Roswell: A Metaphysical Playground?
Oddities in the Air
Four red lights danced in the sky above the Salt Creek Wilderness 10 miles northeast of Roswell, New Mexico. I leaned against my car as a cool wind blew and watched them. The highway behind me was deserted. Electrical wires above were making a strange hissing noise. It was dark outside and I clung close to my automobile as the salt cedars shook all around me and the Pecos River trickled lazily along its path. I watched the red lights; amazingly fast lights darting across the inky black sky. They would appear and then vanish, appear again and then be gone. It looked as if they were chasing each other. They moved in no apparent pattern, but rather very randomly like children playing in a park. I got nervous and drove away.
Another time there were sounds of machines coming from the other side of a ridge as I made my way through the Salt Creek Wilderness during one of my hiking trips out there. About 4 miles in from the trailhead there is a wall of reddish cliffs that juts up out of the flat desert landscape. It was eerily silent, except for a low, incessant hum of … machines? I stood very still and put my ear to the air and listened. Yes, I could hear it. Some kind of machines. It must be something on the other side of the ridge I thought and so climbed up through the scrabbly rocks and red dirt until I got to the top. I looked down and it was a vast emptiness of flat desert and brush. No machines. Nothing. A vacant plain of foreboding landscape. The sound had stopped.
And yet another time, a red glow appeared behind my car as my friend and I were hanging out near the Two River Dams about 10 miles west of Roswell. We were in the car listening to music and drinking beer. It was very dark and when the red light did appear it seemed strangely bright. My friend thought that perhaps I had pressed my foot on the brake pedal and that was causing the red light. But I hadn’t pressed on the brake. I never press on the brake when I am parked. Why would I? We got out of the car to investigate. The sky was black but painted with a fresh coat of a billion stars. We heard something. A noise. Some noise. Was it a voice? The growl of an animal? Someone quickly walking away? Frightened, we got back into the car and tore down the gravel road and back to the main highway. My heart is still pounding.
In my time in Roswell I experienced many things that I would call odd, creepy, eerie or downright scary. I think there is more in Roswell than just the memory of a reported crash of a UFO in 1947. There is some weird energy there, an odd vibrato in the air that makes it one of the strangest and most unique places I have ever experienced.
Roswell sits in the southeast region of the state about 3 or 4 hours southeast of Albuquerque. It is a very isolated town of about 47,000 people. It’s windswept, dry and dusty. A lonely, empty and disheartening place at times, but if you have a few friends and a decent car, it is liveable for at least a while.
Apartment F
For a time I lived in a very old building that was renovated into apartments: The Alameda Estates. If you ever decide to move to Roswell and live there, stay away from Apartment F. I have known three different people who have lived in Apartment F and each one of them reported strange things. But it wasn’t until I started dating a girl who lived in Apartment F that I actually experienced these things firsthand.
Let me backtrack a bit and tell you about the first strange experience I had with Apartment F. It was late and I just had gotten home from work and had to take out the garbage. The garbage can was on the other side of the building in a dark alley and I had to walk around the corner and down a long sidewalk that passed in front of Apartment F to get there. I made the walk but on the way back as I passed Apartment F I distinctively heard the sound of a little girl laughing coming from the veranda. I looked up, but there was no one there. The lights were out and the curtains were drawn. I quickly walked around the corner and back to my apartment.
The next day I told this girl (who eventually became my girlfriend) what I had experienced. She was nervous and then told me some things that made me wonder how in the world she could of kept living there. She told a story of coming home and finding her windows wide open when she knew for sure she had closed them before she left for work. She told me how the TV would come on by itself. She told me how she once came home to find all her clothes had been taken out of the closet and strewn across the bed. She told me of how she woke up one morning and the blankets of her bed had been pulled so tight around her that she could not move.
Once we started dating I spent the nights with her in Apartment F. I would get there after I got off work, go in and go up to her bedroom where she was sleeping. But when I came in I felt very uneasy. I would close and lock the door behind me and run up the stairs because I felt something was following me. I would go into her room, close the door and jump into bed. One night we were sleeping peacefully, it was around Halloween actually, and suddenly she sat straight up in bed and screamed. My heart pounded out of my chest and I yelled to her, “What is it?! What’s wrong?!” She was shaking and crying and she told me that she had felt as if someone were pressing down on her, making it hard for her to breathe. I was shaking too and when I laid back down, I felt a breath against my ear and someone was whispering my name.
