Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Pretty much everything there is to see at the International UFO Museum you can see from exactly wherever you happen to be standing in the International UFO Museum. I tell Madi Bear to stay near but she keeps ducking behind exhibits on account of embarrassment about our matching T-shirts. There’s a decent crowd. All the celebrities of paranormal culture have set up book-signing tables. I linger around Stan the Man, who sits with his protégé Kathleen Marden, the 2012 UFOlogist of the Year. Together they wrote Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, about the first-ever widely publicized claim of alien abduction. In 1961 Barney was a postman turned civil rights leader and Betty was a social worker and they were headed back to New Hampshire from Niagara Falls when Betty spotted streaks in the sky. Kathleen is the niece of Betty, the way Madi Bear is the niece of me. Stan the Man doesn’t pay attention when I keep asking about Snowden but Kathleen tells me all about the times she’s been wiretapped. She can hear them (government? aliens?) breathing on the line as she debates dishes for a potluck with her neighbor, so sometimes she’ll just say, Hello. I know you’re there. Enjoy my bisque recipe.

  I’ll keep in touch with Kathleen more than I do with Stan the Man but often she won’t approve of my interest in her family. She has ten hours of uncut recordings of her aunt and uncle, Betty and Barney Hill, under hypnosis and trying to work through their abduction trauma. But Kathleen won’t share. Some of the therapy sessions were published as transcripts in the book that first made Betty and Barney famous, The Interrupted Journey, but Kathleen will say that book left out much and got more wrong. She’ll implore me to buy her book. She’ll say I should place far more emphasis on the Hills’ conscious recall of the abduction. Hypnosis just mixed things up, all the traumas from the past spilling out at once so that Barney’s getting wounded in our Second World War slips into the abduction narrative and now there’s the claim that he saw Nazis on the alien spacecraft. Which he did not, Kathleen will say. And any of the hypnosis tapes posted online are illegal. But that won’t stop me from getting online and listening again and again to forty-five minutes of bootlegged Barney under a spell and getting grilled by a hypnotist.

  I believe Betty is trying to make me think this is a flying saucer.

  Was it light enough to see?

  Just a light moving through the sky and I heard no noise. And I think, this is ridiculous. And, Betty, this is not a flying saucer. What are you doing that for? You want to believe in this thing and I don’t. And I can’t hear any sound. I want to hear a jet. Oh, I want to hear a jet so badly.

  Why do you want to hear a jet?

  Because Betty is making me mad. She is making me angry. Because she is saying, “Look at that. It’s strange. It’s not a plane.” And I keep thinking, “It’s got to be.” And I want to hear a hum. I want to hear a motor.

  You can remember everything now.

  It’s right over my right shoulder. God. What is it? I try to maintain control so Betty cannot tell I am scared. God, I am scared.

  It’s alright. Go on. It will not hurt you now.

  I got to get my gun.

  Then Barney screams.

  You do not have to make any outcry, says the hypnotist.

  But Barney wails.

  Don’t outcry.

  And whimpers.

  No outcry.

  And moans.

  Do not outcry.

  Madi Bear darts out from behind the animatronic aliens at the center of the museum and says, There’s the man you were staring at. He sits at a table with his name taped to the front: Travis Walton. His eyes are all bags and dark circles. A kid with a skateboard walks up to the table and says, Are you the guy from that movie? I watched that movie. What’s it like to get abducted? Travis doesn’t look up from the subatomic particles of the folding table he’s been trying to stare through or rearrange with sheer willpower or extraterrestrial magic, but he pushes his book toward the kid and says, It’s all in there. Buy it. But the kid walks off. The book, like the movie it inspired, is called Fire in the Sky.

