The Thing?

Brought across the state line in 1965

Thomas Binkley Prince moved The Thing from California to a patch of sagebrush beside an I-10 exit ramp in 1965 and built a shed museum around it. The other exhibits set the tone: a section of a woolly mammoth's front leg, and a 1937 Rolls-Royce displayed with a dummy of Hitler in it on the claim that the car had once carried him.

Prince died in 1969. Bowlin Travel Centers took the site over and ran it for decades in much that form: three sheds, a concrete floor, a small admission charge, and hundreds of yellow billboards across Arizona and New Mexico asking What Is It?

The 2018 rebuild

Bowlin spent $3.5 million rebuilding the attraction, finished in 2018, explicitly to compete with the International UFO Museum in Roswell. The sheds were replaced by a large walk-through with life-size dioramas, and the loose collection of oddities was given a single narrative: that aliens have been present throughout human history, fought dinosaurs, and directed events since.

The Thing itself still sits at the end of it, in a case, and is now framed as a mummified extraterrestrial rather than left unexplained.

The billboards remain the best part of it, and they still do not tell you.

Open daily at I-10 exit 322 near Dragoon, between Benson and Willcox, with a gas station, a Dairy Queen, and a large gift shop attached. The museum charges a small admission, cash or card, and takes most people about 30 minutes to walk through.

It works best as a break on a long drive rather than a destination, and it is well placed for that, since there is very little else on that stretch of I-10.

If you have children with you, the dioramas are more elaborate and more startling than the old sheds were, and the final room is dark.