I read with amusement a story about the Roswell, NM, Police Department’s new logo which incorporates the town’s identity with a famous UFO incident and aliens. If you’ll recall, U.S. Army Air Force officials at then Walker Air Force Base in Roswell reported that an alien spacecraft had crash landed on a ranch northwest of the city on July 8, 1947.
The Air Force quickly debunked the story, claiming the debris found on the W.W. Brazel ranch was from a crashed weather balloon. That quickly spiraled into conspiracy theories that continue today about “little green men” and alien spacecraft visiting our planet.
As you can, see the department’s logo promises to protect and serve “all those that land here.” As someone who is sensitive to the proper use of grammar, I did notice that the logo used the word “that” instead of “who,” which to me was used in deference to possible otherworldly beings or spacecraft that might want to visit the southeastern New Mexico city again.
This reminds me of the statue in Winslow, Arizona, that is “standin’ on the corner…” from the Eagles song “Take it easy.”
As the song goes:
“Well I’m-a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and it’s such a fine sight to see. There’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.”
My very good friend Joel Diemer, a retired professor at New Mexico State University, had a similar idea to help capture the spirit of a town’s character with a project linking historic Route 66 with Tucumcari, NM.
Tucumcari is about the halfway point on the “Mother Road” of U.S. 66 which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s a legendary highway that has had much written about it along with various songs.
Although Interstate 40 now dodges Tucumcari, the old path of U.S. 66 runs through the town. Joel’s idea was to have a section of the old highway paved with unique tiles that would include a person or group’s name and link to a technical method to replay a recorded message of their memory of U.S. 66. Visitors to the site could have heard many fascinating stories about their personal link to the “Mother Road.”
“It would have made Tucumcari more of a destination,” he said.
Current travelers along Interstate 40 mostly zoom by Tucumcari these days, maybe only stopping at an easy off-on exit for gas or snacks. With Joel’s idea, Tucumcari would have been more of place you’d make time to see and hear about.
I even traveled with Joel to Tucumcari several years ago to talk with local officials about the idea. They seemed to like the idea, but unfortunately, it did not make much progress and seems to have died. It may have been too futuristic for some people to grasp but more likely as Joel said, it was about the money.
“It seems like in New Mexico, if you don’t have a good source of up front money for ideas like this, they won’t go far,” he lamented.
Maybe we could incorporate a similar idea in Roswell, where people who claim to have been abducted by aliens could have their recollections recorded in tiny space capsules placed inside one of the old hangars at Walker Air Force Base. And don’t forget that Elvis Presley’s old private jet haunted the former air force base for years. Maybe we could even conjure Elvis back from the dead to record…
No wait, that’s a little too farfetched. I’ll let Joel come up with the good ideas.
aero-cordero.com 