  Travis Walton on Geraldo in the nineties looks pretty out of it, sanitywise. D. B. Sweeney playing Travis in the movie adaptation of Fire in the Sky looks out of it too. Travis right now standing next to the projector playing old clips of himself in the movies and on Geraldo doesn’t look a whole lot different. His mullet is red and seems dyed except that the color of his mustache matches exactly. Frances from Fort Worth leans over, almost falling out of her metal folding chair, and asks me why we are watching old clips of Travis when Travis is standing right there in the flesh. Frances is with me in the back row of the audience. She’s at this lecture alone because her husband and son are boycotting the stupid alien festival to play a bunch of golf. I’m alone at the lecture because Madi Bear went with Pops to change out of the wrong legend and ride some miniature donkeys. So me and Frances from Fort Worth sit together. Her blouse is white and her pants are white and she keeps whispering in my ear. She wants Travis to talk about the poking and the prodding and what the alien eyes looked like and how their skin felt and what it was like to feel their breath (Do they breathe? she whispers) on his skin. She wants to know if he was really naked when his friends found him after he’d been missing for five days, but she doesn’t laugh when I say he probably had on the same Western blazer he wore on Geraldo, that he’s still wearing now. A lot of people suspect Travis is a faker because his abduction happened just two weeks after the first airing of The UFO Incident, a 1975 television movie based on The Interrupted Journey, starring James Earl Jones as our old friend, the original abductee, Barney Hill. On Geraldo, Travis says that’s just a coincidence of time. Or maybe the aliens saw the movie too. Maybe the urge toward rebuttal after a Hollywood gloss is universal.

  The clips end and Travis doesn’t even introduce himself to us but just launches into the story he’s told a billion times. Frances whispers some conjecture about how the story likely got him laid every day for the last thirty years, and I don’t have the energy to work through all the scenarios that might result in a woman’s running and screaming from Travis’s motel room in any number of small towns that host these kinds of extraterrestrial conferences, or I’m overwhelmed by understanding all of the scenarios at once, but either way my face flinches like I’m about to register disgust but then, when I notice Frances from Fort Worth is totally sincere, I roll the whole flinch up into my eye and just wink at her, which will probably turn out to be a mistake. I don’t think the problem is that Travis is unattractive or totally dull or otherwise unfuckable, but if what he says about the abduction is a conscious lie, then he’s the kind of jerk that could send a woman running and screaming or, if it’s an unconscious lie, then he’s probably kind of ill and untreated and that could send a woman running and screaming or, if what he’s saying about the abduction is true, then the aliens could come back in the middle of the night to tell him to pipe down on all his blabbering about the incident and that kind of postcoital visitation could send a woman running and screaming. But Frances is enamored of him, and lots of other ladies and gentlemen are snapping his photo. He doesn’t shade his eyes from the flashes and I worry he’ll seize into a flashback of the abduction, but that kind of evangelical dramatics doesn’t show up at UFO festivals even though I hoped it might. Really it is all rather dull. Travis says he could only ever put together what happened to him when he underwent hypnosis. All of our best stories come from unconsciousness. I’m ready to be a little less conscious of this lecture so I put Blind Willie in the ear that doesn’t already have Frances in it. I will or Oh, well or Ah, Lord. There are no definitive lyrics. Three totally different sentiments about getting it done or giving up or having faith and Blind Willie’s figured out a way to say them all at once. And that’s the only honest way to express any one of those feelings—all mixed up with the rest. Doc Jung writes, “Hence there would be nothing against the naive interpretation of the UFOs as ‘souls.’ Naturally they do not represent our modern conception of the soul, but rather an
involuntary archetypal or mythological conception of an unconscious content, a rotundum, as the alchemists called it, that expresses the totality of the individual.” Frances from Fort Worth puts her hand on my thigh. She wants to know what I’m listening to. It’s an outcry, I say. She stares at me for a while. She declines when I try to pass her the headphones. She raises her hand, the one not on my thigh, and asks Travis if it’s true that people who have been abducted will know other people who have been abducted just by looking them in the eyes.

  The parking-lot pool of Americas Best Value Inn isn’t supposed to be open after dark but we’re there anyway, Madi Bear splashing around and me and Pops with a twelve-pack of Buds and our Phillies Blunts. He tells Madi Bear to climb on out of the pool because a storm might be rolling in but it’s just overcast. Nothing: things seen in the sky tonight.

