My Strange New Mexico

The stories take place in the southwestern part of New Mexico—in the watery, sand-sifting darkness of Elephant Butte Reservoir—along the concrete base of Elephant Butte Dam.  The reservoir is large—sprawling up forty…

As of 2007, almost two million people live in New Mexico.  Almost 500,000 of these live in Albuquerque.  And more than 300,000 live in Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Rio Rancho,…

In the piney mountains and desert mesas of southcentral New Mexico, citizens of the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation still tell legends of an enormous and evil bird: Big Owl.  The Jicarilla Apaches, along the state’s…

Certainly, one of the most amazing things about being in New Mexico, about being alive, or about being anywhere, is that being, and being here, is even possible.  That people…

The view is of a rolling desert plain—shabby with yellow grass and sagebrush and radiant beneath a purple, cloudless sky.  Through this sky, a white, oval-shaped object plummets diagonally toward…

Over fifteen or so noiseless seconds, this intriguing footage plays out with no commentary, no captions, and no known filmmaker willing to take credit for it.  Where it really came from,…

It was October, 1997, and the second annual Australian International UFO Symposium had just begun, in the eastern Australia city of Brisbane.  There, writers gave lectures on the latest extraterrestrial news and theories,…

In 1998, Kevin Cole, of Carlsbad, New Mexico set a new world record for farthest spaghetti nasal ejection, by sending seven-and-a-half inches of noodle rocketing from his nose in a single…

If you were to ask most New Mexicans—or even most Americans—to name the most famously strange, most controversial, most wildly celebrated place in our entire state, chances are that the…

Exceeded in size only by Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana, New Mexico is America’s fifth largest state.  Within New Mexico’s more than 121,355 square miles could fit more than seventy-eight Rhode Islands,…