The Annual Roswell UFO Festival

By Joel Berliner

The Roswell UFO Festival starts as a search for extraterrestrial life, abounds with tales of mystery and imagination, uncovers a number of historic, artistic and cultural treasures and ends up like an old-fashioned Fourth of July parade, with all the warmth and genuineness of a real Main Street America, with a saucer-eyed twist.

Held every year over the Fourth of July holiday, it invites you to explore the most credible watershed event in the pantheon of UFO encounters, and it lets you discover another, deeper side of Roswell's prominence among science and the arts, American history, folklore and the story of the Old West and the modern age.

It all began at 11:45 p.m. July 4, 1947, when two alien spacecraft were alleged to have crashed over sheep farms just north and west of Roswell. Ranchers who were on the scene were extremely specific about what they saw, and newspapers reported that aliens had been removed from the wreckage of "flying saucers." Twenty-four hours later the official account changed radically: The incident was just an errant weather balloon, evidence was spirited away, stories were changed, threats were made, and the events at Roswell were a forgotten occurrence until the publication in the early '80s of "The Roswell Incident," complete with tales of alien autopsies and government cover-ups. The town was quick to capitalize on the publicity once the story re-emerged, and Roswell soon became ground zero for the full range of intellectual and commercial interest in alien visitation, which makes for a pretty fascinating destination.

As it turns out, there are two UFO festivals, simultaneous and largely coexisting: one by the city of Roswell and one by the originator of the event, the Roswell UFO Museum.

Both have panel discussions and special events, with this last year the city event featuring a concert by members of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead doing a medley of Paul Kantner's science fiction musical epics; the UFO Museum featured acclaimed actor Malcolm McDowell, of "Clockwork Orange" fame and much else, answering questions at length in a spirited public forum.  

The fact that they are separate organizations and that their events overlap adds to the depth of offerings to explore when visiting Roswell and learning about the most notorious incident in modern times of alien visitation, how it came about and the incidental realities surrounding it.

The town itself is somewhat small, and the main activities are at the center of town, at Main and Second streets. This UFO Museum covers the wide ground of alien encounters, with extremely specific exhibits detailing every aspect of the Roswell Incident, from the crashes to the alien autopsies, military interference and threats, governmental cover-ups, disappearing nurses and the subsequent transfers of spacecraft and alien remains to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and then to Area 51 in Nevada.

Additional exhibits chart a string of alien encounters, alien abductions and a particularly interesting Mayan exhibit showing the ancient influence of alien visitation on art and hieroglyphics. To add spice, there is a recreation of the alien autopsy. Nestled on the streets around the UFO Museum are bookstores with publications on every conceivable aspect of UFO encounters and many T-shirt and souvenir shops, all amid a certain small-town quietude that bursts into activity with each UFO Festival. 

The official town festival is at the Roswell Convention Center about a mile away. There, the branding of Roswell is in full swing, and close to a hundred kiosks inside the hall extol the likes of accounts of alien abduction, entertainment personalities with histories of science-fiction film projects, and the Virgin Galactic exhibit promoting the new age of commercial civilian travel into suborbital space from the Virgin Galactic Spaceport at Truth or Consequences, 100 miles away. 

It is festive and well attended. Multiple food trucks provide sustenance (including the first-rate Bears Barbecue) and there are music and tongue-in-cheek alien costume contests. Lectures take place in the Roswell Museum and Art Center next door, and daily laser shows with space themes take place in the Goddard Planetarium.

It is at that museum next door that another aspect of Roswell unfolds, for Roswell has long been an artists' community, and the Roswell Museum holds an impressive collection of modern and period artists far out of proportion to its setting and location. Rooms with a serious collection of significant art and sculpture by artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Henriette Wyeth make this museum a joy to discover. The American Indian artifacts exhibit is equally fantastic, very detailed and beautifully organized. More than just a collection of costumes and weapons, it explains the life of the local Indian cultures and displays hundreds of artifacts, headdresses and historic objects to bring Native American culture to life.

The most impressive aspect of the museum, even more than the fabulous art, is Robert Goddard's rocketry garage and workshop reconstructed in its entirety, exactly as it looked, as well as an exhibit of the evolution of his rockets and the history of his scientific journey to greatness.

It is not well known that Goddard came to Roswell in the 1920s with a $25,000 grant from Charles Lindbergh to continue his studies in rocket science after being expelled from Boston for burning down a field, and he chose Roswell for its wide-open spaces and subsequent ability to proceed unobstructed. To wander through his original laboratory and see the rockets he built, by hand, is to discover a chapter of American history whose consequences and benefits we enjoy to this day.

When you add the confluences of Goddard, Los Alamos, Trinity and the Roswell Incident, as well as the SETI radio telescope project just west of the White Sands Missile Range (an official agency looking for radio signals from extraterrestrial life in the universe), we see a pattern of significance that careens from the historical to the astronomical to the surreal and back.

