got an Americano at a little coffee shop and kept traveling down the road. By then, I was already weary of tourist traps. Whether or not one of the proprietors of these shops could peel their face off to reveal an otherworldly countenance, concealed by a rubber mask just didn’t interest me. The trinkets all come from the same factory in China. There’s enough of a demand that some coal-gobbling factory out there is cranking out alien tchochkes by the thousands.
That was many miles ago, practically when I was first starting out. If I thought I was cynical before about extraterrestrials, it only got worse. Which is strange, considering I have had my own experiences with UFOs that can’t be readily explained.
One night, back before I even started this journey, I was working with my digital camera, trying to figure out how to take pictures of the night sky. I was experimenting with aperture, exposure times, and even tripping the shutter remotely so the camera shock didn’t affect the shot. The night sky was clear, about four miles outside of Walden, CO. The Milky Way was bright. Not a cloud hung in the sky, but the night air was cold.
In a portion of the sky directly above, I saw what I thought might have been a satellite. Those little points of light are pretty common to see on a night as clear as this, and are very distinctive. Satellites don’t have the flashing lights that aircraft use. They also cut across the sky much faster and can be very hard to track. They travel with direction and purpose. This was different in the way it moved. It danced around in the sky. It moved as fast as a satellite, but without a vector. It seemed to just go wherever it wanted, moving in a general direction towards the northeast. A single point of light, moving much faster than the wind could have carried anything caught in the upper atmosphere. Moving against wind currents. Moving very quickly and not really seeming to have any kind of course. No running lights. Nothing.
I watched it for a little while until it eventually disappeared over the mountains. I tried to capture it with my camera, but I didn’t have the skills, or the equipment, at the time to get anything more than some very blurry shots of the milky way.
Outside of Alamogordo, NM, I watched fighter planes during the day and night as they did maneuvers over the gypsum flats of White Sands. Sometimes a pair of aircraft would fly low and the sky would crack with a sonic boom, thunder on a cloudless afternoon. F-18s. F-16s. Other smaller jets. You hear the boom before the roar of those jet engines as they streak overhead.
While I was camped outside of Quartzsite, AZ, some nights I would watch aircraft pass over the desert at night. One night, I watched the running lights of some massive aircraft which formed a wide triangle pattern, which seemed to just pull apart from the stars that were visible that night. This triangle of stars headed towards the east and banked and headed northwest, towards Lake Havasu City. I can only assume it must have been very high up, considering I never heard engines.
As my travels took me further away from the heart of the Arizona desert, I lingered in St. George, UT for a while. I needed tires for my bus and decided to check out Zion and Bryce National Parks. Where winter had been a rumor over the last few months, in southern Utah, it was a reality, although I seemed to have missed most of it. The nights were chilly, and the mornings brought frost. At higher elevations, snow still clung to the hills. Up at Zion and Bryce Canyon, roads were closed due to snow. I decided to push on after a few weeks. One of my goals for this year’s trip was to make it to Yosemite. I decided to get there by way of California, rather than take the route through Las Vegas. Going back through Vegas seemed to be a hundred miles out of the way, and there wasn’t much of anything I wanted to see there anyway.
Which left me an interesting route: the Extraterrestrial Highway.
I crossed the border into Nevada and made camp for a few days among strange rock formations in the Dixie National Forest. A few days without cell service motivated me to continue onwards. On a map, Nevada looks sparse, with towns platted out as little as 40 miles apart at a stretch. Settlement of these places came after the era of the stagecoach, where horses had to be rested every ten or twenty miles. The roads here are cut straight, following cardinal directions, as there are few rivers and only mountain passes to cause much variance. It doesn’t look so far away on a map, but when you are driving, you feel the miles. The distance. The isolation.
Millions of acres of Nevada are cordoned off for weapons testing, military bases, and even atomic testing. They used to watch mushroom clouds from Las Vegas up at the proving grounds outside Nellis Air Force Base in the 50s and 60s.
Some theories say that our first forays into the atomic age where what caught the attention of extraterrestrial visitors. It’s not much of a reach to think that the proving grounds of the Nevada desert looked anything at all like we see them to alien visitors. We see expanses of scrub brush, pinon, desert cedar, and pines, while they would have seen familiar technology that could harness the power of the atom.
At a crossroads on Route 93, just before the Extraterrestrial Highway (HWY 375), a series of flat-roofed buildings becons travelers with signs advertising cold drinks, ice cream, and aliens. Life-sized sculptures of spacecraft, alien murals, and other familiar alien iconography advertise that this is the gateway to America’s alien frontier. Not the secret labs of Roswell and Los Alamos, but the stomping grounds of the USAF skunk works of Area 51, just about 50 miles away.
I stopped at this spot with a craving for cold drinks and also to slake the thirst of my curiosity. Inside, I found familiar alien trinkets and memorabilia, as well as a talking fortune teller machine voiced by Donald Trump. The young woman working the cash register was happy to talk about aliens. She was dressed somewhat out of place, more like a character from a Tim Burton movie with a gothic black lace dress and straight black bangs that she kept fussing with when we visited.
