Chilling 'Alien' Message To Humanity Revealed

Above, The Day The Earth Stood Still display at the Roswell International UFO Museum. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

More stuff from the release of UFO files has been gleaned through.

Several news outlets have posted about "chilling" warnings allegedly from extra-terrestrials. Shades of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)!

MSN posted:

The FBI files revealed alleged messages from ‘outer space people’ containing chilling warnings for humanity.

The documents were part of the Trump administration’s latest UFO disclosure release on Friday, which included never-before-seen memos, witness reports, photographs and videos tied to mysterious aerial phenomena.

One FBI memo, dated January 12, 1955, detailed claims from members of the Detroit Flying Saucer Club, one of the earliest UFO organizations in the US.

According to the document, club member Randall Cox told agents the group had received multiple messages from extraterrestrials warning humanity about its place in the universe.

The memo states the beings said all planets except Earth had already conquered outer space. 

To read more, go here. 

Must-Visit Quirky Roadside Attractions For RVers

Above, a replica of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) at the
International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

In the 1983 movie, National Lampoon's Vacation, the World's Largest Ball of Twine is mentioned. Unfortunately, it was not shown.

But it also gets a mention in a new article in RV Life. It is on RVing through quirky America of must-see roadside attractions. Many of the attractions mentioned do have RV parking.

I have been to some of them such as the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico and the Giant Paul Bunyan and Babe in Klamath, California. 

The article begins with:

One of the best parts about road-tripping in an RV is the ability to explore off the beaten path and find quirky things to see. My family loves doing this and some of our favorite memories come from stopping to see strange and interesting roadside attractions. That said, it’s not always easy to know where to find such attractions. That’s where this article comes into play. 

Below, I’ve listed some of the best quirky roadside attractions in the US. Some of these are things I’ve stopped to see. Others are things that are on my must-see list. In both cases, I feel like all of these attractions are worth adding to a trip itinerary to add a little spice to your travels. 

Why Quirk Belongs on Your RV Itinerary

Not sure why you might want to stop at some of these silly roadside attractions? Honestly, they’re mostly just for fun. They are easily accessible, perfect for breaking up long driving days and stretching your legs, and are often low-cost.

In many cases, roadside attractions also have big-rig parking, making them easy stops for RVers. You might also find that these stops offer plenty in the way of food and gas options, making them even more appealing.

To read more, go here.

Roswell UFO Museum Reaches 5 Million Visitors

Above, the International UFO Museum during the 2018 UFO Festival. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

After moving to New Mexico five years ago, one of the things I did that first year was to drive down to Roswell for the annual UFO Festival. My former Tarzana roommate and I had a good time at the festival.'

One of the highlights of that trip was to visit the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center. The museum is well worth a visit. It even has a full size Gort replica from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Above, the museum's Gort replica display. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The Times Union reported that the International UFO Museum and Research Center has reached five million visitors.

They wrote:

ROSWELL, N.M. (AP) — The International UFO Museum & Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, is celebrating an out-of-this-world milestone: 5 million visitors.

A father and daughter from Roswell became the lucky visitors when they entered the museum earlier Nov. 21, the Roswell Daily Record reported.

Chris and Hannah McDonald received balloons, memorabilia and a lifetime family museum membership.

Museum Executive Director Karen Jaramillo said it was a surprise that Roswell residents brought them to 5 million because so many guests are from out of state.

The UFO Museum, which opened in 1992, draws over 220,000 visitors each year, Jaramillo said.

Roswell has been a hub for people fascinated by space and extraterrestrial phenomenon since the 1947 so-called Roswell Incident.

To read more, go here. 

TheTravel: The Ultimate Guide To Roswell & Things To Do

Above, Roswell's famous welcome sign. Photo by Armand Vaquer

A few months after moving to New Mexico from California, I attended the UFO Festival in Roswell. It was a fun and interesting event held annually around Independence Day.

Along with the festival, I visited the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center. It had many exhibits along with a seven-foot Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still. 

Above, yours truly in the Roswell Visitor Center with two friendly aliens.

TheTravel has posted "Attention Extraterrestrials: The Ultimate Guide To Roswell & Things To Do".

