At the rental counter the agent looked me up.



"And you're dropping off in … oh, hon, lucky you. Las Vegas!"



"Well, sort of," I said. "I'm dropping the car off in Vegas, but first I'm driving to Area 51."



I figured people must say this sort of thing all the time in Roswell – oh, sure, just casually road-tripping out to America's most sinister top-secret black site – but she looked taken aback. "Area 51," she said, "that's … "



"Yeah," I said.



"You know it's not … "



"It's a thousand miles away," I said. "That's why I'm dropping the car off in Vegas."



"OK, because sometimes people come here and they think – you know – they think it's right next to Roswell, because they hear about them together and whatnot. But Roswell, we're like a tourist attraction, and that's … "



"I know," I said.



"That's not," she finished. She gave me back my ID. "Well, we've got you in a Nissan Sentra."



"I'm driving on Route 66," I told her. "Not the whole way, because you can't, but as much as I can."



"OK," she said. "Well. We've got you in a Nissan Sentra."



I declined insurance. She slid over the gargantuan clove of key fobs.



"Hon, before you go," she said. "Can I ask. Do you mind if I ask why you're doing that?"

It had something to do with the desert and something to do with my brain and something to do with a line I wrote in a notebook once, one of those throwaway thoughts you forget five minutes after you jot them down, except this time I didn't. The line was: "What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of things."

I flew to Roswell in early spring, the day before Easter. That whole winter I'd been thinking about the desert. Partly this was because of everything that had gone wrong in my own mind. For months, I'd found myself driving too fast and sleeping too little and lying too much, lying almost all the time, really, and mostly to people I loved. I've never been great at communication. Now the gradual disaster of my own choices had left me without even the illusion that I understood myself; I seemed to look out at the world from the other side of a large, bright blank, a space I could navigate only by means of symbols and codes and gestures that made no sense to anyone else. I hurt people I cared about. I cut myself off from the person who best understood me. I was a secret league of one, only with no sense of how to read the directions on whatever inner map was supposed to be my guide to the conspiracy.

"Apocalypses become quaint the moment they don't happen ..."

There's a word that shows up in old country songs: astray. That was how I felt. Not just lost. Like I'd fallen out of my real life and into some eccentric parallel from which I couldn't find a way back.

All that time, I thought about the desert. I couldn't admit that I was depressed, but I could close my eyes and picture sandstone spires. There is in the image of the desert a nullification that I find almost hypnotic. Think about wagon trains rolling into that immeasurable, unforgiving, all-dwarfing strangeness, the way the tenor of the adventure changes as soon you leave behind rivers and trees for immensities of rock. The orderly progress of the American frontier convulses when it gets to the southwest, because the desert surrounds pragmatic individualism with a silence, a stillness against which it's a speck. A little farther east, your folk heroes are frontiersmen, survivors, builders of cabins and wearers of coonskin caps. In the desert, they're gunmen. They're murderers, or else lawmen who are barely distinguishable from murderers. West of the Alamo, violence takes on a quality of curiously inevitable accident. You always hear it said that Monument Valley is the backdrop for so many John Ford movies because the ruggedness and grandeur of the rocks matched qualities he saw in the young country. I see it differently: To watch John Wayne swagger in front of those wild citadels is to see the drama of American self-definition play out against a backdrop that reveals the utter fragility of the pose, the ongoing inescapable presence of what the pose is meant to keep you safe from. There's a reason the marvels of human engineering we most associate with the desert are some of the most outrageous emblems of [crackly newsreel voice] Man's Conquest of Nature – giant dams, fighter jets, the mushroom cloud. To bring order to the desert requires an ingenuity that is, itself, insane.

Think, too, about how the desert functions in the cultures that border it, how ubiquitously it beckons to hermits and shamans and saints. Whenever a pilgrim needs to reach a holy place, the world has a way of interposing a desert. St. Anthony goes into the Sahara to have visions of men with the heads of hawks and caves teeming with demons. The Huichol in the Sierra Madre travel yearly to high desert mountains, to take peyote and pray. I didn't much believe in ecstatic truth or in my own capacity to receive it. But that winter I would catch myself thinking: What I really want is to get in a car and go west.

And because, in America, the profound weirdness and unknowability of the desert are spiralingly intertwined with the UFO phenomenon, and with the vast network of paranormal experiencers, scientific iconoclasts, hippie mystics, and aviator-wearing conspiracy theorists who populate it, I finally decided to check out some of the marquee sites, poke around a little. I wondered if doing so could quiet some of the tremors in my web.

photo: The Image Works

Downtown, I saw something truly otherworldly. I saw Jesus Christ. He was moving down Main Street, at the head of a small peloton of disciples. I'd dropped my bag at the hotel and gone out to look around, in the Sentra. I saw the Messiah and cruised right past him.

To picture Roswell you have to think of it in layers, one on top of the other, like slide transparencies. The bottom layer looks like a small town in semi-desolation, not an uncommon sight in America these days. On the outskirts, you see horses standing on front lawns. You pass rusted hulks of machinery, looking old in the way the hills do. As you get closer to the center, where the streets fall into a grid, the quality of decline changes, becomes stage-managed. The sidewalks outside the old-timey storefronts sport brick inlays, elegant street lamps. It's only on a second look that you notice hardly anyone is out walking.

