McMinnville is a great place to begin for several reasons. For starters, photos of the UFO that appeared over McMinnville are considered some of the most compelling, clear evidence of UFOs ever captured. Secondly, they have an annual UFO festival. There’s plenty of goofiness happening, but there are also serious discussions. The latest festival featured several witnesses and investigators of the Phoenix Lights, one of the most well-documented and widely-seen UFO events in history.
(image via Flickr)
The story of UFOs in America doesn’t start with Roswell. It actually goes back much farther than that. In 1896, residents of Aurora, Texas, started seeing a cigar-shaped object floating in the sky. In 1897, the alleged craft collided with a windmill. According to local legend, the pilot—assumed to be from another planet—was buried in the town graveyard. While the gravestone that used to mark its plot is gone, there’s still a historical telling the story.
(image via Instagram)
Washington, D.C.
The Smithsonian has fascinating scientific and historical artifacts, but it also has a great deal of science fiction on display. Margaret Weitekamp is the Curator for Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spaceflight, which means that it’s her job to put together a collection of all the ways space travel has captured our imaginations. That’s not the only place to see UFOs at the Smithsonian, though. The Institute’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture holds a reconstructed incarnation of Parliament’s P-Funk Mothership, one of the most iconic stage props in history, and certainly the funkiest starship in the galaxy.
(image via Flickr)
Merritt Island, Florida
Maybe the objects flying out of Kennedy are more known than unknown, but it’s still a cool place to be. This is an exciting time for spaceflight—SpaceX just launched a rocket that successfully landed on a boat at sea. Being able to reuse rockets instead of just crashing them makes space exploration much more affordable. They’re not the only private company helping advance spaceflight, just one of the many getting in on the action here at Kennedy and Cape Canaveral.
(image via Flickr)
Crook County, Wyoming
Devils Tower is an enormous igneous intrusion in Wyoming. Most people probably know it from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Richard Dreyfuss and several others found themselves obsessed with the unique shape of the mountain, eventually flocking to the site just in time for UFOs to land. The movie turned the monument into a sci-fi icon, one that’s been parodied by everyone from “Weird Al” Yankovic to The Simpsons to even The X-Files.
Los Angeles County, California
Vasquez Rocks is one of those places more associated with fictional aliens than any real or alleged encounter. Still, it’s so iconic that it deserves a mention—as soon as you see this structure, it’s immediately familiar, even if you can’t place it. That’s because it’s been a filming location for over 50 films and countless TV shows. Captain Kirk famously fought that rubber-suited lizard monster here. But the rocks have also appeared in the likes of Roswell, Alien Nation, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, and much more.
(image via Flickr)
Socorro County, New Mexico
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is (you guessed it) a very large array of radio telescopes, trained at the Socorro County skies. The antennas here are so huge that they’re repositioned via a system of trains. They’ve helped us learn more about black holes, quarks, quasars, and even the gasses at the center of our galaxy. They’re not actually used to seek out UFOs, but they’re almost better.
(image via Flickr)
Mountain View, California
Not all of the conversation around aliens has to do with little green men. SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—has been exploring the universe for signs of life since it began operations in 1985. They use a telescope array (not the Very Large Array; a different one) to search for signs of technology, and a cross-disciplinary team of scientists explores forms of life that might exist but haven’t occurred to us.
(image via Flickr)
Lincoln County, Nevada
Let’s get one thing clear—do NOT attempt to actually enter Area 51. Whether it has anything to do with UFOs or not, this is a very real military base, about which nearly everything is classified. Its proximity to Roswell has led people to cite it as the parking spot for the Roswell UFO. It's probably no surprise, then, that most of the kitschy tourist items around here are centered around the alien theme.
(image via Flickr)
In 1947, one of two things occurred during the “Roswell Incident:" either (1) part of a weather balloon fell onto a rancher’s property or (2) a UFO crashed that incited an immediate government cover-up. That second theory is certainly not harmed by the fact that there is a top-secret air force base not too terribly far away. At a minimum, kitschy UFO imagery has seeped into just about every part of the town, and it makes for a good time.
(image via Flickr)
