Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  This, then, was the alien’s-eye view. A small, whitish cluster—the town—resting on the gray seafloor of the desert, a short distance to the west of the Pecos River. Framed in the airplane window, the image looked timeless, the old American nowhere in its parcel of dust. Easy to imagine that long-ago Fourth of July. Easy to imagine that you, too, were sailing down from the dark side of the moon.

  Just then the spider that lives in my brain twanged a thread, and I remembered a theory I’d read somewhere, insane but unforgettable, which held that the Roswell aliens weren’t extraterrestrials at all but surgically altered human children. After World War II, the story went, Stalin tracked down Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor-sadist infamous for his experiments on live human subjects at Auschwitz. This would have been in 1946 or so, when Mengele was still living in hiding in Germany. Stalin offered Mengele asylum in the Soviet Union if he’d engineer a crew of mutant child-pilots, eyes hideously enlarged, adult crania grafted onto their skulls. The idea was that they’d land an aircraft in the United States, where they’d be mistaken for Martians, sowing panic. Evidently, Stalin had been boning up on his Orson Welles. But the vessel crashed near Roswell, Stalin went back on his promise, and Mengele fled ahead of Nazi hunters to South America, where he died in 1979, at the age of sixty-seven, while swimming.

  We touched down. Roswell’s civilian airport occupies the same spot as the former military airfield. Flying into the city, you land at the very spot where the alien bodies were taken, if there were bodies, if the bodies were moved. Now, however, the only space creatures you see are the tourist-friendly Little Green Men that peep out from every signboard, every folded sweatshirt, every postcard on the rack. There’s one on the welcome banner over the terminal. He’s holding up, with his green cartoon hand, a Native American sun symbol, which sheds its beams onto the town seal; the town seal is itself flying saucer shaped.

  That’s how central the UFO crash is to the identity of this place. It’s the radioactive core of the wildest conspiracy theory in American history; in Roswell, they put it on the government letterhead.

  * * *

  At the rental counter, the agent looked me up.

  “And you’re dropping off in … oh, hon, lucky you. Las Vegas!”

  “Well, sort of,” I said. “I’m dropping the car off in Vegas, but first I’m driving to Area 51.”

  I figured people must say this sort of thing all the time in Roswell—oh, sure, just casually road-tripping out to America’s most sinister top secret black site—but she looked taken aback. “Area 51,” she said, “that’s…”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know it’s not…”

  “It’s a thousand miles away,” I said. “That’s why I’m dropping the car off in Vegas.”

  “Okay, because sometimes people come here and they think—you know—they think it’s right next to Roswell, because they hear about them together and whatnot. But Roswell, we’re like a tourist attraction, and that’s…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “That’s not,” she finished. She handed back my ID. Then she sighed, as if committing herself to doing what little she could for me, in my foolishness. “Well, we’ve got you in a Nissan Sentra.”

  “I’m driving on Route 66,” I told her. “Not the whole way, because you can’t, but as much as I can.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Well! We’ve got you in a Nissan Sentra.”

  I declined insurance. She slid over the gargantuan clove of key fobs.

  “Hon, before you go. Can I ask … do you mind if I ask why you’re doing that?”

  * * *

  An hour or so later I was driving through downtown Roswell when, to my surprise, I found Jesus Christ.

  He was walking down Main Street, trailed by a small group of disciples. The disciples wore long robes and biblical head scarves. They were holding up signs. JESUS LOVES YOU, the signs said. JESUS DIED FOR YOU. JESUS SAVES. They were walking south, toward the UFO Museum, and walking slowly, because Jesus was stooped under the weight of the true cross, which he carried over one shoulder, Passion-style. One of the disciples, a woman in her late twenties, didn’t have robes. She was wearing a sweat suit.

  Slowly I remembered that today was the day before Easter.

  It was twilight. There were alien eyes on the frosted glass orbs of the streetlamps. The street was lined with floating alien heads. Everywhere you looked there were inflatable aliens, alien window displays, alien marquees. Alien bumper stickers: I WANT TO BELIEVE on an RV docked across three parking spaces. Alien murals: wasp-waisted aliens flourishing matador capes on the wall outside the Mexican restaurant.