  Five a.m. and I’m chugging Gatorade to clear out my system for the Alien Chase. Madi Bear won’t wake up so Pops carries her to the truck and we drive our tower of inheritance to the starting line. By 6:00 a.m. over three hundred people have gathered, far and away the most attended event of the festival. Serious runners are stretching one another’s quads and serious joggers are putting the finishing touches on their playlists and whole families are there complete with babies in strollers. I did not expect to actually chase actual aliens but I guess I expected more than this: it’s just people. I sidle over to a group wearing T-shirts that say GONZALEZ FAMILY REUNION 2013, who all look like they are also regretting drinking and smoking and sleeping on a motel floor last night. They all laugh when my number gets called to line up with the serious runners doing the 10K. But really there is no line. Everyone just crowds toward a guy brandishing a bullhorn. I snug Blind Willie into my ears. Doc Jung writes, “If we try to define the psychological structure of the religious experience which saves, heals, and makes whole, the simplest formula we can find would seem to be the following: in a religious experience man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.” But it’s just people. Three hundred of us in short shorts and tank tops, some with their faces painted green and one guy with a tinfoil hat and even the family with the thick-rimmed glasses but now with the added touch of sweatbands and wobbly antennae, everyone starting to jostle one another and a muscleman knocking over kids as he pushes his way to the front and everyone else picking the kids up off the ground and someone hoots from the back until all three hundred of us are hooting, all throbbing together in one outcry to get going chasing nothing but one another and on the edges of this melee Pops and Madi Bear blow hot air into a small purple alien as the guy on the bullhorn counts down from ten.

  TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES AT THE GATEWAY TO SPACE

  In the Year of Our Lord 2013

  They come from the north by helicopter, flying over scattered cattle, mesquite brush, yucca straining skyward. To the east is White Sands Missile Range. Farther: Roswell. Below is that old muddy snake, the Rio Grande. And just west is a town called Truth or Consequences. But the men on this cherry-red Bell 206 LongRanger are not sightseeing. They’re headed to the middle of the desert where they plan to launch a bunch of spaceships.

  December 2005. Rick Homans heads up the New Mexico Economic Development Department for Governor Bill Richardson. Homans sits shotgun in the LongRanger and behind him are three Brits, two top dogs in a company called Virgin Galactic and the godfather of all things Virgin, billionaire Richard Branson. The billionaire has recently licensed technology that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 by taking the first privately built manned ship to an altitude above sixty-two miles, the internationally recognized boundary of space. Branson is confident that by 2007 Galactic will be making that trip daily.

  As the chopper flies deeper into the desert, the men shout louder into their bulky headsets. Homans knows he might not get another chance to spitball with these men he considers some of the top branding minds in the world, so he has them brainstorming, a round-robin of hollering over the rotor noise to figure out a name for the place they’re headed. And the billionaire finally says it: a new name that encapsulates all the ambition of the project, one that suggests a collective ownership—the hope that access to space will soon be available to anyone who desires it. The new name outshines the rather mundane Southwest Regional Spaceport, by which the project had been known for decades before Virgin Galactic flew into New Mexico. The new name is ingenuous and bold and plants a symbolic flag, a gesture fashioned in roughly the same spirit that Armstrong and Aldrin drove the Stars and Stripes into the surface of the moon thirty-six years earlier. More than a little bit of the old space race bleeds into the new one, even though the New Space Race is not about a cold war, but a commercial one. And so a British billionaire says it.

  And so say we all: Spaceport America.

  * * *

  Eight years on and you’ve likely heard little or nothing about Spaceport America. All the talk is of Virgin Galactic, the self-proclaimed World’s First Commercial Spaceline—since 2004 over seven hundred people have forked over at least $200,000 for a ticket and the promise of a two-hour spaceflight. The publicized passenger manifesto is a bona fide red carpet, a fantasy guest list, the irresistible front page of a supermarket tabloid: Mr. Lance Bass and Leo and Bieber and the cuddlepuddle of Brangelina. The Little Monsters scream that their idol Lady Gaga will be the first diva wailing heartbreak in space.