Above all this is Roswell's second layer, which floats uneasily over the first. Those dignified old storefronts? They're plastered with little green men. Every other signboard and shop window screams about visitors from beyond the sky. Inflatable aliens sway under the awnings of RV-lite gift emporia with names like Star Child and Roswell Landing. Alien hats for $17, alien shot glasses for $6.50. Wasp-waisted matador aliens posture with capes on the mural outside the Mexican restaurant. The street lamps' frosted orbs have alien eyes stuck on them. At twilight, they look like floating alien heads.

It was twilight now. The light was bluish ash. Jesus and his disciples were moving through all of this, walking south, toward the UFO Museum, and walking slowly, because Jesus was stooped under the weight of the cross, which he carried over one shoulder, Passion-style. Was that a crown of thorns on his forehead? Red blood drenched his white garment, though not his gray athletic shoes. His disciples wore long robes and biblical-looking headscarves. One solitary disciple, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, had on a sweatsuit. Some of the disciples carried signs. Jesus Loves You. Jesus Died For You. Jesus Saves. Their procession reached an intersection moments before I lost sight of them. I watched Jesus look both ways before crossing the street.

photo: the UFO Museum

The next morning I stopped in at the museum. The Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center is a big, dark, warehouselike space with a vibe trapped in the bewildering no-man's-land between "grade-school science fair" and "Kyle, check out my lava-lamp collection." I mean pegboard where you can still see the holes. The exhibits gesture toward neutrality on the question of what really happened the night of the crash; the 6-foot-tall animatronic aliens in the center of the main room are maybe marginally less open to interpretation. They come to life periodically and address the crowd. They sound like Donald Duck impersonating a fax machine into a vocoder. Their flying saucer bloops and spins.

After a couple of minutes I stopped reading the placards and instead eavesdropped on a pair of startlingly beautiful bikers, a man and a woman, neither one possibly more than 25. They were dressed like leather cultists from the future after the fall. Wren's-nest hair, eye black smeared across their cheeks.

"Fuckin' Yodas," the male biker chuckled.

UFOs are an American phenomenon, although they were not, in the beginning, specific to the desert. Or, from another perspective, UFOs are a phenomenon common to every place and time (the pyramids, ever heard of them?) whose characteristics happened to be codified in America, whereupon they entered wider notice. An important early abduction case took place in Brazil; a wave of sightings in France in 1954 led the town of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to outlaw flying saucers, in the interest of protecting the grapes. The so-called foo fighters, mysterious balls of darting-eye light that appeared to pilots on both sides during World War II, were likewise based in Europe. But it was in this country, after the war, that sightings of unexplained aerial lights were first widely correlated with the idea of extraterrestrial ships. At first, the accounts were scattered. A tower reports a flyover at an impossible rate of speed, by a craft it can't identify. Luminous spheres, viewed by dozens, effervesce over a small Midwestern town. A fighter pilot crashes while chasing a gigantic something – but surely the description he called in doesn't make sense? Then people started putting the accounts together, and a narrative began to form.

Apocalypses become quaint the moment they don't happen, which can make it hard to reenter the fear matrix of a previous generation. We know how things turn out, and we have our own nightmares to tend to. Decades of media coverage has turned UFOs into either a tinfoil-hat punch line or an X-Files-ish fantasy-escape. But during the early Cold War years, as subdued hysteria started to set in, the riddle of what exactly all these people were seeing was of mainstream concern. We remember the novelty songs and goofball entertainments playing up the UFO craze — "The Purple People-Eater," say, or Jesse Lee Turner's "The Little Space Girl," from 1959, in which a lonely earthman tries halfheartedly to fend off the advances of an amorous alien in the park. But these were popular because the phenomenon was real. Millions of people took it seriously. Millions of people were, I'm not saying panicking, but at least aware of something sinister in the atmosphere, something not quite right.

"This was where we'd started the trip to space, and it was where space, or the idea of space, came crashing back down to us."

It's striking now, when you read the books that helped establish the outlines of the UFO narrative, how hard-bitten they are. My favorite, produced by Donald Keyhoe in 1950, is way more Smoking Man than Mulder; James M. Cain could have written it. It's called The Flying Saucers Are Real. Basically every scene depicts Keyhoe, flinty-eyed investigative journalist, marching into some scientist's lab or government office, overcoat flapping at his ankles, and listen here, buster–ing whoever's inside. I want the truth, see? The truth! The New Age dimension of alien contact hadn't emerged yet, and neither had the idea of a government conspiracy whose byzantine depths made it functionally magical. What you have, instead, is the room tone of an era that had watched the atom split, had lived through the war's devastation, had seen humanity's idea of itself transfigured more than once, in a few short years, and in progressively more breathtaking ways. Why are the aliens here? Keyhoe asks, and the answer is obvious. Because America has the bomb. They're here because of the bomb. The old paradigm was a memory; what could come from the sky put everyone at risk. Why wouldn't aliens show up?

Did you know that Robert Goddard lived in Roswell? Goddard was a rocket scientist whose work paved the way for human spaceflight. Also missile technology. He did, before the war, an intense, tubercular obsessive firing-off of rockets into the desert. You can visit his old lab. He'd been laughed out of the East Coast scientific establishment and had come here to do his work. Work without which, again, there'd be no moon landing, no ICBMs, no rovers on Mars. Goddard thought we could use rockets to reach outer space, spoke of sending messages to alien civilizations inscribed on metal plates. The circularity felt eerie. This was where we'd started the trip to space, and it was where space, or the idea of space, came crashing back down to us.