  As I rolled by in the Sentra I saw that Jesus was wearing a crown of thorns. Red blood stained his white garment, though not, as far as I could make out, his gray athletic sneakers. The procession reached an intersection as I passed. In the rearview mirror, I watched Jesus look both ways before crossing the street.

  * * *

  Late that night, I lay on my bed at the Holiday Inn, sipping Diet Coke with ice from the machine. The TV was on mute, tuned to some news channel: Hillary Clinton’s face looked out over ominous chyrons. Weeks before, in March, the news had broken about her private e-mail server, and the shows were roiling with conspiracy theories, dark innuendos about the Benghazi attack, hints of secret corruption at the invisible heart of things. Donald Trump, who’d risen to new heights of prominence peddling what half the country saw as patriotic concern about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, had just launched a presidential exploratory committee. The air seethed with suspicion. What passed for the national discourse had become a sealed maze of internal data points. Everything tended toward a final conclusion that was somehow both terrifying and indefinite, unspeakable—the total minus, the apocalyptic blank.

  That night I wasn’t paying much attention. I’d made a playlist for the trip, a days-long Spotify mix of 1950s singles, and when I got sick of watching the news on mute I’d put on headphones and listen to the Platters or the Flamingos with my eyes closed, blue swerve into an alternate dimension.

  Only you can make this world seem right,

  Only you can make the darkness bright.

  Those had been the years, that first weird decade after the war, when the UFO narrative was codified in America. Not that UFOs were exclusively American; they were a transnational concern, even a transhistorical one if you tilted your perspective the right way. (The pyramids, heard of them?) The so-called foo fighters, mysterious balls of darting-eye light that appeared to pilots on both sides during World War II, belonged to Europe. In 1954, a town in France, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, had passed a law banning flying saucers, in the interest of protecting the grapes. But it was in this country that unexplained aerial lights were first widely correlated with the idea of extraterrestrial ships.

  I fished my iPad out of my bag. On the plane, I’d been browsing through a book, a work of sensationalist mid-century journalism that played a role in charting the outlines of the narrative, pre–Close Encounters version. The book was called The Flying Saucers Are Real. Forgotten today outside hard-core UFO circles, but a mainstream bestseller in 1950. Its author, an ex-marine pilot and pulp fiction writer named Donald Keyhoe, had started with a series of articles for True magazine (True: The Man’s Magazine), then expanded them into the book. I’d dug up a PDF online. Keyhoe’s work is a fascinating tour through a bygone paranoia matrix. Its tone is hard-boiled, way more Smoking Man than Mulder; James M. Cain could have written it. We’re in that early Cold War moment when something sour starts creeping into the mood of national triumph. The war is over, blue skies ahead, and yet already many people sense that something is wrong, something hard to explain or define, a bad secret fizzing under the atmosphere. Waiting for a myth to inhabit.

  Keyhoe begins by collating data. A tower reports a flyover at an impossible rate of speed, by a craft it can’t identify. A fighter pilot crashes while chasing a gigantic something—but surely the description he calle
d in doesn’t make sense? Once Keyhoe picks up the trail of what he suspects is a government cover-up, he shifts into flinty-eyed investigative mode. Just about every scene in The Flying Saucers Are Real depicts him marching into some scientist’s lab or federal office, overcoat flapping at his ankles, and listen here, buster-ing whoever’s inside. I want the truth, see? The truth! The New Age dimension of alien contact hadn’t emerged yet, and neither had the idea of a government conspiracy whose depths made it functionally magical. What you have, instead, is the suppressed hysteria of a generation that had seen the atom split, had lived through the war’s devastation, had seen humanity’s idea of itself transfigured more than once, in a few short years, and in progressively more disturbing ways. By telling the story of the alien cover-up, Keyhoe is registering an early flutter of the needle in what became the slow collapse of democratic faith. But he’s also preserving the fantasy that the truth is still attainable, that a strong man’s moral outrage would be enough to tear down the lies and bring the people the facts. Nothing ever seems more naive, I thought, watching the faces flickering across the television, than the paranoia of the dead.

