This week saw the passing of a visionary of space and a giant of science fiction.  Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of ninety. The author of almost a hundred books, he was an ardent promoter of humans’ destiny beyond the confines of Earth, most famously in the book and following movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. His work was also foretelling of the future. His forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Clarke set his sights high. He did a lot of his best writing during the cold war, and he suggested that exploring space could serve as the moral equivalent of war, giving humans an outlet to their energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust. He influenced a huge number of American scientists and inspired a number of people to become astronauts. Carl Sagan was influenced by him, and producer Gene Roddenberry said that Clarke’s writings gave him the courage to pursue Star Trek in the face of ridicule from TV executives.

His ideas were often ahead of his time. The article he wrote on telecommunications satellites was almost rejected by the magazine Wireless World as too farfetched and ridiculous. Decades later he wrote a wry article called “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time” in which he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent for the idea because the lawyer said the idea of relaying signals from space was too outrageous to be taken seriously.

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in 1917 in southern England. His father was a farmer and his mother a post office telegrapher. He had four siblings and was educated in the regular schools of his town. His childhood imagination was awakened by rambling along the Somerset shoreline, by pictures of dinosaurs he found in cigarette packets, and by the gift of a Meccano set, which is the British equivalent of Erector. He also spent time, like young Galileo before him, mapping the Moon with a telescope he constructed himself from a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses.

The year his father died, when he was just thirteen, he found his first copy of Astounding Stories of Super Science, then the leading American science fiction magazine, and so his path was set. While still a schoolboy he joined the British Interplanetary Society, a small band of enthusiasts who held the view that space travel was not only possible but could and should be achieved in the not too distant future. He wrote his first story, Against the Fall of Night, when he was twenty, but it wasn’t published until sixteen years later.

He’s most famous of course for the movie and book 2001. Its genesis was a short story called The Sentinel published in a science fiction magazine in 1951. It tells the story of an alien artifact found on the moon, a small crystalline pyramid, that explorers from Earth destroy while trying to open it. One explorer realizes that the artifact is a kind of failsafe beacon, and by silencing it, humans have signaled their existence to their far-off creators. The power of “2001: The Movie” came from the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick who was fresh from his triumph in Dr. Strangelove.  When these two met they formed an immediate bond and a great team. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel. Stanley Kubrick produced and directed the film, and they are jointly credited with the screenplay. Even though it has the usual elements of hard science fiction, many reviewers and audience members were puzzled by the final scenes which seem almost ethereal, when the alien returns to orbit as a star child. The most memorable character in the movie is not a person, but HAL, the mutinous computer, a kind of smug machine that believed too strongly in its own infallibility.

Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. Many people were influenced by him. Listen to Charles Kohlhase who planned NASA’s Cassini mission. He said of Mr. Clarke, “When you dream what is possible and add a knowledge of physics, you make it happen.” Another scientist Torrence Johnson said Clarke’s work was a major influence on many people in the field. He recalled a meeting of planetary scientists and rocket engineers where talk turned to the author. “All of us around the table said we read Arthur C. Clarke,” he said. “That was the thing that got us there.”

Clarke was a British citizen who lived most of his life in Sri Lanka. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. Along with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Clarke said his greatest influence as a writer was Olaf Stapledon, the quirky British philosopher who wrote speculative narratives of extraordinary imagination. Clarke was also influenced by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. A statement from Clarke’s office says he had recently reviewed the final manuscript of his last novel called The Last Theorem, co-written with Frederik Pohl, which will be published later this year as his memorial. Some of his best-known books are Childhood’s End from 1953, The City and the Stars from 1956, The Nine Billion Names of God in 1967, Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, and The Songs of Distant Earth in 1986.

Clarke also wrote non-fiction books about nature and diving. He got interested in diving in the early 1950s when he realized that he could find underwater something close to the weightlessness of outer space, and he settled in Sri Lanka in the 1950s.  He suffered polio early in his life, and later in his life it returned and debilitated him, limiting him to a wheelchair. But of course his mind was never bounded by anything. He liberated himself and millions of people who, like him, would never leave the Earth, allowing them to vault into space on their imaginations.

