Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947: Did a flying saucer crash there? Were aliens, live and dead, found? Would you want your son to marry an alien? What was the government covering up? I know that I swore off conspiracy theories, but as the world’s most infamous TG investigative reporter I have a duty to publish the Truth about Roswell (which I discovered by accident). Why? Because my findings have Universal (or Cosmetic) implications for our understanding of gender.

Aliens near Roswell: A Cosmetic Conspiracy
By: Somer Knight

Petrified. That’s what I was. Petrified with fear at a small diner beside a dusty highway in the Arizona desert near the Petrified Forest. I was also stone cold drunk, which shouldn’t surprise my readers. They know that I have been on the run ever since my exposé of the ongoing Skull and Bones conspiracy to plant the US Presidency with Bushes — first George, then George W. and soon, all too soon, Georgina.

Accompanying me on my flight southward to Mexico (I knew that I would be perfectly safe once I reached a Mexican border town like Nuevo Laredo or Cuidad Juarez) was Carlotta, my transgendered Chinese lover — that is, until he woke up two days ago in a pool of blood in our bed from a severed horse’s head .

He freaked out, believing the Mafia were also after him, and wouldn’t accept my explanation that horsemeat is a real bargain in West Texas ranch country and that I hadn’t realized when I put the head on a shelf overhead to age that it was still dripping blood. Carlotta insisted that we alter our itinerary, heading north by northwest to Las Vegas. “That’s a famous family resort,” Carlotta said. “We’ll be far away from the Mafia there.”

Given my gambling problem, I should have known better than to take Carlotta to Vegas. After I lost him in a crap game at the Tropicana Hotel, I was truly alone for the first time since my trip to China (as reported in my story about the Fluorescent-Light Conspiracy). It’s no wonder that I panicked when I saw the Skull and Bones brazenly displayed on a sailing ship outside the Treasure Island Hotel. The conspiracy was closing in on me! So I hightailed it to Arizona.

I didn’t much like the people in the diner. The pear-shaped owner had a heavy French accent and a French name — Achille Poirot — yet insisted that he’s a Belgian. Did he take me for a fool? Everyone knows that the Belgians speak Dutch, sort of. His waitressing daughter, her name Baby Doll, turned me off when she said that while she couldn’t figure out my true sex that she was nonetheless willing to sell her body to me for the price of a car ride to Hollywood. The offer I thought insulting, inasmuch as she had to know that, having lost my auto to a one-arm bandit in Las Vegas, I was hitchhiking myself.

In any case, she seemed far more interested in the British toff drinking his tea in the corner booth beside the begrimed, picture-free window. He claimed to be an intellectual, a claim that I was willing to accede to him after I saw that he had a “drinking problem” — he talked so much that most of his tea ended up on his hair shirt and worsted trousers. He didn’t notice when Baby Doll each time patted him dry.

As for me, bored, ignored and frightened that the Bonesmen might show up at any moment to harvest my head for their collection at Yale (including the skulls of Geronimo, the Apache chief, and Pancho Villa, the bandit-revolutionary), I went outside to chat up Booz, the diner’s seventy-seven-year-old gas jockey.

I looked Booz over closely — from his sunken oil-smeared cheeks downward to his sunken, oil-stained cheeks (collapsing under the weight of heavyweight denim), I concluded that I would do whatever it took to persuade him to let me share his bedroom that night. I needed a hideout, and did not yet realize that he normally slept outside in an abandoned Chevy out back of the outhouse.

Booz at first had only two topics of conversation — the parching desert heat (it was, he opined, as hot as a whorehouse on dollar night) and his parched throat. Only after I shared my mickey of Australian Sherry (or Apera), the two of us romantically taking turns sucking on a plastic straw, did Booz change topics: “You know,” he said, “I was in Roswell, New Mexico when them aliens arrived in 1947. At the time I was an assistant gas jockey at a Phillips 66 station. You know — just starting out in my career. Since then I’ve worked my way up to BP, which they tell me, stands for “Beyond Petroleum.”

