Original subtitles

In June 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed northwest of Roswell, New

Mexico.

What precisely some probably superior being was doing, piloting a probably

expensive spacecraft over a remote, though cynically notable portion of a

probably a good number of light years away from its home world, is something

this movie is about.

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

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

having forgotten that there's all this stuff he was supposed to remember.

Amnesia is what brings me to New Mexico.

To 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 UFO 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

whether it was a weather balloon or a spy satellite.

or some secret CIA mind experiment.

But really, that's not all that important.

The real enigma here is why that UFO pilot was flying around Roswell in the

first place.

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

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?

did have something to do with high technology in the 21st century disguised

row after row of telephone poles.

I sometimes think that UFO 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 UFO.

The curator of the Enigma Museum didn't have much to say about my UFO 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.

And maybe a driver hopes his purposefulness behind the wheel will

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

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

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

of your own mortality.

UFOs and space aliens get a lot of bad press, which is pretty unfair.

After all, UFOs are just events that transform, not unlike volcanic eruptions

plate tectonics.

And the geography UFOs transform is in our heads or in our hearts.

UFOs can make an otherwise boring day really exciting or an otherwise ordinary

life suddenly extraordinary.

UFOs offer the possibility that even the most average or ordinary life could be

the subject of a TV mini -series.

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.

One day, time will make every road map in the known universe obsolete and

useless, and then we'll all get lost.

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

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.

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

in some violent updraft and drifted to that star boy's 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

See, on the road, it's easy to find yourself dreaming about home sweet home

backyard gardens and long summer afternoons chasing fireflies in the yard

warm smells drifting out kitchen windows.

All travelers are broken -hearted somehow, and they dream about a

address, maybe with the same strange consistency that homebodies dream about

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.

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.

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

Well, the next night in Las Cruces or Columbus or Truth or Consequences, I can

watch the second part of the 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.

But what I really wanted to write about was the movie Repo Man, and Miller

claims at one point that UFOs and time machines are really just the same thing,

and I think he might be right, the way UFOs fly into a life and take it out of

time, the way UFOs make ordinary people legendary and memorable and somehow

timeless.

It's like UFOs 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

crash.

Dear Secret Diary, out here among the small ruins that crumble along this

road to white sands, I think about the Starboy again, and how unfamiliar this

landscape must be.

How depressing to hide among the abandonment that reminds you of your

UFO and the dreams you had to abandon on board.

And I think how maybe the Starboy 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.

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

him stop caring about where he was going just long enough that he stopped going

anywhere at all.

But thoughts like these on this long, lost road make me sad.

So I force myself to imagine my star boy signaled the skies above Roswell and

caught another passing UFO and hitchhiked back out of time, back onto

highway. And he's okay now.

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 UFO, 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 time's trap, the fate of the missing person, is to find some

UFO and hop aboard and hope time doesn't figure out what we're up to before it

can conveniently decide to run out.