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If you want to find life elsewhere in the universe, follow the water according to NASA and many astrobiologists. The Earth is a water world, and in addition to the Earth it’s likely that Mars may liquid water kept under pressure on its surface, and also perhaps half a dozen moons in the outer solar system. As far from the Sun as they are, moons of gas giant planets may have liquid water under a crusty surface.

Water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe so it’s sensible to follow the water as a strategy for looking for life, but as we were reminded late last year in a report for the National Academies of Science, we should also to loosen the envelope of what we consider life. That report, titled The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, said that there are so many ways that life might evolve and so many chemical and biochemical bases for life that we should be generous in considering what is a minimum requirement. Following on from that, a paper in Astrobiology Magazine recently says we should follow the energy in looking for life. The opening paragraph of the paper which summarizes the rationale and the approach:

“A key challenge in astrobiology is to comprehend life and its interaction with the environment at a level sufficiently fundamental to embrace alternative biochemistries that may be encountered in a search for life elsewhere. Life on Earth presents us with a single, albeit highly diversified, biochemical model around which to build this comprehension. This model is extremely valuable in providing an empirical starting point for understanding metabolic potential and environmental tolerance and as a continuing reality check on whatever generalized concepts of life may be developed. Reference to this single example, however, also carries the risk of narrowing our sense of possibility of leading us to define biochemistry, habitability, and biosignatures in terms so specific that they may exclude different forms of life.”

Sixty years ago Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger brought life’s definition down to its fundamental elements. Life consumes and transforms energy, and so energy is perhaps more fundamental to the definition of life than water, which is simply an ingredient. Water is a very useful solvent and clearly essential to life on Earth but maybe not elsewhere.

The study of terrestrial life in terms of its energy usage reveals several common principles. First, the core metabolic processes function across all organisms from human beings to the tiniest microbes. Second, energy usage encompasses two fundamental ideas: power, or how energy is used over time, and something that’s called voltage, which is the amount of energy in a metabolic event. There seem to be minimum values of power and voltage in the way that life uses energy; below these values life is simply not possible on Earth. Finally, there is a direct and obvious link from environment to biology by a small number of biochemical schemes in molecules, and every form of life on Earth uses one of these small number of biochemical schemes.

So while water is important in general, and essential on Earth and maybe other locations, there is energy everywhere including places where there’s no water. If we think of energy as fundamental, life could get it in many ways. It could get it from gravity. It could get it from starlight or geothermal energy deep within a planet. Most importantly, life on Earth and probably elsewhere gains energy by rearranging molecules. There is abundant free chemical energy simply waiting to be tapped in many environments. Some terrestrial microbes get their energy from metals that we would consider toxic, for example, and since molecules will exist elsewhere in the universe in different concentrations and in very different physical forms than the Earth, there’s an abundance of ways life could gain its energy. The most general way to look for life is to follow the energy in the universe, and that may be the bottom line for astrobiology.

To close, here’s a tag on a story from a few weeks ago about the best message to send ET. Perhaps sending the classics is the best idea. No I don’t mean classical music; I mean the Beatles. On Monday, NASA broadcast the Beatles song Across the Universe a little ways across the galaxy to Polaris, the North Star. The first ever beaming of a radio song by the space agency directly into deep space is driven by nostalgia for the most part, not science. It celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the song, the forty-fifth anniversary of NASA’s deep space network, and the fiftieth anniversary of NASA. Paul McCartney told NASA through a Beatles historian, “Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.” The song, written by McCartney and Lennon, may have a ticket to ride and will be flying at the speed of light, but it will still take 431 years to reach its destination because Polaris is 2.5 quadrillion miles away.