We are guided through the museum by dedicated docent and local scholar Andrew Cecil, whose 70 years in Roswell are a mark of the character and decency of the old-timers. He knows every aspect of each significant work of art, including detailed and fascinating lectures on a collection of modernist art with Indian themes. His knowledge of New Mexico history brings it to life. When we come around to discussing the Roswell Incident, he grows quiet, measuring his words and repeating what other old-timers told me many times during my visit. He knew the people involved, knew their families, and they weren't the type of people to make things up or create a hoax or seek publicity or make fools of themselves.

We take a tour of the important UFO-related locations with Roswell Tours, visiting the hangar where the spacecraft wreckage was taken at the old Air Force base that was once the home of America's first strategic (nuclear) bomber command, but also going past the nearby farm of Kentucky Derby winner Mine that Bird, and visiting the New Mexico Military Institute, a lovely prep school with distinctive castle walled architecture, where Roger Staubach attended high school and gained his first taste of football stardom before making the Dallas Cowboys "America's team."

On the Fourth of July the Roswell UFO festival reaches a climax with the alien costume contest and the Fourth of July parade. Many people in the crowd dress as aliens as well. Alien costume contest winners, floats and antique cars carrying distinguished guests move slowly along the street past throngs of visitors and local residents.

Even this doesn't encompass everything there is to explore about the Roswell area. Carlsbad Caverns is 100 miles south. The hill country west of Roswell holds a series of quaint towns, including Lincoln, where Billy the Kid made his home. When you add that on top of the Trinity test site, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport, the White Sands Missile Range, the Roswell Museum, the historic presence of Robert Goddard and the cultural impact of the Roswell Incident, you have a fascinating and compelling event in a lovely town.

The Birth of Our Universe

 By Michio Kaku

Up until just a few hundred years ago most people thought that the Universe was a stable, static place that had been here forever and would continue forever. Today we know that nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we know that the Universe is a violent and continually changing place that was born in a mere nanosecond of time in the spectacular event we call the Big Bang. You may have heard the Big Bang referred to as the mother of all explosions but it wasn’t an explosion so much as an expansion. From a space that was infinitely small, the entire Universe expanded and continues even to this day -13.7 billion years later.

Lots of people wonder how we even arrived at that number and how we originally calculated the age of the Universe in the first place. It started with some educated guesswork and later got refined through some sophisticated technologies. A remarkable astronomer, Edwin Hubble was really one of the very first to make a reliable calculation of the age of the Universe. When Hubble was at Mount Wilson in the 1920’s, astronomers still believed that the Universe was static and not moving. But when Hubble looked at the very distant galaxies through a large new telescope, he began to notice that light was a bit distorted. The yellow galaxies appeared to be slightly redish and he wondered if the color change might be due to something called the Doppler effect. According to Wikipedia, the Doppler effect is commonly heard when a vehicle sound a siren or horn approaches, passes and then recedes from an observer. The same Doppler effect happens with starlight which becomes distorted and changes color. Hubble was then able to estimate the distance to certain stars and soon realized that they were receding and moving away from us. This meant that the Universe wasn’t static at all and was in fact actually expanding and had been for billions of years. Hubble’s work was a monumental discovery and changed everyone’s view on the way they looked at the Universe.

As hard as this is to fathom, at the very beginning, just at the instant of the Big Bang, the entire universe was infinitely smaller than an atom and we call this infinitely tiny point a singularity. This also raises the question of what was going on before the Big Bang. The problem we have is that standard mathematics just don’t apply before the Big Bang. There are of course beautiful animations of what we think may have happened during this bang but the fact is that the explosion took place in a time that is so short that it simply cannot be comprehended. The Universe expanded not into space but as space. In other words, matter did not simply explode but space expanded. It grew from a dot infinitely smaller than an atom to an area billions of light years across in a mere fraction of a second.

The Big Bang expanded as it cooled and as it cooled different kinds of matter began to condense out. For example, atoms began to condense about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. We still have lots of questions and there is still lots to learn but machines like the Large Hadron Collider are bringing us closer than ever before. With every successful experiment - we are closer to understanding the birth of our Universe.  

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Do We Really Need Nutritional Supplements?

There is no simple answer to this question. The common belief is that people who are healthy, exercise regularly, eat nutritious food, do not smoke or abuse alcohol, do not need any supplementation. It is believed that their daily nutritional needs are met and there is no need for additional supplementation. Another line of thought, however, advocates the need of supplementation independently of the lifestyle and nutritional preferences. Some of the writers and researches, especially in the field of gerontology and aging, as well as the specialists in orthomolecular medicine* take nutritional supplementation one step further. They suggest that so called aggressive supplementation combined with healthy diet is the only way to deliver optimal amounts of nutrients. The doses of nutrients often exceed the generally accepted daily allowances and supplementation goes beyond the regular multivitamin and mineral formulas.