  It’s fascinating, from this temporal distance, that the hypothesis Keyhoe offers to explain the alien presence actually coincides with what’s sociologically the likeliest reason for the atmospheric anxiety he detects. That is, he thinks the aliens are here because of the bomb. Because America has the bomb. The old order is a memory; what can come from the sky puts everyone at risk. Why wouldn’t aliens show up?

  I don’t want to set the world on fire

  I just want to start a flame in your heart.

  * * *

  At the UFO Museum, in downtown Roswell, a group of six-foot-tall animatronic aliens occupies the prime Instagram real estate at the center of the main hall, and a thing happens every few minutes where the flying saucer behind them starts blooping and spinning and flashing laserish lights, and a little space-fart of white steam escapes from the base of the saucer, and a sci-fi musical score slide-whistles cosmically, and the aliens start talking to the crowd. What they say is—I’m paraphrasing—“bzzzzrrg bzzzzoom ppozz bzrg pzow.” Imagine Donald Duck trying to mimic a dial-up modem; it’s like that.

  I wandered near a pair of startlingly beautiful bikers, a man and a woman in black leather jackets with diagonal zips. They wore eye black smeared across their cheeks, which made no practical sense to me, a man who had recently taken possession of a rented Nissan Sentra, but they were striking. Neither one possibly more than twenty-five. They looked like leather cultists from the future after the fall. Only the most aristocratic genes would endure in the cliff fortresses.

  When the aliens’ light show buzzed on, they both turned and made a face.

  “Fuckin’ Yodas,” the male biker said, chuckling.

  * * *

  This isn’t much remembered now, or much talked about, but during World War II there were POW camps throughout the United States, holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners. There’d been one outside Roswell. Five thousand German soldiers. Most captured from among Rommel’s forces in North Africa. They were put to work on local ranches and farms—and try to picture that, if you can, thousands of troops from the Nazi Afrika Korps picking cotton in the New Mexico desert.

  In 1943, a small detachment from this group, fifty or so men, was assigned to pave a section of the Spring River, which runs through town. They were told to line the sides of the channel with large stones. Working in secret, the prisoners managed to construct a mosaic, which they embedded in the riverbank. It’s a crude but unmistakable depiction of the Iron Cross.

  When the townspeople discovered what the soldiers had done, they were furious. The second-most-recognizable symbol of the Wehrmacht right there in the middle of Roswell—unthinkable. They buried it under concrete. Over the years, though, the river washed the concrete away. Now the town had a dilemma. On the one hand, the mosaic was history, a remnant from a time that deserved to be remembered. On the other hand, Nazi symbolism, even of the ad hoc and vaguely pitiful sort that Roswell found on its riverbank, is tricky to memorialize. Do it wrong and you’re inviting alt-right photo pilgrims in by the subreddit-load.

  Roswell’s solution was to build a park. The park is dedicated to the world’s prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. It’s across the river from the Germans’ mosaic, which you can see from a special viewing platform. There’s a historic marker, telling the story of the POW camp. There’s a piece of the Berlin Wall in a display case. There’s a little basketball court, which looks out at the Iron Cross.

  I stood on the platform and looked across the river. It was late morning. There was the cross, at the center of a ring of pale stones. It was hard to connect it to the things I was trying to connect it to. Whatever meaning it had once held, whatever concentration of hatred or nationalism or even defiance, had gone out of it. It was a shape on a riverbed. One more thing that hadn’t disappeared.

  * * *

  Out of town now, driving through the desert, I found myself remembering Robert Goddard, the rocket scientist. Did you know he’d lived in Roswell? He did some of his important experiments there, the ones that paved the way for human spaceflight. Also for long-range missiles. He was there before the war, an intense, tubercular obsessive firing projectiles into the wasteland. Without him, there’d be no moon landing, no ICBMs, no Cold War as we know it. No rovers on Mars. Goddard thought we could use rockets to reach the far cosmos, spoke of sending messages to alien civilizations inscribed on metal plates. To me, the circularity felt eerie. This was where we’d started the trip to space, and it was where space, or the idea of space, came crashing back down to us.