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UFOs: alien visitors or mundane terrestrial phenomena? You be the judge. This week’s morality play takes place in three acts. Act One was back on January 8 in the small farming community of Stephenville, Texas, where nightfall usually only brings clear skies and starry nights. Three weeks ago, residents were abuzz over reported sightings of UFOs. Several dozen people, including a pilot, a county constable, and several business owners say they saw a large, silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some people reported seeing fighter jets chasing it. Listen to Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot. He said, “People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt and everyone is afraid it’s the end of times.” He said the object that he saw was a mile long and half a mile wide. “It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts.”

While federal officials said at the time there was a logical explanation, locals swore that it was larger, quieter, faster, and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object’s lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several other towns offered similar descriptions. Machinist Ricky Sorrells’ friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat metallic object hovering three hundred feet over a pasture behind his Dublin, Texas, home, but he heard of several accounts so he came forward. Sorrells said he had seen the object seven times. He watched it through his rifle’s telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts, or bolts.

At the time, Major Karl Lewis, spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area on the night of January 8 when most people reported the sightings. “I’m ninety percent sure this was an airliner,” said Lewis. “With the sun’s angle, it can play tricks on you.” Officials at the region’s two Air Force bases also said that none of their aircraft were in the area. The Air Force no longer actively investigates UFOs but there are about 200 UFO sightings reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado, and Texas according to the Mutual UFO Network. Fourteen percent of Americans, or roughly one in five, saw a UFO at some time in the past according to the Associated Press.

That was the story a few weeks ago, and people dove right into it. Two weeks later on the web “UFO photos” was the third fastest moving search item on all web sites according to Hitwise, an online measurement company. Among news and media sites, “UFO sightings” was number four of all searches in the US, and “Texas UFO” was number five. Obviously search term behavior is a good indicator of what’s on people’s minds. So this was one of the hottest stories a few weeks ago.

Now for Act Two. Just last week the bubble burst, or did it? Ten Air Force reserve F-16 fighter jets were the cause of the lights seen over parts of central Texas earlier this month, according to CNN. Many had believed them to be UFOs according to an Air Force reserve news release. “The F-16s were on a nighttime training mission over the Brownwood Military Operating Area near Stephenville, Texas,” the statement said. A military operating area is airspace designated for military training. People had seen lights moving fast across the night sky, and the Air Force originally reported it had no aircraft flying that night. But on Wednesday last week an Air Force Reserve statement said that it made a mistake in its initial reporting and that there were planes in the area that night.

Here’s what the release actually said. “In the interest of public awareness, Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs realized an error was made regarding the reported training activity of military aircraft.” Spokesman Karl Lewis said that the error in the reporting resulted from an internal communications problem between offices at the base. He said he received the flight information earlier this week, confirmed it with officials at the base, and sent a news release out on Wednesday. The release said, “The planes were in the area from 6 pm to 8 pm, just the time when many people had reported seeing the lights.” Lewis said the planes were from the 457th Fighter Squadron based at the Reserve Naval Base outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

So you’d think that was the end of the story, wouldn’t you? Well, I did a little Google News search, and found an interesting thing. There were ten times more news releases across the Internet on the original story than there were on the story last week that corrected the fact that these were not UFOs but fighter jets. That’s a big part of why the idea of UFOs persists. The reports are made, people speculate, they draw conclusions, and when new evidence comes in later, people’s attention has moved on and so the error is never corrected. That was Act Two.

What about Act Three? You’d think it would all be over at this point? Well not according to Kenneth Cherry, the Texas Director of the Mutual UFO Network which took more than fifty of the reports from locals at the original January 8 sighting. The announcement from the Air Force that fighter jets were training that night also did little to satisfy Texas town residents who swear that what they saw on January 8 was no airplane. Some even said it bolstered their claims because several people reported seeing at least two fighter jets chasing a strange object. According to Cherry, “This supports our story that there was UFO activity in that area. I find it curious that it took them two weeks to fess up. I think they’re feeling heat from the publicity.” So there you have it. It’s a cover up. And even when the evidence comes in, people like Mr. Cherry can always believe what they wanted to believe. And so UFOs live on. And on and on and on.

