Authors: Katherine Ward
Humanity is no stranger to arranged marriage. In fact, before the 20th century, most marriages were nothing more than business transactions.
Okay, that’s a lie. I can actually tell you the exact moment when I became obsessed with them. Me and my grandparents were on a cross country road trip just a few months after mom and dad died in their car wreck. I was 7-years-old at the time, and I my grandpa thought a long road trip would help us bond and begin to heal from the sudden death of my parents.
My folks were never very close with my grandma and grandpa. In fact, I’d only met them once before my folk’s accident. I think I was 4 or 5 years-old, and all I remember from the visit is making cookies with my grandma and the sound of my dad and grandpa shouting at each other. As my grandpa explained to me when I was older was that the riff between the two of them happened because my grandpa—who was a lifelong military man—had secured my dad entrance into West Point. But, my dad was an artist and really didn’t want to have anything to do with the military. He wanted to go to art school and become a graphic designer. Grandpa wasn’t having that nonsense, though. He wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps and make the Army his career. In the end, grandpa kicked dad out of the house, and my dad paid for school on his own dime and met my mother.
My grandpa always regretted his actions. Because, hey, my dad was his only child, and he knew he was just being a stubborn old fool.
Anyway, grandpa thought the trip would be a great way for me and him and grandma to all get to know each other and become a family. At the time, I really didn’t care because I felt like I wanted to die all the time so that I could be with my mom and dad. I mean, I was 7 when they died, so obviously they were my whole world. But here I was, living with two people who were essentially nothing but strangers to me. They were a framed snapshot that my mom kept on the mantle at our old house that I barely ever noticed except when my mom would have me help her clean.
We started the trip in California. We did the Disneyland and theme park thing. We drove to San Diego and did the Shamu and beach thing. Then we drove to Arizona, started at the Grand Canyon and rode donkeys to the bottom of it (I remember having a lot of fun doing that, but what I remember most of all was how bad my butt hurt after we got off of them.). After that, we drove to New Mexico. I remember grandma and grandpa arguing a little bit about where grandpa wanted to take us.
“Earl, why in the world would you want to take a little girl to go and see that? You’re going to scare the daylights out of her!”
“Oh, come on, Joann, why don’t you take the rod out of your butt for once and try having a little fun! I Betcha anything that Dawn would love seeing some little green men.”
My grandpa turned to me as he was driving down that long, dusty stretch of New Mexican highway, a huge smile on his face and he asked:
“What do you think, Dawn? Do you want to go and see where some aliens crash landed or what?”
Up until this point in my life, I’d never really heard of aliens. I mean, I remembered watching that dopey E.T. movie with my folks when I was super little, and I remember thinking how cute the little E.T. was when he said he wanted to go home. But other than that, the mainstream version of aliens was a complete mystery to me. Besides, I really had to go to the bathroom at the time, so I was willing to stop anywhere.
“Sure, grandpa,” I said, giving him a little smile. “Let’s go see some little green men.”
“Well, alright then,” He said with a self-satisfied smile when he turned his attention back to grandma. “See, grandma, see does want to go see some little green men.”
My grandma’s only response was her usual little string of under her breath curses that I would come to truly love over the years.
We pulled into Roswell about midday and grandpa followed the signs—and there were plenty of them—pointing to the Roswell UFO museum. He pulled right in front of the building and we all climbed out, paid the cashier our entrance fee—I was free because I was under 10, which grandpa really liked. Despite him being a very generous man, he was also a natural born skinflint—but before we began the tour, we all needed to use the bathroom. I remember sitting in my stall and there was this bald green man with huge black eyes painted on the back of the door. I kept giggling at it and thinking how weird it looked. I remember grandma kept asking me what was so funny, but I was laughing so hard at the painting that I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer her. Finally, she just had to pull me out of the stall and out into the lobby.
The tour started with a 15-minute movie about the history of Roswell. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Roswell incident, I’ll give you a quick primer. Back in 1947, a UFO supposedly crash landed on some ranch a little north of Roswell. The owner of the ranch was named Mack Brazel. Good old Mack was a simple, hard-working man, and he didn’t know much about anything else other than ranching, which was a good thing because he was pretty darn successful at it. Anyway, Mack and one of his employees were riding around the property when all of the sudden they saw something fall from the sky. Curious about, they drove to where the object hit and discovered a massive amount of debris with all kinds of strange and unknown writing on it.