She had moved to Nevada a few years before, and had lived in Las Vegas, but said she prefered the solitude of the desert. She had come here to get away from the city. She talked about many of the things that people had be concerned with since I have been on the road. Homelessness. Fentanyl. She said that Las Vegas was doing whatever they could to take their water for a rapidly growing city. We talked about how Lake Mead was drying up, and the solution the biggest user of it had was to just force other counties to give up their water rights.
In spite of the great distances and seemingly endless tracts of uninhabited land, these places still rely on water for agriculture and people living a very rural life. Big box stores you find in the city are less important to these people than their peace. There’s less crime. The stark beauty of the place is captivating as the light changes throughout the day. People come to places in the desert to get away from other people. At least to get away from the worst of what they bring.
In the middle of the Nevada desert, I found a cold bottle of Lemon Iced Tea Snapple. The only place that has had it before or since that I have found. As we visited and my ice cream drumstick began to melt and my Snapple started to get warm, I opened up the can of worms to a whole other conversation. I asked about the Raid on Area 51.
According to her, the Raid had been changed at the last minute to Area 15, which was some distance away. The county tourism trade had overextended itself in anticipation of such an influx of visitors for this raid. Now they were out hundreds of thousands of dollars. All it took was a phone call to move the location and the county had basically been bankrupted. They were so far into debt now that they had to shut down most of their social programs. Healthcare. Public assistance. The taps were dry. It was no wonder the county was seriously considering selling off their water rights to Las Vegas, a city that had no shortage of what Lincoln County was in desperate need of: money. Around $140,000 to be exact.
Not far from this outpost is the Extraterrestrial Research Organization. A clump of buildings on the hillside a few miles away, which bristles with antennas and other scientific equipment. I was camped about ten miles from the crossroads myself just past Hiko and near Mt. Rish and the Basin and Range National Monument. If I had thought Alamogordo was a hot spot for fighter plane activity, I was about to get a wakeup call. Several, in fact. Throughout the day and night.
I could watch the contrails of fighter planes in the upper altitudes turning and intercepting each other over much of the sky. At night, sonic booms from low-flying jets would rattle the contents of the inside of my bus. During the day, the jets would scream across the desert and they would vanish just as quickly as they arrived.
After a few days of this, I headed across the desert, following the Extraterrestrial Highway. A grade of road that runs impossibly straight into the Reveille Range, climbing in altitude, straight into the cold wind that blows down from the high desert. A pair of F-22s crossed the highway in front of me near Ash Springs. I can only assume these were probably the birds I was hearing buzz by at all hours of night and day. Nimble, distinctive looking twin-engine aircraft. The latest generation of America’s fighting force. Also around a billion bucks each, just casually flying around in the skies.
I wondered about all that surviellance equipment at the Institute. How much of it was blocked by the Department of Defense. If there were aliens in Area 51, a HAM radio wasn’t going to find them. I kept driving onward, through the fabled land of cattle mutilations and government secrets. The snow returned and my propane supplies were getting low. I decided to head for Tonopah, NV, thinking at least I could find a Walmart to restock. Everything was expensive and far apart, other than what you might find in Las Vegas, Elko, or Carson City.
By the time I reached the “Little Alie-Inn” I had enough of Alien tourism. The much-hyped eatery stood alone on the frozen plains, a couple trailer houses and beat up old pickup trucks, perpetually sand-blasted by the wind. I left Rachel, NV in the rear-view and continued on into the hills. Warm Springs was abandoned. An attempt to entice tourists seeking hot springs on a long and lonely drive were now just graffitied outbuildings and no-trespassing signs. Cattle grazed on the high-country plains, eagerly awaiting abduction and mutilation as something to pass the time.
Tonopah only had a series of silver mine museums, and abandoned lunatic asylum, and a very unabandoned haunted Clown Motel. I stopped at a Family Dollar for some groceries. Here I could begin to feel the pinch of the economic disaster the rest of the country was dealing with. $5 for a half-gallon of milk. $3 for a can of refried beans. Everytime I stopped at a new place, the price of groceries and gas had gone up. Lots of evidence of meth addiction. Very few places to camp for a couple days that seemed safe in the least.
Fuel in Tonopah was about a dollar higher than it had been in St. George. It would be another dollar higher in California. With a hundred miles to Bishop, CA, I fueled up and decided to go for it. I had taken only a few days to cross Nevada, when I had really been expected it to take weeks. After crossing into California, I discovered that the road into Yosemite over the Sierras was closed until at least June. I could continue north again into Nevada to Tahoe and over to Sacramento, or I could head south to Bakersfield, which ironically, and unfortunately enough, was just a few hours away from Las Vegas. Either way was about the same distance. Except that Donner Pass had just been socked in with a late blizzard.
I had gone about 500 miles out of my way to get to Yosemite. I had gone too far now to give up, so I decided to keep going by way of Bishop, Lone Pine, and eventually Lake Isabella.