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Here’s an interesting question. What if ET is so bored by terrestrial transmissions towards them that they don’t bother to respond? Think about it. The messages sent into space so far have been rather simple mathematically coded descriptions of basic physics and chemistry and some biology and descriptions of humans thrown in. It’s not really that interesting, so it’s a distinct possibility that these messages are beneath the consideration of the ET’s that they’re aimed at.

Only four messages have been beamed into space in binary code, the first in 1974 was designed by Frank Drake and sent from the Arecibo Observatory. All of these messages have the technical problem that they’re short on redundant information so it’s possible that they may be misconstrued or not understood at all. The first one was also aimed at M13, a globular cluster that’s very unlikely to have planets and is tens of thousands of light years away. That’s a pretty bad choice. But the real problem, as pointed out by Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil, is that if a civilization is advanced enough to understand the message, they’ll already know most of its contents. He says, “After reading it, they’ll be none the wiser about humans and our achievements. In some ways, we may have been wasting our telescope time.”

For a good example of this, consider the movie and book Contact. Remember the scene where Jodi Foster is sitting in the control room at the radio telescope, and the first extraterrestrial signals come in? It’s a sequence of prime numbers from beings on a planet around Alpha Centauri. Prime numbers are fourth grade math, not that interesting. Does that really tell us how advanced the aliens were? And we’ve been doing the same thing beamed out at them. It’s like getting to see the President, no, better than that, the Dalai Lama and saying, “Wow, I’m really glad to meet you.” If that’s all you can think to say, you may as well not have bothered.

In 1999 and 2003, Dutil and fellow researcher Stephane Dumas beamed messages in a language of their own design into space, and now they’re hard at work on composing more interesting messages. “The question,” Dutil says, “is what is interesting to an extraterrestrial? We think the answer is using some common ground to communicate things about humanity that will be new or different to them, like social features of our society. Luckily, those kind of subjects are already being described mathematically by economists, physicists, and sociologists.” The language they use for this work is called Lincos, or Lingua Cosmica, which was invented by the mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960. He wrote a book called “Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse,” which sounds a little more exciting than it actually is.

They’re using his language to compose messages about more interesting problems. One topic the researchers are working on is called the cake-cutting problem, how you share out resources, which is a classical problem for all human civilizations. Democracy is another eye-catching subject. According to Dutil, “The math shows that with more than two choices there is no perfect electoral procedure.” So he started working on encoding this into a message in which we can explain our methods and say, “What do you use on your planet?” Social physics, which is the application of mathematical techniques to societies, provides good material that’s potentially interesting to any aliens. Every social network that humans have ever constructed is highly complex and probably not optimized. So the issues we’re dealing with as societies are probably similar to the issues that aliens are dealing with. Another fundamental challenge for old civilizations is how to use resources sustainably to avoid dying. Any good examples out there could help us a lot; it’s not clear we have much to teach aliens on that score.

Dumas designed software that’s like a word processor for composing messages in their symbolic language. There’s also an automatic decoder that should help avoid slips like the missing factor of ten in the duo’s 1999 message. Oops. That’s right, eight or nine years ago they made two mistakes in a message that they beamed out into space, substituting the wrong symbol twice for the equals sign. The mistake was discovered by a gamer in the Netherlands, but the information didn’t get back to them in time and so the message was sent out into space by the radio telescope in Russia, making human civilization look not quite as smart at they might have hoped.

Another commentator on this work has been Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute. He agrees that humans need to make interstellar chat more compelling. He says “If we only communicate something their receiver already knows, it’s not going to be interesting.” He’s held workshops to try and widen participation in messaging extraterrestrials beyond astrophysicists. “I think the most important question is how do we represent what being a human is, and science disciplines can’t always help.”

Vakoch points out that email like messages may not be the best approach. One alternative is to send software code for an avatar that could answer a lot of basic alien questions. That would also get around the problem of delays produced by large distances across space. If you think about it, we’ve sent messages thousands of light years across space. If there’s a mistake, as there was in 1999, or if the message is boring or confusing, it takes that light trip time twice over before we can rectify that problem. That’s rather slow and inefficient. Another approach is to send a lot of stuff and hope there’s enough redundancy for them to spot patterns. Basically we would just send them the Wikipedia. Dutil agrees that these other options are worth exploring but points out that sometimes only a message would do. He says, “It would make sense to have an answer phone message ready in case we are contacted just to say we’ll get back to you while we figure out what to do.” You may have your own thoughts about what the best message to send to ET is to stop him, her, or it from being bored.