They begin it with:

Driving along Highway 285 from the south towards Roswell through the New Mexico desert, travelers may be a little surprised to come across life-size cut-outs of an alien ship, little green men, and some locals trying to befriend them with pie. Coming into the city from any direction there is ample warning of the wacky, weird, and wonderful still to come.

And there’s plenty still to come.

Roswell, in Chaves County, New Mexico, has fully embraced the “Roswell Incident” UFO brand with out-of-this-world museums, kitschy gift stores, and a number of roadside attractions. Whether coming in from the north, south, west, or east, visitors are greeted by signs decorated with spacecraft, and the universally recognized androgynous alien with the oversized head, large almond-shaped eyes, Voldemort nose, and long lanky arms.

Roswell was founded in 1871 by businessman Van C. Smith who named the town after his father, Roswell Smith. After a slow start, the town’s growth and development took off when an aquifer was discovered in 1890 and continued with the arrival of the railroad in 1892.

Today Roswell is home to 50,000 residents and a booming tourist industry built around an unidentified flying object crashing in a nearby ranch in 1947.

It soon became the focus of the “flying saucer” craze of the 40s and 50s and since the 1970s, the city has cashed in on the controversy surrounding the alleged crash and subsequent military “cover-up”.

It has been explored in books, TV shows, and films, culminating in the now-debunked footage “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” released in 1995. All the information about this intriguing story can be gleaned at the International Museum and Research Center on South Main Street – the first stop on our itinerary in the ultimate travel guide to Roswell, New Mexico.

Above, Gort at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

To read more, go here.

Above, aliens and their flying saucer in the Roswell International UFO Museum. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

50 Best Alien Movies Ever Made

Above, a replica Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still at the
 Roswell International UFO Museum. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Since summer is over and autumn has arrived (with winter just around the corner), many will find themselves indoors and needing something to do. One idea to keep occupied is to watch alien movies.

Madison.com has compiled a list of the 50 best alien movies ever made. Several Star Trek movies made the list, by the way.

Before listing the 50 best, they wrote:

Humanity’s ideas of alien existence often says more about us than the little green men we envision. Our conception of life beyond Earth reflects our collective hopes and fears about the unknown and about technology, as well as our knowledge of the larger universe — which changes dramatically as time goes on.

No medium has more vividly captured and utilized scenarios of extraterrestrial life better than film. Aliens first appeared on screen in 1902, in Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon.” After 1947 — in which civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sightings and the discovery of a mysterious “flying disc” near Roswell, New Mexico occurred — a subculture devoted to otherworldly creatures called “ufology” emerged, leaving a lasting mark on cinema.

As America dealt with the Red Scare in the 1950s, influential alien films like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “War of the Worlds” used intergalactic characters to reflect citizens’ fear of Communism and other “outsiders,” as well as humanity's penchant to destroy itself from within. Extraterrestrials were also common sci-fi horror monsters, ranging from the titular alien in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic to the shape-shifting arctic creature in “The Thing.” However, in the 1970s and 1980s, friendlier and sometimes lovable aliens were also reflected in movies such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” and “Cocoon.” These days, otherworldly characters appear in a wide range of roles, from the alien force that mutates biological creatures in “Annihilation” to the more kindly, time-bending heptapods of “Arrival.”

With the wide number of alien movies throughout the history of film, how can viewers determine which extraterrestrial features are most worth their time? To answer that question, Stacker compiled data (as of Sept. 2, 2020) on all sci-fi movies on Letterboxd, the film-based social media network, and selected the top 50 alien movies, ranked according to their average Letterboxd score. To qualify, aliens had to be main characters or central to the plot of the film.

Here are the best alien movies of all time, starting at No. 50 and counting down to No. 1.

To see the list, go here. 

International UFO Museum and Research Center

Above, the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Vacation season is fast approaching and here is an idea for a vacation trip.

The 2019 UFO Festival will be held on July 5-9 in Roswell, New Mexico.

I attended last year's festival and found it to be a fun and entertaining event. There are many things to see and do, but be prepared to do a lot of walking as the many events are spread out in different venues in town.

Above, yours truly with one of the big displays in the museum. 

