Rockets, Aliens, and Caves

March 19-20, 2005

We stopped for the night in Roswell, NM and then visited a couple of museums.

The first stop was the Roswell Museum, where they have a reconstruction of Goddard's lab. Goddard was an early pioneer in rocketry. He started his experiments in Massachusetts, but when his experiments got bigger and more dangerous; he moved to Roswell where he could conduct his experiments in a more sparsely populated area. Goddard developed many of the ideas used in rocketry and spacecraft today. One of Goddard's more advanced rockets is in the foreground, an earlier rocket is shown under the flag in the background.
 

The next stop in Roswell was the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Roswell is, of course, well-known for the "sightings of UFOs" and the supposed crash in 1947 of a flying saucer with an alien aboard.  This museum contains news clippings and displays about the UFO sightings and other such nonsense. It seems to me to be more of marketing gimmick now.
 

Carlsbad Caverns National Park contains some enormous and very beautiful caves. We elected to enter the main cave through the "Natural Entrance" and walk down 750 (vertical) feet to the Big Room. The cave was known to people in the late 1800s as the "bat cave" since thousands of bats come flying out the entrance at dusk in the summer time; they feed on insects and return to the cave at dawn. We didn't get to see the bats since they have migrated south for the winter, and have not yet returned.
 

The Big Room is enormous; the floor area is about that of 14 football fields, and the height ranges up to about 250 feet. This picture shows stalactites, stalagmites, and columns. I have always had trouble remembering which were stalactites and which we stalagmites. Today I learned that stalactites hang "tight to the ceiling" and stalagmites grow up "tall and mighty" from the floor. Columns form when they grow together.
 

Next we head into Texas.