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This week saw a landmark in the search for intelligent life in the universe. At Hat Creek, California, astronomers switched on the first elements of a large new array of radio telescopes that will extend the investigation of unnatural signals from the universe that we think might come from intelligent aliens. The facility is called the Allen Telescope Array, named after one of the founder members of Microsoft who provided twenty-five million in seed money, which is actually pin money for such a multibillionaire. Paul Allen is of course the “poor cousin” of Bill Gates.

When it’s complete the Allen Array will consist of three hundred and fifty dishes or antennae, each twenty feet in diameter. Using them as if they were one dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast areas of sky very cheaply and very efficiently. It will extend the search for extraterrestrial radio signals by a factor of a thousand to include a million nearby stars over the next twenty years. This week only forty two of the antennae go online. They are mass-produced from molds and have very inexpensive telecommunications technology. Seth Shostak, the Chief Astronomer at the SETI institute, said, “It’s like cutting the ribbon on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,” and he pointed out that this is the first radio telescope ever designed specifically for the extraterrestrial quest. Most previous surveys have been done with existing radio telescopes, squeezed into time for their conventional radio astronomy programs or piggybacking astronomy programs.

The telescope is a joint project between Paul Allen and the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley. Mr. Allen said in an interview published this week, “If they do find something, they’re going to call me up first and say that we have a signal. So far, the phone hasn’t rung.” Allen describes himself as a child of the fifties, which was the golden age of space exploration and science fiction. He first got interested in supporting the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence after talking to Carl Sagan about twelve years ago. When the idea came to build a radio telescope array on the cheap, Mr. Allen was intrigued. “If you know anything about me,” he said in the same interview, “you know I’m a real enthusiast for new, unconventional approaches to things.”

It’ll take another three years and forty-one million dollars more, depending on the price of aluminum, to complete the array. The complete array will be useful not just for science but also as a practice for a truly giant telescope called the Square Kilometer Array, which would have a combined receiving area of a square kilometer and an effective resolution of a telescope a thousand kilometers across. The main advantage of the Allen Array for normal radio astronomy is the ability to observe the sky in large swaths over and over again in a single night. In principle, the array can map the entire sky in day and a night and do it again the next day, and that’s never been possible before.

The previous radio search for extraterrestrial signals was called Project Phoenix and it finished three years ago and checked only seven hundred and fifty stars. Dr. Shostak says, “While that might sound a lot, it doesn’t impress anyone who knows how many stars there are in the galaxy.” Indeed, there are some two hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and we already know that a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy range from one, or none if you don’t think we’re going to amount to much, to the millions.

Shostak has calculated that a full Allen Array would be able to detect a signal from as far away as five hundred light years, and that’s only a few more times powerful than what we can now send by our own Arecibo Radio Telescope. Arecibo is the world’s largest telescope, although it’s in danger of being shut down right now. It translates to the million stars which is a promising number. Shostak, who has a wit about him, described the expanded search as looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon. Anyone who’s out there broadcasting would also have to be broadcasting right at Earth, but an advanced civilization would be able to tell there was life here because of the oxygen in our atmosphere.

The first thing the new telescope will do is survey a strip across the center of the galaxy, where there are several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, ten to fifty thousand light years, so any signal would have to be huge to be detected. But who are we to say what the transmission power of an unknown galactic civilization will be? Either way, it’s a very promising new step in the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe using radio technology. And perhaps, a major advance in answering the profound question: are we alone?

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You’ve probably heard the expression “The truth is out there.” Well, I know where the truth is, and it’s not too far from where I live, here in the desert southwest. There’s a small town called Roswell in New Mexico, where the truth is apparently located. If you drive down the desolate highway en route to Roswell and see the weird landscape, you can wonder what strange things have happened there.