  This is the promise the rich and famous have paid for: WhiteKnightTwo, the Galactic mother ship, will fly to fifty thousand feet with SpaceShipTwo strapped to its underbelly. SpaceShipTwo and the six ticket holders seated inside will then be released from the mother ship and rocket at up to 2,500 mph to suborbit, seventy miles high, where they will be weightless for a few minutes before gliding back down to earth, where they will sip champagne in the Astronaut Lounge and slap high fives the way only people who have been to space can slap high fives—reaching a little bit higher because every fiber of them now knows the magic of weightlessness. Three thousand wealthy tourists were supposed to have made this trip by 2012. That goal was not met in part because of problems with rocket development—a 2007 explosion killed three people at Galactic’s test facilities in Mojave, California. One expects technological delays from a fledgling industry, but nearly every year Galactic promises to begin operations anyway. The last eight years of promises without a spaceflight recently culminated in Branson biographer Tom Bower calling the billionaire Virgin mogul an “overvalued aging sun lizard” whose Galactic company is “a total sham.”

  But the untold story is about New Mexico and its taxpayers, the people who paid for and built Spaceport America. The saga of their decade-old and nearly quarter-billion-dollar gamble on an aging sun lizard’s quest to dominate the commercial space industry often gets buried by the big-media machine, relegated to a small paragraph or one sentence in favor of playing up the dream of space tourism or bashing the dream of space tourism or just gawking at Lady Gaga’s breasts (she riffs on her Galactic gig in some revealing space suits for the March 2014 issue of Harper’s Bazaar). But whether the dream will be realized or the dream will break or the dream will crash and burn or just stagnate, it will happen here in New Mexico, down the road from Truth or Consequences.

  * * *

  There’s an ashtray for every barstool and the pool table is right in the doorway and beyond that there’s lots of room for two-stepping or staggering. I’m at the Pine Knot Saloon in Truth or Consequences on an uncharacteristically frigid New Mexico day in late November. On my drive into town the local radio bemoaned Virgin Galactic’s failure to begin operations from Spaceport America in 2013. Richard Branson would not, they said, don a Saint Nick getup and rocket to the edge of space with his kids on Christmas as he had hoped. Galactic would not fly for yet another year. Nobody at the Pine Knot seems too bothered by the news. A man lies on a bench beside a telephone booth, napping before his night shift. Three guys slowly orbit a billiards table. Everything in the saloon is pine and covered in a little bit of sweat fro
m joy and a little bit of sweat from toil and there’s that thick bar air from years of liquor-swelled dreams that don’t quite break but just get stagnant and hang around.

  You can buy booze lots of places in Truth or Consequences but the Pine Knot is the only real honky-tonk. Most nightlife is relegated to evening services at one of the town’s nine churches. The sixty-four hundred residents here get by on an annual median income south of $22,000. The largest employers are Walmart and the public schools. Half the storefronts in the historic downtown are shuttered. Main Street stays pretty empty except for an Art Hop one day a month, when you can buy any kind of turquoise jewelry or Navajo rug or get your tarot read by Christopher the Bohemian Vagabond. Downtown’s real treasure is its spas, fueled by countless natural hot springs rising from deep in the earth around the Rio Grande. If you’ve been to Truth or Consequences, it was likely for the spas, which are not the exquisite kind but the working-class kind, mostly just sheds around holes or steel tubs. For many years the name of this town was simply Hot Springs. Then Ralph Edwards held a contest in 1950 that required the winning town to rename itself after his popular radio show, Truth or Consequences. The age of advertising had begun and Hot Springs was ready to be rebranded. Though a handful of citizens moved out in protest, the name stuck. Now, six decades later, the town’s identity is on the brink of another strange overhaul.