One big highlight is the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Again, there are many exhibits inside and it is something that can be enjoyed by entire families. It is open all year, so people can visit it outside of the UFO Festival dates.

Above, the UFO Research Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Besides artifacts from the Roswell Incident, there is a full-size replica of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The official website for the International UFO Museum and Research Center can be reached by going here.

Above, the full-sized replica of Gort. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

When UFOs Buzzed The White House

Above, The Day The Earth Stood Still display at the International UFO
Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Not too many people (outside of UFO enthusiasts) are aware that the White House was buzzed by UFOs back during the Truman Administration in 1952.

In fact, a number of UFO sighting were reported in the Washington, DC area.

History.com has an article on the White House UFO encounter and Washington, DC UFO sightings.

They begin with:

When a slew of saucer-like sightings was reported over Washington, D.C. in 1952, the Air Force blocked its own investigator from checking them out. 

1952 was the year America caught flying-saucer fever. 

So when a rash of strange sightings was reported in the skies over Washington D.C. that summer, the press and the public demanded answers. Were these unexplained radar blips, crafts that in some cases outran jets, part of a nuclear-armed Soviet invasion—a very real threat at the height of the Red Scare? Or were they evidence of something far more mysterious? 

The Washington, D.C. sightings of July 1952, also known as “the Big Flap,” hold a special place in the history of unidentified flying objects. Major American newspapers were reporting multiple credible sightings by civilian and military radar operators and pilots—so many that a special intelligence unit of the U.S. Air Force was sent in to investigate. What they found—or didn’t find—along with the Air Force’s official explanation, fueled some of the earliest conspiracy theories about a government plot to hide evidence of alien life.

The White House and Capitol buzzed:

When radar operators at National watched the objects buzz past the White House and Capitol building, the UFO jokes stopped. Two F-94 interceptor jets were scrambled, but each time they approached the locations appearing on the radar screens, the mysterious blips would disappear. By dawn of July 20, the objects were gone.

It is interesting that UFOs buzzed the capital after The Day The Earth Stood Still was released in September 1951.

To read more, go here.

Gort Is Among Us

Above, Gort is ready to blast someone at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Cener. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

When I visited the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research center, I found that the museum has a full-size replica of Gort, the robot policeman from the 1951 science-fiction classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Above, yours truly with Gort in Roswell. 

This wasn't the first Gort I've ever encountered.

On La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, stands a Gort replica in the window of Grey Goose Framing at 1170 S. La Brea Ave. I've passed by the store many times over the years.

At the Action Figure Insider website, they state that there are two other full-size Gort replicas in the Los Angeles area. One is at a collectibles shop in Santa Monica. Another is at Fry's Electronics in Burbank. They have photos of both along with a photo of the one at Grey Goose Framing. To view the site, go here.

I have my own Gort. It is a five-inch metal figure that I bought at the Science-Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington in 2005.

Above, my 5" Gort. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The helmet to the real Gort movie prop helmet was sold to a collector three years ago for $150,000. I don't know what became of the rest of the Gort suit.

Roswell UFO Museum

Above, the UFO Museum in Roswell. Note the interesting street lamp. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Rather than trying to see the Roswell UFO Museum tomorrow or Saturday and fight the UFO Festival crowds, Jess and I went to the museum today.

It was an interesting museum. Author Donald R. Schmitt (Witness To Roswell) gave an overview talk about the Roswell incident, particularly on the government's cover-up (giving four different cover stories over the years). He also had a table where he autographed copies of his books. Unfortunately, one moron fanboy in an orange t-shirt kept people from being able to chat with Schmitt by hogging up Schmitt's time.

There was also a big figure of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

I took a bunch of photos inside the museum. Here's some of them:

Above, a model of the Roswell crash. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, the famous front page of the Roswell Daily Record. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, the Los Angeles Herald Express front page. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, what the government says the alien bodies actually were.
But those didn't exist until 1952. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, Gort with yours truly. Photo by Jess.

Above, Gort ready to blast someone. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, an alien body. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, an alien body. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, aliens and their space ship are about to launch. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, props from a Roswell movie. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, the Research Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Above, author Donald R. Schmitt during his talk. Photo by Armand Vaquer.