In June 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. What precisely some probably superior being was doing piloting a probably very expensive spacecraft over a remote, though cynically notable portion of a state probably a good number of light years away from its home world is something this movie is about. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dear secret diary, hi. This is Bill again. Having a secret diary sure is fun. Anyway, I got lost today, which I realized is a lot like having amnesia. See, it’s like you’ll pass all these road signs and landmarks and all this stuff you normally pass on the road. And you know this stuff is probably really important. But when you get amnesia, you just can’t say why it’s important anymore. It seems that people in movies who get amnesia always remember too much. Like they realize they’re amnesiacs. But it seems amnesia should encompass its own condition, right? So a real amnesiac forgets he’s forgotten anything, and he goes on with his life, having forgotten that there’s all this stuff he was supposed to remember. [WIND WHOOSHING] Amnesia is what brings me to New Mexico. See, I have a theory that what got that UFO pilot into the mess he got into back in ‘47 had something to do with forgetting where he was going or why he was going there or what he was doing going anywhere at all. Roswell, New Mexico is home to the U.F.O. Enigma Museum and Outer Limits Video shop. Most people think the enigmatic thing about the Roswell crash has something to do with the nature of the thing that smashed into that ranch northwest of town, whether it was a weather balloon or a spy satellite or some secret C.I.A. mind experiment. But, really, that’s not all that important. The real enigma here is why that U.F.O. pilot was flying around Roswell in the first place. [MUSIC PLAYING] What was he doing out here under the big blue yawn of the sky, flying over ranches and long, lonely highways and barbed wire fences? What brought a cosmic tourist out here of all places, and what brought him down? What made him crash up and screw up his vacation? And did it have something to do with the sorghum fields or the old grain elevators that sit idle by idle railroad tracks? [MUSIC PLAYING] Did it have something to do with high technology in the 21st century disguised as row after row of telephone poles? [MUSIC PLAYING] I sometimes think that U.F.O. wasn’t being piloted by a star man at all but by a boy, a star boy. And maybe he’d borrowed dad’s spaceship, and he was out joyriding through the cosmos. And who knows, maybe he got lost, and he was looking at a map. And that’s when he lost control and lost his U.F.O. [MUSIC PLAYING] The curator of the Enigma Museum didn’t have much to say about my U.F.O. theories, but he did agree to take my picture in front of the aliens. It was sort of creepy. Dear secret diary, driving is real purposeful what with the speed and the destinations and the itineraries. It’s mostly really straight ahead. [MUSIC PLAYING] And maybe a driver hopes his purposefulness behind the wheel will infect the world he travels through so that the world and the traveler are suddenly in sync. And I was thinking maybe there’s a more advanced species of travelers, namely time travelers, who find traveling so excellent and exciting because they start to convince themselves that time itself conspires with them and somehow time’s vast span had these time travelers in mind when it decided to lurch into motion. Then I was thinking somewhere in the universe, there’s probably postcards that say greetings from the future, wish you were here, which, if you think about it too long, begins to sound less like a friendly greeting and more like a reminder of your own mortality. [MUSIC PLAYING] U.F.O.s and space aliens get a lot of bad press, which is pretty unfair. After all, U.F.O.s are just events that transform, not unlike volcanic eruptions or plate tectonics. And the geography U.F.O.s transform is in our heads or in our hearts. [MUSIC PLAYING] U.F.O.s can make an otherwise boring day really exciting or an otherwise ordinary life suddenly extraordinary. U.F.O.s offer the possibility that even the most average or ordinary life could be the subject of a TV mini series. [MUSIC PLAYING] Time is the real enemy not space aliens. Time abducts our memories. It turns our brains into mush. It performs creepy experiments on our bodies. Time conspires to make us all amnesiacs. [WIND WHOOSHING] One day time will make every road map in the known universe obsolete and useless. And then we’ll all get lost. [WIND WHOOSHING] On the road to Corona, I remembered a really sad story. It was about a woman who lived on the New Mexico range during the pioneer days. And the story goes that this woman lived alone in some ranch house far from anyone and spent her days composing elaborate love letters, which on completion she would carry outside and set adrift on the interminable wind that blusters and blows over this land. [WIND WHOOSHING] Far-off cowboys would occasionally find her letters tangled in the scrub or caught on some barbed wire. But they never knew where the letters came from. So on the road to Corona, I began to think maybe one of these letters got caught in some violent updraft and drifted to that star boys far off world. And maybe the star boy went looking for this woman as lost in space as he was. There’s an irony to traveling, secret diary, contained in the traveler’s dreams. [MUSIC PLAYING] See, on the road, it’s easy to find yourself dreaming about home sweet home, and backyard gardens, and long summer afternoons chasing fireflies in the yard and warm smells drifting out kitchen windows. [MUSIC PLAYING] All travelers are broken hearted somehow, and they dream about a permanent address, maybe with the same strange consistency that homebodies dream about the open road. And maybe it’s because all traveling implies a destination someday, a dream house hidden in the ruins you pass along the back roads. [MUSIC PLAYING] The runes remind you that someday you might stop. They remind you that the legacy of this land is as much about stopping as it is about going. [MUSIC PLAYING] Did I ever mention how much I appreciate motel TV? It makes me feel connected no matter how far I drive because say I watch a show in Albuquerque one night and it’s to be continued, well, the next night in Las Cruces or Columbus or Truth or Consequences, I can watch the second part of this show and feel like there’s some element of continuity that ties my wandering together, even if it’s just the invisible continuity of television signals. [MUSIC PLAYING] But what I really wanted to write about was the movie “Repo Man,” and Miller claims at one point that refers and time machines are really just the same thing. And I think he might be right, the way U.F.O.s fly into a life and take it out of time, the way U.F.O.s make ordinary people legendary, and memorable, and somehow timeless. [U.F.O. WHIRRING] It’s like U.F.O.s can fly us so high that maybe we escape time’s gravitational field for just a moment. We can escape time’s gravity, which is always trying to pull us down and make us crash. Dear secret diary, out here among the small ruins that crumble along this lonely road to White Sands, I think about the star boy again and how unfamiliar this landscape must be, how depressing to hide among the abandonment that reminds you of your abandoned U.F.O. and the dreams you had to abandon on board. [MUSIC PLAYING] And I think how maybe the star boy was an amnesiac like me who hoped cruising off into space would help him remember if he’d really forgotten something, another life maybe or another person without whom his life was broken, and hobbled, and incomplete. And maybe it was the shock of finally remembering that distracted him for the split second it took to crash into that remote place on this remote planet. [MUSIC PLAYING] Or maybe after so many miles, it was the shock of recognizing his amnesia as something like a universal condition rather than a personal pathology that made him stop caring about where he was going just long enough that he stopped going anywhere at all. [MUSIC PLAYING] But thoughts like these on this long lost road make me sad. So I forced myself to imagine my star boy signal the skies above Roswell and caught another passing U.F.O. and hitchhiked back out of time, back onto the cosmic highway, and he’s OK now. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dear secret diary, I’ve been informed by reliable sources that an alien spacecraft is buried out here somewhere at White Sands underneath the tourists and the sand dunes, a technology so dangerous that it had to be lost. I suppose when I take off in some U.F.O., I’ll be considered a missing person, and my face will be printed on milk cartons all over America, which is so ironic since really the only way any of us can ever escape that fate, the fate of everyone caught in times trap, the fate of the missing person is to find some U.F.O. and hop aboard and hope time doesn’t figure out what we’re up to before it can conveniently decide to run out. [WIND WHOOSHING] [MUSIC PLAYING]