Places such as the Extraterrestrial Highway and Roswell, New Mexico, about 1,000 miles to the east, have become beacons to an entire community. Roswell, according to a representative for the city, averages 226,000 visitors each year—and embraces its place in the mythos, despite the fact that it is easy to see the whole thing as a joke.
“Ridicule is pockmarked throughout the entire phenomenon,” says Greg Eghigian, a historian at Penn State University and author of multiple research papers on the history of UFO sightings and alien contact. But he sees a deeper meaning in the way people connect with these sites. “What I consistently see across the board generally are people who are trying to find meaning,” he adds. “I think human beings are essentially meaning-makers and one of the ways, in fact, maybe the key way we often do that, is through stories. Stories bring meaning to our lives.
UFO sighting location, Nevada.
“The desert is this place that, because it’s so empty, because there are so few people around … you can write something about your own life or about the meaning of bigger, more cosmic kinds of things,” he adds. Against that backdrop, he explains, people have created landmarks and elevated the locations of sightings to provide them with spaces to focus their energies. Ultimately, they’re grappling with some big existential questions in the otherwise stark desert landscape.
For his part, Arcenillas is “not a believer, but certainly, yes very comfortable [with the possibility]. I can not be alone in the universe, right?”
Atlas Obscura has a selection of photos of out-of-this-world sites from Arcenillas’s upcoming book.
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