Motel Saucer and Alien

Roswell, New Mexico

The Western Inn motel placed a space alien in a pioneer covered wagon, nicely blending the region's wagon train frontier heritage with its appeal to green folk as a nice place to visit. A bit more time-paradoxy, however, is a different, much larger little green man, chainsaw-carved from a tree, that stood next to a home-built flying saucer. The extraterrestrial held a flip phone. What, we wondered, did it mean? Was he calling the T-Mobile store planet through a 1990s wormhole to complain about dropped calls?

In early 2017 the Western Inn removed the flip phone -- or maybe it just popped off, because it appears to have been glued to his knuckles as an afterthought. Shorn of this incongruity, the saucer, alien, and their covered wagon companion now have the roadside photo-op frontage to themselves.