The worst night though was when her and I and a friend were sitting in the livingroom just talking. The friend, sitting in the sofa opposite us suddenly looked up over us and claimed he just saw a shadow pass by. We all became frantic. The friend got very nervous and jumped up off the couch and said he had to get out of there. We were nervous too and soon we were all headed out the door and over to my place. She had a cat and I felt bad because we were leaving it behind. The cat even looked scared. So since that night I have not been able to sleep without having a light on in the house that I could see. That’s been like two years ago.
Pueblo Auditorium
My girlfriend was penning an article for the local newspaper on the alleged haunting of a local auditorium: Pueblo auditorium. She enlisted the aid of a local psychic and one night just around Halloween we, some friends and the psychic met at the auditorium where it was prearranged that the janitor would let us in. We first gathered in the theater area where the psychic quickly reported sensing the presence of spirits.
“Look! Over there. They’re sitting in those seats!” We turned to look but saw nothing. I was beginning to feel that she was a hoax and making it all up for dramatic effect. But as the night wore on and we explored different areas of the auditorium I really did begin to feel as if there were some sort of presence in that old, dark place. But when my friend and I decided to break away from the group and go down to the basement level, that’s when things got really creepy.
The hallway was long and very dimly lit by a few glowing exit signs. We walked slowly across the polished linoleum floor and then I saw it. It was faint, but I saw it. A man’s leg, just a leg, walking slowly toward us. My friend and I said nothing to each other but instead turned and quickly went back up the stairs to meet the others.
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“A leg! I saw a leg!”
He agreed he had seen the same thing as I had and when we joined the group we relayed our story and then everyone went back downstairs and the psychic did feel that there was someone there. Someone. Somewhere, wandering the hall.
The highway
The Old Clovis Highway is a road that leads out of Roswell through the back door and meets up with the newer state highway 70. It’s a seldom used road that winds through the outskirts of town along some railroad tracks. It’s a flat, desolate area of desert and low hills that passes by a natural gas processing plant and an old and junky equipment lot where a mean dog runs out of the fence and chases your car if you drive by too slowly. At night the road is very dark and on our many trips out there late at night after work, my friend and I would see and sense things that made me very nervous.
Car lights for one. Car lights that would suddenly appear out of nowhere behind us and follow us for a while and then disappear. Sometimes there would be a light that would appear out in an open field. It would be a bright light for a while and then slowly fade away and maybe later reappear again. But the turnoff, the turnoff was the worst. Just before the natural gas plant there is a small, open space that you can pull off into from the road. It was a dark and windy and cold place and when he shut off the car and we would sit in the silence I always felt that there was someone or something behind us, watching us, ready to come at us at any moment. I couldn’t stand it and I would always say: “Let’s just go.”
My friend would tell me about stories that there were “men” out there that would chase you away and that they had guns and they’d shoot you if they had to. Men in black suits he would tell me. Black suits? But what were they protecting out there? The rail line maybe? But why? Trains seldom rolled through there. And one night when this same friend and I came back into town on the Old Clovis Highway and we crested a hill and the lights of the town were spread out below before us, it looked completely different. I mean the whole layout of the town was not right. We looked at each other and said: “Is that Roswell?”
Roswell: Aliens and Mystery
So, is it Roswell? Or is it just a metaphysical playground for spirits and aliens? My experiences tell me that there is something there. Out there. In the air, in the desert, in the buildings, in the people themselves perhaps. I myself have been drawn to live there THREE different times in my life. I believe there is much more to Roswell than a story about a UFO crash. I’ve heard talk that the whole town is merely a psychological experiment conducted by the government and that there are cameras in the streetlights recording the activities of residents.
My good sense tells me that I will never move back there again, but after a stint on the East Coast for a little more than a year, I find myself now living in Texas, in a town a mere four hours away from Roswell. I am compelled to visit. I am compelled to see the old Alameda Estates and perhaps even take a hike in the Salt Creek Wilderness. There is something there beyond the veil of alien-inspired commercialism. But you have to actually LIVE there to experience it. A two hour sidetrip just won’t do it. Try staying a while in the metaphysical playground that is Roswell, New Mexico.
