A three-day desert drive from one of America's largest mass UFO sightings to roadside strangeness, the birthplace of modern flying-saucer mythology, and the mesa said to conceal an underground base near Dulce.
Shortly after 8pm on March 13, 1997, witnesses across nearly 300 miles of Nevada and Arizona watched a silent V-shaped formation of lights, and later that night a separate set of lights hung over Phoenix for hours. The Air Force attributes the second set to flares dropped during a National Guard exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range.
Start beneath the flight path of the March 1997 Phoenix Lights, one of the most widely witnessed UFO events in American history.
A desert attraction advertised by billboards for hundreds of miles, built around a mummified figure brought to Arizona in 1965. In 2018, its owners spent $3.5 million rebuilding it around a story about aliens directing human history.
Break up the desert drive at The Thing?, the billboard-fueled Interstate 10 attraction that has made mystery its business model for decades.
Debris from a ranch north of Roswell prompted an Army press release on July 8, 1947, announcing a captured flying disc, reversed within 24 hours. The Air Force explained it twice in the 1990s, and a government audit found the base's outgoing messages for those years had been destroyed.
Spend the night in Roswell and compare the Army's documented 1947 reversal with the mythology that grew around it.
Visitor access
International UFO Museum and Research Center, 114 North Main Street, Roswell, NM 88203
The underground base was invented, and the people who invented it worked for the U.S. Air Force. A counterintelligence officer at Kirtland fed forged documents to an Albuquerque businessman to steer his attention away from the base he was filming, and years later said so publicly.
End near Dulce and Archuleta Mesa. The alleged base is not a public attraction; respect tribal land, local residents, and all access restrictions.