The writing spooked Mack and his employee, so they gathered some of the debris and then decided to drive back to the main ranch house and call the local air force base at White Sands, figuring that the thing that crashed had to be one of their aircraft. Mack and his ranch hand drove back out to the site to meet the air force and show them what they had found. But as soon as they arrived, the air force men who were now out the site in force confiscated what Mack had collected and told them to be on their way. Confused, they drove back to the ranch house, and Mack and his ranch hand would obsess about the crash for the rest of their lives.
Now here’s where things get really weird. The same night of the crash, the air force contacted a young mortician named Glenn Daniels and was told that there had been a crash and some bodies had been recovered from it which needed his attention. Daniels drove out to White Sands only to be turned away by the entrance guards. Daniels thought it was a little funny to have driven all the way out to the base, but he really didn’t give it a second thought until the next day when an air force nurse who worked part time at the same mortuary as Daniels came into work.
From what Daniels said, the nurse was as white as a ghost and being concerned with her overall well-being, he asked her what was wrong? The nurse asked Daniels if he’d heard about the crash and he said yes, and that he’d been called out the base to examine the bodies but had been turned away when he arrived. Next the nurse told Daniels about the truckloads of debris that been hauled back to the base and the three bodies that they had delivered to the bases’ hospital. She couldn’t describe what the bodies looked like, so she drew them on a prescription pad, and what she drew was what are most commonly these days as “gray men”. You know, the tall skinny guys with gray skin, huge heads, and big black eyes. Daniels was flabbergasted, and seeing the nurse was exhausted, he sent her home for the day. Daniels found out the next day when the nurse didn’t show up for work that she had been inexplicably transferred to England the very day Daniels sent her home.
After that, the film ended and we walked around the small museum for a couple of hours examining every little exhibit they had, and then my grandpa bought me a little-stuffed toy of one of the little green men. As we left the museum, grandma turned to both of us and said:
“Well, then, that was pointless wasn’t it?”
But my grandpa stared down at me with me clutching my little green man doll and gave me a wink.
Yeah, from that moment on, I was hooked.
My grandparents thought I would get over the whole UFO thing by the time I was a teenager, and when that didn’t happen, they thought for sure I would be over it by the time I graduated high school.
Nope, that didn’t happen either.
When I went away to college, they were 100% positive I would be way too busy with my studies, and that eventually I would meet a nice boy and get caught up in college life and becoming an adult.
And while I did ended up meeting a few boys—none of them in the least bit nice, but they served their purpose while they were around—and I didn’t get caught up in college life. In fact, I flat out hated college life and was anxious to just get on with my adult life. Which in my junior year that was exactly what I did. I dropped out of Northern Arizona University because my website—UFOArchives.com—became a huge hit, and with the amount of money, I was generating from ad revenue as well as speaking engagements around the country, going to school was actually costing me money.
After I dropped out and moved to Sedona, AZ—The western capital of all things weird and bizarre—I went from Dawn Phillips, student, to Dawn Phillips, the foremost expert on aliens and UFO’s in the western the United States. Yeah, I had turned my obsession into a career. I mean, don’t get me wrong, not all of my money comes from the lecture circuit, my books, and my website, because I’m also one hell of a website designer with average hourly currently hovering around $300. But as you’ve probably already guessed, the bulk of my web design clients all come from the UFO and conspiracy community.
Grandma hated the fact that I dropped out of school. Of course, her generation thought of college as nothing more than a singles club where nice young women met and married the doctors and lawyers of their dreams. Grandpa didn’t mind one bit. Grandpa was a retired non-com officer, so his general belief was that all college really did was extend out childhood another 4 years before you had to go out and get a real job. Plus, well, grandpa secretly liked the alien stuff just as much as I did, and he was happy I was able to make a career out of it.
And don’t get me wrong, I love my job. I love studying and delving into the conspiracy of all types. My obsession with UFO’s has since spilled over into the JFK assignation (If you think Oswald was the lone shooter—or if you think he was the shooter at all—you’re an idiot.), the Moon Landing (We were there, but we found something that we shouldn’t have, and all of the footage that was shown to the world was all recorded on a soundstage.), the MLK assignation (The minute he went from advocating for just black Americans to all poor Americans was the worst mistake he ever made. Also, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t help him out either.), I even dabble a little in things water fluoridation. But the biggest downside to my job is that it's pretty lonely.
