Triphap - Funny Travel Stories and Travel Horror Stories

In a town where the lamp posts look like alien heads and Walmart is painted with UFO murals, you start to believe. Roswell uses aliens as their mascot like Florida uses alligators—in souvenir shops they appear on everything from t-shirts to fake driver’s licenses, menu items are named after them, and you half expect to wake up and find one in your backyard.

After a day of wavering skepticism at the UFO Museum & Research Center, followed by a visit to a storefront whose sign advertised cheap internet access (but turned out to be the headquarters of “Alien Resistance,” who believe aliens are actually messenger of God), and a dinner of “escape pods” at the Crash Down Diner, we were aliened-out.

But they were unavoidable. On the deserted road back to our campsite at the Bottomless Lakes, we noticed two formations of blinking lights. We looked at each other with only mild surprise, and major terror. Roswell’s aliens are the kinds that grace the covers of “Communion” paperback editions—they are not the stuff of ALF or ET. When you think you see a UFO in Roswell, you are pretty sure you will shortly be abducted, dissected, reassembled, preserved, impregnated, and monitored in a large specimen jar—not befriended, rescued, and heart-broken upon your new BFF’s departure.

We managed to outrun the UFO and make it to our tent without being beamed up. Several hours later, we awoke simultaneously, sat up, and looked at each other in panic. Something was brushing up against our tent—and snorting.

“Look!” whispered my friend, pointing through the mesh of our tent at something hobbling toward the trash cans.

“Just a dog” I said, though I had never heard a dog grunt like that.

“Definitely not a dog. It looks like an alien,” she said. Of course it was an alien. I glanced around for their UFO. Nothing.

We heard a loud grunt and the creature opened its mouth, only ten feet so away. “It’s got tusks!” she said. “Holy crap, it’s a javelina!”

We dove for the ground and feigned sleep. Aliens might dissect and impregnate—but javelina would maul you and gouge out your eyeballs (or so we thought, plastered to the ground in our easily mangled tent.) Eventually, it hobbled away with a mouthful of trash.

When we climbed out of the tent the next morning, garbage was strewn around the campsite. “A#@hole pig,” said my friend.

When we drove off the campsite, we noticed two towers of blinking lights where the previous night’s UFO had been. “A#@hole spaceship,” she said.

As we left town, a teenage alien with antennas and baggy jeans waved goodbye.

“A#@hole alien,” said my friend, and we ventured back to earth.