This coming weekend is the sixtieth anniversary of the so-called Roswell incident, which will be marked by the city’s annual UFO festival. City officials say that fifty thousand people are expected for the event that will include lectures, book signings, tours, entertainment, and according to the organizers, maybe even an alien abduction or two. Long-term plans are underway for a UFO themed amusement park, complete with an indoor roller coaster that would take passengers on a simulated alien abduction. This park could open as early as 2010. The city has already got a quarter million dollar legislative appropriation for initial planning but the park will mostly be privately built and managed.

In case you’ve been in a time capsule for those sixty years, the original Roswell incident occurred in July 1947 outside the city. A rancher named W. W. “Mac” Brazel went to check on some sheep after a night of storms, He claimed he found some strange debris. Neighbors told Brazel he might have pieces of a flying saucer. On July 8, 1947, a local military office issued a press release saying that pieces of a crashed disk were recovered. The story featured on the front page of the Roswell Daily Record, claiming a flying saucer was captured. That paper is now reproduced and sold to tourists. Other news agencies picked up on the event, albeit in a cursory fashion.

A revised release was soon sent out that said that material was a weather balloon. But stories about requests for tiny coffins and a nefarious plot began to emerge, and Roswell went from small town to alien capital. What exactly happened more than a century ago in the New Mexico desert remains murky, but it has inspired many thousands of people to drive across a godforsaken landscape to visit the small town of roughly forty-five thousand people.

Listen to John Turner, age seventy-eight, who works the main desk of the International UFO Museum and Research Center on Roswell’s North Main Street. “I do know this,” he says. “There are other things out there in the universe.”

When I went to the UFO museum a while back, which used to be a movie theater, I was greeted by an alien dummy wearing a Santa Claus hat. The light posts on the streets of Roswell feature alien heads wearing Santa Claus hats. These benign creatures look utterly incapable of malevolent acts such as abduction and brain surgery. The museum takes visitors through a timeline beginning with newspaper clips and printed affidavits from many who claim to have intimate knowledge of the crash. For an extra donation you can take an audio tour with a walkman. That’s pretty low-tech. The timeline of what happened after the Roswell Incident shows why there are so many conflicting stories about the event. The museum mixes documentary materials and kitsch. It throws in stuff about crop circles and an exhibit detailing how Roswell’s been portrayed in the popular culture.

It is curious how aliens are almost inevitably depicted in this museum and others, by those who claim they’ve been visited by extraterrestrials, as diminutive with oval heads, green skin, and doe-shaped eyes. The most popular part of the museum is purely fictional. It’s the set of an alien autopsy from the 1994 television movie Roswell. This vivid exhibit in which doctors prepare to examine an emaciated alien corpse is on a permanent loan to the museum. Fans of the X-Files will recall a similar scene from one of that TV show’s episodes.

The gift shop takes up a good chunk of the first floor and offers everything imaginable for the alien connoisseur: plush dolls, shot glasses, and magnets that say, “I believe.” There’s also a wide selection of rather unskeptical books and documents on the Roswell incident and a research library for those who want to study the alien phenomenon even better. Downtown Roswell is a hub of alien-themed shops. There’s a Not of This World Coffeehouse and the Cover-up Café. Even businesses like banks have cardboard cutouts of aliens in the windows.

One shop that’s worth a visit is the Alien Zone about one block away from the museum. For a small fee, visitors can see an exhibit called Area 51 that features a display of roughly three foot tall alien models in very human poses. In one display an alien is reading a newspaper in a sauna. Another features a forlorn looking alien lounging in a jail cell in prison stripes. And then of course there’s the inevitable alien autopsy, complete with alien baby fetus in a glass jar in a background, and another life-sized model of an alien stumbling from a crashed spaceship. There’s plenty to do in Roswell. So if you’re bored next weekend and looking for some fun and a little brush with the wild side, head off to Roswell in New Mexico.

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