“Or ‘Best Polluters’ I muttered into the straw. Petrol-flecked bubbles appeared on the surface of the ‘sherry’. For the first time I noticed that the liquor had an oily taste, which shouldn’t have been quite so surprising to me, given that Booz had been using the straw to siphon oil from a crankcase. Now I understood how cheap booze got to be called ‘benzene’ in the Old West.

“In those days,” I asked, “did the aliens still arrive wearing white shirts and pants, a serape, and a sombrero with a two-foot brim? If they did, they must have been a lot easier to identify and to deport to Mexico than they now are. I mean, sombreros weren’t much worn in the USA back in 1947. Gosh, you must have been a mere infant way back then, Booz, given how young you look now.”

“Somer, I am mighty obliged to you for the compliment. I can see why so many men cotton to you. While I reckon some might me have called me a child in 1947 ‘cuz I was just fourteen-years-old, between hay and grass in height, and didn’t yet shave, I was already a man inasmuch I was working five days a week at the gas station and paying for my own chow and crib. In them days I well-nigh considered myself the biggest toad in the Roswell puddle.”

“You’re still quite a toad,” I thought — but kept to myself.

“As for them aliens, I reckon that you were joshing some when you asked if they were wearing sombreros. Little green men like Yoda in Star Wars wearing two-foot-wide sombreros? What horse feathers! You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you, Somer? You’re quite the comic, a regular I Love Lucy.”

I smiled and nodded, not wanting Booz to realize that I had indeed assumed that he was talking about illegal aliens from Mexico. But then I remembered reading in the Globe (one of the best-researched of the supermarket tabloids) that a space saucer once crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, killing its crew of little green humanoids.

“Somer, would you like to see the photographs I took with my Kodak after I snuck into the Roswell funeral parlor where they embalmed the dead space aliens? I’ll fetch them if you find another bottle of hooch for us to empty.”

As I had a full bottle of Winnemucca pink Chablis wine in my purse, and the desert sun still beat down on my head like a migraine, I readily accepted the deal. Maybe I was onto a lead to my next story.

However, after Booz returned, it didn’t take me long to wonder whether it was a mistake to share my last bottle of liquor with the grizzled, guzzling gasoline-pumper. There was something about the first three photos he showed me that caused me to doubt that he had taken them at a funeral parlor in Roswell, New Mexico more than sixty years ago:

Sure, the first photo might, as Booz claimed, come from the casket room of the funeral parlor (although I did immediately wonder whether a small-town undertaker could afford to stock that many coffins). And the second could have been used for at least one of the aliens. After all, our government was bound to bury him in an impressive casket, given that he had been probably the saucer’s commander (since his pajama top had been the same color as Captain James T. Kirk’s of the U.S.S. Enterprise). And it was conceivable that the third photograph did show an alien corpse in a cheap, open casket, as Booz said.

Yet there was something vaguely unsettling about the pictures. First of all, the alien in the coffin didn’t have green-colored skin, but I didn’t consider that finding conclusive, since aliens might be like lobsters and change color when they die.

But, my suspicions raised, I knew I had to examine the photos more closely. Fortunately, I always carry my official “Junior Sherlock” magnifying glass in my handbag. With the help of this remarkable investigative tool, I eventually confirmed that Booz was misrepresenting the photos as his own; they clearly came from “Fotoseach”. When he admitted that the pictures didn’t come from his own his website, I had enough information to force him to admit that he had been trying to bamboozle me.

“I wanted to see how gullible you were,” Booz said, after spilling the last of the summer wine on the left shoe. (He had been checking whether any Chablis remained in the bottle, and it turned out that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was — he had overlooked the last few drops, and they went to waste.)

“You’ve picked the wrong reporter to string along,” I replied with maximum hauteur. “Thanks to more than a year spent in checking out conspiracy theories I’ve learned how to sniff out fraud. Your fakes will never show up in a story of mine.”

At this point I was tempted to turn my back on the rapscallion and seek better company inside the diner. But it had become even more deserted now that it was serving only coffee, tea and desserts, the dinner hour having ended. Besides, Booz knew where to buy some bootleg tequila (made, he said, from local potatoes) if I had five dollars to spare.

