We Believe: A Quiet Pilgrimage to Roswell

Traveling-

There’s a warmth the morning sun brings—not just heat, but something elemental. It seeps through the skin and into the marrow, quieting the tremble that sometimes lives inside the chest, the one that comes from too many hours on the road, too many quiet thoughts left unspoken. That morning in New Mexico, I felt it—sunlight that didn’t just shine but seemed to bless. My body, stiff from sleep and the miles before, slowly began to soften.

I spooned oatmeal from a steaming tin bowl, the kind that always feels one gust away from being blown off a picnic table. The oats clung together with a reluctant stubbornness, as if protesting my solitude. I read for a while, returning to A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. It felt like the right book. That strange, disconnected narrator wandering through a quiet, surreal Japan echoed how I felt moving through the dry New Mexican air—untethered but somehow not lost. It was like Peace Piece by Bill Evans was vibrating along my spine while I read, his piano notes lingering in my nervous system, soft and dissonant, giving Murakami’s prose a rhythm that matched the beat of my own quiet searching.

I moved slowly, almost unwilling to break the spell of the morning. Eventually, I packed up, nodded goodbye to Bottomless Lake—an improbable name for a place so modest—and rolled toward the edges of Roswell.

As a kid, I devoured Ripley’s Believe It or Not books and spent hours squinting at MUFON newsletters in poorly lit corners of libraries. I wasn’t just interested in aliens or monsters—I was chasing something else, something unspoken. I wanted the world to mean more. I needed it to. Maybe, in a way, I still do.

Walking into the Roswell UFO Museum felt like stepping into a time capsule built by true believers and tireless archivists. The first thing that caught my eye—oddly—was a Japanese PlayStation 2 edition of Destroy All Humans!, an artifact somehow more sacred for being out of place. My heart beat a little faster. Here in the heart of the desert, hundreds of miles from Tokyo or Los Angeles, sat this pixelated relic of conspiracy fantasy rendered in vivid Japanese lettering. It was absurd. It was beautiful.

Near the entrance stood a piece of art that stopped me cold. A life-sized steed, its form crafted from reclaimed materials and covered in newspaper clippings like some decoupage Trojan horse. It wasn’t just creative—it was intentional, and it felt like a statement. A monument to belief, or maybe to hope. It looked like it could sprint off into the sky and disappear without a trace. That’s the thing about Roswell—everything seems just plausible enough to make you look twice.

A staff member waved at me as I paid my admission—older, with a warmth that felt Midwestern in tone, but seasoned by the desert. He had that look of someone who’d found peace in repetition. Maybe it was all the stories, all the maps and sightings and contradictions. Or maybe he just liked people who still came looking.

I made my way to the Roswell UFO Library, expecting dusty shelves and a few yellowing paperbacks. Instead, I found a treasure trove: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all groaning under the weight of every conceivable book, document, and tabloid article dedicated to UFOs, abductions, and strange lights in the sky. There were comic book boxes—actual longboxes—filled with first-hand documents and clippings, neatly categorized and clearly loved. It was like walking into someone’s life's work. I could’ve lost weeks there, easy. Instead, I pretended to be casual, drifting from shelf to shelf like an English nanny in a botanical garden, afraid that touching anything would cause it to collapse under the weight of memory.

Meteorites rested in glass cases, their jagged edges catching the light like broken promises. Each one held the silent testimony of another world, and the glass between us seemed cruel. There were spacecraft fragments, or at least that’s what the plaques said. I didn’t need them to be real. I just needed them to exist.

The walls were layered with newspaper clippings—first-hand accounts of lights in the sky, strange men in black, whole towns confused and terrified. There was a rhythm to them, like seasoning scattered across a carefully plated meal. Each headline felt like part of a larger narrative that nobody had quite finished writing.

I learned about Betty and Barney Hill again—everyone does, eventually. But this time, something hit differently. Their story, told in quiet rooms and on AM radio stations, had an intimacy that scared me more than any autopsy replica. The terror wasn’t in the aliens—it was in not being believed. It was in having something unspeakable happen and watching people laugh about it.

At the apex of the exhibit was the infamous alien autopsy scene: gurneys, dim lighting, frozen silicone faces with lifeless eyes. I felt unsettled. It wasn’t scary in the horror-movie sense—it was disturbing in a very human way. It represented belief made grotesque. We want to know so badly that we build what we cannot prove, and then we photograph it like truth.

Just beyond that, a reprieve—a different kind of wonder. There, looming in quiet majesty, was a replica of a Mayan carving, supposedly from a temple door. The image struck me dumb. A figure, seated in what appeared to be a cockpit, surrounded by stars and geometric etchings that echoed the inside of a spacecraft. Buttons. Levers. Cosmic scale rendered in stone. I don’t know what it really was. I don’t need to. I stood still, for a long time, and let it wash over me. My breath slowed. My heartbeat became distant. I felt very small. But not insignificant.

That’s the paradox of Roswell: you come here to feel close to the stars, but in the end, what you find is a deeper connection to earth. To people. To the very human need to believe in more.

Out of everything, the maps struck me hardest. Wall-sized grids of the United States with pins marking sightings—red for encounters, blue for unexplained phenomena, green for crashes. Looking at them, I got chills. It was a feeling I hadn’t known since childhood, when I’d stare at Tolkien’s maps of Middle-earth and try to walk the paths in my imagination. Maps are anchors for dreamers. They let us believe we can find something if we just follow the signs.

I ran into the couple from Australia again, purely by accident. We’d met earlier in my trip, swapped a few stories. There they were, standing in front of a painting of a UFO hovering over Jackson Square in New Orleans—my home turf. We laughed, exchanged email addresses, and moved on. The world, for a moment, felt stitched together in perfect coincidence.

Before I left, I stepped into the courtyard beside the museum. The air was dry, a little too sharp in my humidity saturated lungs, but it felt clean. A lovely woman with long black hair, board straight, and smile full of perfect teeth stood with her grandmother handing out Bibles, we shared the sunlight and exchanged pleasantries. I accepted one, not because I needed it, but because I respected the gesture. That’s what Roswell is, in the end—a place of offerings. Of stories passed hand to hand. Of people trying to give each other meaning in whatever form they can.

I paused by the “We Believe” mural and took a picture. It wasn’t just kitsch. It was a mission statement. A quiet declaration of hope in a chaotic world.

And then I thought of something Stephen Hawking said, years ago:

“Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach…”

That scared me. Not because it suggests monsters in the sky—but because it suggests us. That we might look outward and bring our worst selves along.

Once I read, “There is no safety this side of the grave”(Heinlein) and I have to be okay with that.

I don’t know if I believe in aliens. Some days I do. Some days I think we’re the aliens—strangers to ourselves, lost in the dust. But I believe in places like Roswell. I believe in people who chase wonder. And I believe, maybe more than anything, in the quiet power of a well-lit library full of dusty books and impossible stories.

I got back in my car, closed the door, and sat for a long minute before turning the key. The sky was impossibly blue. The road stretched ahead, indifferent and eternal.

And I drove.