BEETLEMANIA; It's an Alien Thing. You Wouldn't Understand.(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Submitted for your approval: The fifth annual Roswell 2K Car Show for New Beetles. A simple get-together of New Beetle enthusiasts in the desert of the American Southwest. The same as a hundred other car events going on the same weekend all over the country and around the world. But nothing is ever simple and nothing is ever the same in... The Twilight Zone.

Doo doo doo doo. Doo doo doo doo.

Why, oh why had we thought this would be a good idea? First off, Roswell is nowhere near anything else. Look at a map. See that big empty part of New Mexico? Smack in the middle of that is Roswell. No matter how you slice it, Roswell is 200 miles from anything. And we're not talking big, metropolitan anything-we're talking Lubbock, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Roswell used to be known for... nothing. Okay, it has the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Robert Goddard Planetarium and Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, but that wasn't enough. To the outside world, it was a lunch stop on the way to the Carlsbad Caverns. Nearby towns up and down Highway 285 and across the flat, flat rangeland of southeastern New Mexico had the good sense to up and die years ago. Roswell might have been on the way to extinction itself until someone, we suspect it was the Roswell Chamber of Commerce, found some newspaper clippings from 1947 about a spaceship crash in the desert near, yes, Roswell.

Was there really "an incident'' out there on the wind-swept, burning wilderness? Had we been visited by beings from another planet? Was our government in fact holding those beings on life support back in Langley? Can you get a freaking life?

Regardless of the fact that THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS ALIEN SPACESHIPS HERE, the business of UFOs has transformed tiny Roswell, New Mexico. UFOs are like gold in them thar hills to Roswell, like free, legalized gambling and prostitution, like tax shelters for the idle rich. People are flocking.