As you can probably imagine, the conspiracy community is mostly made up of me. But, they’re not exactly the type of men you want to take back to your hotel room—Seriously, I’m telling you this from several miserable experiences— and screw their brains out. In fact, most of the men in my chosen community aren’t even the types you want to spend extended periods of time with. No, let me rephrase that, they’re not even men you want to be in a room alone with for longer than 10 minutes. Yes, I know, these weirdos are my bread and butter, and honestly, I’m just as weird as they are, but I, at least, care about my hygiene a little bit.
So, obviously, the world I’ve created for myself is a successful one, but it’s a lonely one. A very lonely one where my only “boyfriend” for the past two years has been a 10-inch long purple “back massager”. Well, at least, it was until a couple of weeks ago when something I thought would never happen in a million years actually happened. What happened, you ask? Well, I saw a UFO, and not only did I see one, but I also watched it crash, and then I rescued its sole occupant from burning alive.
The biggest UFO event in the United States takes place—surprise, surprise!—in Roswell, New Mexico July 4-to-7. It’s absolutely enormous and the population of Roswell virtually doubles overnight as close to 15,000 UFO and conspiracy nuts from all over the world come streaming in wearing their tinfoil caps ready to spout both their baked and half-baked theories. Grandpa was the one who brought me here for the convention—Yeah, we can go ahead and blame grandpa for just about every bad habit I have—back when I was 16. At the time, the internet wasn’t as much of thing as it was now, and only a few thousand people showed up for it, and it was actually a pretty intelligent event. Sure, it more than had its fair share of crazies, but most of the presenters were Ph.D.’s and folks who had written dozens of books on the subject. They were all so logical and willing to listen to arguments even if those arguments completely attempted to deride their closely held theories. But, of course, the internet exploded, and the real crazies started pouring in.
But with that first convention, it made such a huge impression on me, that I swore I would one day return as the keynote speaker at the event. Well, it hasn’t exactly happened yet, but over the last three years, I have moderated several of the best-attended panels as well as sat on several. Yes, I’m considered an authority, but since the Roswell convention has become such a phenomena, the keynote speaker usually isn’t some stuffy academic like it was back in the old days. Now it’s typically some actor or movie producer or director who really knows nothing about UFO’s or conspiracy and is only there to sell their latest project to the assembled geeks (And I shouldn’t say all of the keynote speakers no nothing. A couple of years ago Oliver Stone was the main presenter, and he brought along a two-hour long presentation not only about JFK but MLK and the Gulf of Tonkin incident as well. Now that was a great talk!)
Anyway, I was driving back home to Arizona after three solid days of being yelled at by smelly, social misfits, and I was just plain sick of Roswell. For the first time in my short 26-year-old life, I was starting to question my career choices because I had such a rotten time at the convention. I mean, I was really down in the dumps. Here I was, an acknowledged expert in the field, and in virtually every panel I was on some untoward fat ass with the social graces of a 9-year-old would stand up and start spitting at me because I didn’t believe exactly like he believed. I was so depressed that I didn’t even bother sticking around for the keynote speaker (Which wasn’t that big of a deal because it was just the guy who played second fiddle to Patrick Stewart on Start Trek: The Next Generation.) and checked out of my hotel room and started driving.
It was 9 o’clock at night, and I knew that I probably should’ve stuck around and gotten a good nights sleep, but I just didn’t want to deal with these people anymore, especially during the morning rush to check out. So I got out of Dodge thinking that if I got too tired, I find some roadside not-tell motel to crash out in.
I was an hour or so out of Roswell, I was smoking my second cigarette of the drive (Okay, before you get all judgmental about me smoking, let me tell you that I normally only smoke a couple of butts a month, and that’s usually when I’m out with my girlfriends and I’ve had a couple of drinks. But, seriously, I was stressed out and I needed some form of relief, and I wasn’t about to pull over to the side of the road and unpack my boyfriend the “back massager” so I could relieve the tension. So I was smoking instead, so sue me.) and let me tell you, it was pitch black out on that lonely highway, and it seemed like I was the only one driving on it.