Are we malnourished?

In order to function optimally we need nutrients that constitute the building blocks of our bodies and sustain all the processes that keep us alive. A well balanced diet consisting of nutritious foods is the most important way to deliver all the nutrients that we require to stay healthy and fit. Unfortunately, many people do not receive the minimum dietary requirement with the foods they consume on daily basis. They become malnourished. Long-term nutritional deficiencies have adverse consequences on their health and may be the cause of serious chronic ailments.

There are many reasons why the food we consume daily may not provide us with all the nutrients we need to stay healthy and energetic. An average person does not receive the suggested RDA amount of nutrients from food. Nutritional value of fruit and vegetable depends on the soil on which they grow. Due to commercial farming practices the soil is often depleted of its mineral content. Harvest, transportation, and food processing may be responsible for some loss of nutrients as well. Very often the produce is harvested in an unripe state and transported over long distances. Such practices are responsible for the diminished nutrient content in our produce. Nutritional value of commercially raised animals, commercially produced eggs and dairy differs from the values that were measured only fifty years ago, but our nutritional needs may have increased over the years due to pollution and the stressful lifestyles we are leading.

What are nutritional supplements?

Nutritional supplements are preparations intended to deliver nutrients such as vitamins and minerals. They can come in form of tablets, capsules, powder, or in a liquid form and are to be ingested. They are meant to replenish what is missing in one's diet and are either considered to be foods or drugs depending on the regulations of a particular country. The dosage of nutrients vary from preparation to preparation and while some offer a minimum necessary for the overall well being, other offer mega-doses that exceed the daily RDA allowance. There are also supplements containing nutrients for which there is no established daily dose.

What is RDA?

RDA or Recommended Dietary Allowance is the amount of certain nutrients that a healthy individual should consume daily in order to maintain good health and decrease the risk of developing chronic disease. There are allowances for vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and fiber. The individual need for nutrients may vary greatly depending on age, gender, personal disease history, and lifestyle factors such as veganism, medication, alcoholism, drug abuse, or smoking.

How to choose the right nutritional supplement?

Choosing a nutritional supplement may be very difficult unless we know what our needs and deficiencies are. Most of the commonly available and inexpensive nutritional supplements contain synthetically manufactured nutrients. They contain fillers and artificial coloring and may be full of allergens. The more expensive, state of the art nutritional supplements are made of extracts derived from plants and provide nutrients in higher concentrations. Nutrients that come together with their co-factors are more bio-available and effective. Such supplements are formulated for maximum absorption and use the pharmaceutical grade active nutritional ingredients. They do not contain allergens such as lactose, soy, yeast, or gluten, and are free of toxic contaminants.

The most commonly used caking agents, fillers, or flow agents such as magnesium stearate often interfere with the nutrient absorption making the low-dose supplements inefficient if not completely useless. Magnesium stearate, for instance, not only decreases absorption of nutrients, it may also be toxic and is suspected of suppressing the immune system. However, finding nutritional supplements that are free of magnesium stearate is not very easy as even the best ones on the market contain this agent which is made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil and commonly used as a flow agent to facilitate the manufacturing process.

If you decide to use a nutritional supplements, it is often best to consult a certified health care professional. If you have an existing medical condition or a medical history, it may be necessary to perform blood tests in order to find out your deficiencies or contra-indications. Take particular care when purchasing your supplement that you know and understand any added ingredient and its toxicity or allergenic potential. You do not want to take anything that may cause adverse reactions. Moreover, it is important to know whether your supplement interacts with any medication you are currently taking.

Conclusion

Supplements are very useful and necessary to alleviate any nutritional deficiencies, but they should never be taken in place of proper nutrition. Active lifestyle and healthy eating habits are absolutely necessary for optimal health. But unless we grow, harvest, and prepare our food ourselves, we must be aware that our nutritional needs may not be met on daily basis. High quality supplements may have be taken additionally to enhance our well being and deliver what is missing on our plates. The natural aging process is also responsible for some nutrient deficiencies. As we age, we may not be able to metabolize and absorb all the nutrients that we need. Supplementation can help us maintain the equilibrium and slow down the degenerative processes. As Dr. Linus Pauling postulated in 1960, "Optimum nutrition and correct nutritional supplementation is the medicine of tomorrow." Today this statement is more relevant than ever.

By Dominique Allmon

*Orthomolecular medicine is a complementary therapy form that seeks to prevent or treat diseases with high doses of nutrients that are either taken as dietary supplements or in form of food. The phrase was coined by Dr. Linus Pauling 

*This information is for educational purposes only and is not meant to diagnose, treat or cure a disease. Please, consult your health care provider before commencing any supplementation as herbs and vitamins may interfere with prescription drugs.

Do We Really Need Nutritional Supplements? by Dominique Allmon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.