  * * *

  It was dusk when I found Route 66. Or when I found the ruins of it. It’s mostly ruins now because Route 66, probably the most important and certainly the most celebrated segment in the history of the American highway system, the road that stitched together Chicago and Los Angeles, making the southwestern desert traversable by car, a road that could plausibly be said to represent the final critical attainment of American westward expansion, the culmination of something that started with Lewis and Clark—Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, a casualty of the modern interstate. From an infrastructural perspective, this was sensible. Overdue, even. A skinny, two-lane string wound around mountains and ridges and stretched along canyon rims, 66 was in some ways outmoded before it was even finished. It hadn’t been fully paved until 1938, and please pause here to consider the lateness of that date—how, far into the twentieth century, well within the lifetimes of many living people, you could not drive across the Southwest without venturing onto gravel. Onto dirt. Stretches of 66 were so lethally twisty and hairpin crazed that drivers crossing, say, the Black Mountains in Arizona would hire locals to guide them, like explorers from earlier centuries.

  The demise of Route 66, though, also meant the slow bleeding away of the roadside culture that flourished along its edges, a weird medley of mid-century tourist kitsch and car worship (the first fast food was here, the first McDonald’s) and a very pure expression of the American genius for deranged carnivalesque. It was slow moving; that was the key. The roadside attractions were right on the side of the road. You just pulled over. There were rattlesnake farms and custard stands, sideshow tents, cases of dinosaur bones. You could see Jesse James’s cave hideout and take your picture on the back of a giant jackrabbit. You could stop and tour Meteor Crater, where a meteorite nearly one mile across crashed in the desert fifty thousand years ago.

  Visually, this was all bound together in Route 66’s cosmic drive-in aesthetic, which is still instantly recognizable today. Maybe you caught Cars, for instance, the Pixar movie, which borrows major elements of both its plot and its look from the history of Route 66. Or a million indie flicks where a guy in a bowling shirt gets murdered, and they bury him under a cactus, and there’s a motel across the road, and the lurid light from the motel sign keeps blinking on the one shoe they left above
ground. Seen a filling station with an icebox on one side, a chrome-plated handle on the icebox, a car with big fins under the overhang, and in the background, purple desert? Seen the center line tick past in lonely headlights, cliffs in the distance, a monotony broken only by tumbleweeds? That’s Route 66.

  It was gone now, or mostly gone. But there were traces, stretches of the old road that were either incorporated into I-40 or accessible via detours, and those were what I wanted to see.

  It’s extraordinary. I mean, sure, in this day and age we live with our fingertips fused to an archive that holds everything that’s ever happened, and one mistyped web search takes you to a streaming clip of the actual assassination of Julius Caesar. Still. Ruins are not so common in America that encountering one is ever a familiar experience. Even Native American ruins aren’t exactly (for obvious reasons) around every corner. As for our late-breaking U.S. culture itself, you sometimes have the sense that we’re rolling up the historical carpet behind us as we go, that when we finally vanish, we’ll leave behind nothing but garbage dumps and videos whose codecs won’t play.

  “Ruins” may not be the right word, at least not for all of it. There are places along the way where you stand knee-deep in weeds on what used to be the concourse of a gas station, the burned-out retro-sci-fi sign above you slashed with whiskers of rust, nothing else in sight but foggy ridges and, in the far distance, one tiny, moving train: That is a ruin. Elsewhere, the old shrines are still at least semi-inhabited, still eking out some sort of existence. A giant jackrabbit, for instance, can still be ridden, and the curio shop next to it still visited, in Arizona. Across the blacktop lot, there’s an ancient yellow billboard, famous in its day, that shows a black rabbit and the words HERE IT IS in giant red letters. Surrounding it now: miles of desert, of nothing.