I pitched my butt and that’s when I saw it: A bright, white light seemingly floating weightlessly in the sky. And when I say it was floating, I mean it was just sitting their stock still. I thought it was a little weird, but let me tell you a little something about New Mexico—Hell, the southwest as a whole—they're a lot of strange things that go on up in the sky on a daily basis, particularly in the middle of the night. The fact is, they're all kinds of active military bases out in the desert, and most of them run 24/7. Basically, if you see a bright white light in the middle of the night sky in either New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or Nevada, 99 times out of 100, it’s just the air force holding nighttime maneuvers or testing aircraft over American soil that they shouldn’t be testing. I know, considering what I do for a living, I know what I just said made me seem like a complete jerk. But there are so many hacks in the world who fake UFO stories just for attention that you can’t help but become a little jaded. Yes, I want to believe, but sometimes it’s so hard to.
But this light, I just couldn’t take my eyes off of it. There was a brilliance to it that I’d never experienced before. It was literally otherworldly, and there was a reason for that. Suddenly. the light bloomed with a dull orange explosion as if something had struck it, and I watched as this dazzling light began to fall from the sky. Actually, fall probably isn’t the best way to describe it. Rocketed is a far more accurate description, and from my perspective, it looked like it was rocketing right towards me. I should have been panicking, I should have stomped on the gas of my rental car and gotten the hell away from there as fast as it would take me. But it was like I was hypnotized, and I instead put the car in park, left it idling and watched as this light came at me like a comet.
It passed right over my head. It was so close that I could feel the heat radiating from it, and it hit the ground with such a roar and crash that it left my ears ringing. Now, if I was a sane person, I would have been running. I would have even forgotten my car entirely and just hoofed it out of there and I probably wouldn’t have stopped until a police officer noticed my bloody feet and sun-blistered skin and made me stop. But apparently I’m not sane. Apparently, I have zero problems with running towards an unidentified flying object that just roared over engulfed in flames. But the fact was, I felt like I was 7-years-old again. I felt like that little, lonely girl traveling the country with her grandparents and playing make belief with the stuffed alien my grandpa had bought me. This thing that had crashed before my very eyes was validation for spending a lifetime dreaming about alien worlds and flying saucers. Or maybe it was just an experimental aircraft that had malfunctioned? But I had to see for myself.
I came to the wreckage expecting nothing but flame and ash so hot that I couldn’t even approach it. I expected body parts and raw, bloody carnage. But what I found instead was an almost completely intact flying saucer. I shit you not. Yes, there was a long trail of debris and fire where the UFO landed and slid to a stop. There were strange kinds of metal that I had never seen before with strange writing on it just like good old rancher Mack must have found back in 1947. I rushed to the intact part of the UFO and lying just a few feet away from it, I saw him, a gray man. But the closer I got to him, I came to realize that the enormous head and dark black eyes I was seeing were just a helmet of some kind and it was badly damaged.
I stepped over to the body and being too curious for my own good, I pulled the helmet off of the person, and I was face-to-face with perhaps the most beautiful male face I had ever seen. The face was pale blue, but it was the type of face you’d expect an angel or a movie star to have. I put my hand under its nose to see if he was breathing, and I felt a brush of air. For some reason, I had never felt so relieved in my life. He was alive! But what I didn’t expect was for his eyes to flutter open and look up at me with the most innocent and curious gaze that I’ve ever seen.
“Are you okay?” I yelled. Yeah, I honestly thought the spaceman could understand English. I’ve never been accused of being a genius, people.
He started to rise to his feet, but he was wobbling like he was going to fall face forward at a second, so I steadied him and slung his arm over my shoulder. Now remember how I just mentioned that no one has ever accused me of being a genius? Do you also remember me saying that I’m not exactly what you would describe as sane? Yeah, well the reason I’m mentioning this again is because if I was smart and sane, I would have just stayed where I was. I would have stood in that field with the space man slung over my shoulder and waited for the expected bevy of government helicopters to come flying to the scene and rushing me and my spaceman off to God knows where. But I’m not smart and I’m not sane. I’m a complete idiot and I walked my spaceman back to my rental car and dumped him nearly unconscious into the back seat and I drove away from what was most likely a still smoldering interstellar incident.