Well, I did, and as I was still hoping to spend the night at his place (to reduce the risk of being found alone, asleep and vulnerable by the Bonesmen), I sent him off to find some liquor in a section of Arizona where the only buildings for miles around were the café, which lacked a liquor license, the shack beside it which the proprietor of the café and gas pumps called home, and a stand-alone outhouse.

He walked bold as brass into the café, asked for “takeout”, and five minutes returned with a brown paper bag holding a bottle of homemade tequila. After a few energetic swigs of it, Booz reckoned he was finally willing to trust me with the “real snapshots” he’d had taken in Roswell “back when New Mexico was still new.”

Hoping he’d leave the bottle with me, I encouraged him to leave the bottle behind while he fetched the pictures from his “bunkhouse”; but he took it with him. He returned with an empty bottle.

By this point, Booz was passing-out drunk. Wordlessly he handed me two snapshots, and then fell face first into the dirt. After scooping the dust out of his nostrils, I was able to verify with my compact mirror that he was still breathing. But before I could look at the photos, I had to fill the gas tank of a passing motorist. While I would have preferred the driver to take me far away from the Petrified Forest, I settled for his taking me behind a flowering cactus bush. Even though I had obliged him with mine, the bum drove off without me!

Only after that cop had sped off in a cloud of dust, his lights flashing and siren wailing, did I have an opportunity to examine the photos. The first two proved nothing, as I knew that Booz hadn’t taken them. Instead, they were the much debunked “Roswell alien autopsy photos” that someone concocted three decades after the alleged crash landings. Just look at them:

The fakery is obvious. First, the so-called aliens don’t have any life force in them. Indeed, they are so lifeless they might as well be dead. Second, they are gray where everyone knows that real aliens are green. If, and it’s a big if, aliens did crash-land near Roswell, New Mexico, these are not their autopsy pictures. Someone created them as a red herring, or to be more accurate, as a black-and-white herring. These photos stink of chicanery.

The third photo was more convincingly fabricated inasmuch as it correctly depicted the alien as green and frog-like. My brain half-baked by the desert sun, my eyeballs wrinkling in the dry heat, it took me more than half-an-hour to determine that it too was a fake.

I imagine that most of my readers have already detected its two key flaws: the lack of pointed, Spock-like ears (another given for any alien likely to visit Earth) or eyes in the eye sockets. As I said, I was laboring under difficult conditions or I wouldn’t have given this photograph a second look.

The fourth picture was quite another matter. The space alien this time was definitely lifelike, and its skin color, size and ears were perfect. Its eyes even had irises! A pencil

scribble on the back of the snapshot gave the creature’s name as Minime. Mi — ni — me: just say the syllables slowly, lingering over the exotic sounds, and one just knows that this was the sort of name a space alien will surely possess.

After I had awoken Booz and jogged his memory with homemade grog (obligingly sold to me on a “takeout” basis by the café), he confirmed that I had successfully evaded the traps he had set me. Yes, the first three pictures were Internet fakes, but the fourth was an actual photo he had taken of an alien he had encountered alive at the Roswell mortuary in 1947. It was, he claimed, the only genuine photograph of a genuine space creature. That is to say, he had seen a film of this creature in a spacesuit floating in Outer Space.

Did he make a copy of the film? Did he have it now?

Booz shook his head; then he collapsed like a burned building onto a nest of fire ants. An heroic son of the Old West, he uttered not a word — not a single complaint — as the ants turned his brown leathery skin a flaming red from their ferocious bites.

A dudette, I wasn’t as tough as Booz. When one of the ants finally reached me, I ran as fast as I could away from the gas pumps as my pumps could take me; in my panic I dragged the stoic Westerner with me (the spurs on my shoes having accidentally snagged a pocket of his jeans). Once again, not a peep of complaint from him — even when we broke through a patch of prickly pear cacti.

By the time I had run twice around the café, the sun had finally set behind the outhouse. I began to shiver — From the sudden drop in temperature? From dread of the Bonesmen? Whichever, I desperately wanted to find Booz’s digs so that I could bed down for the night. Fortunately, the chill air, or the noise of my chattering teeth or the hard slaps I delivered to each of his four cheeks, Booz revived long enough to say that he slept in the abandoned Chevy.

At dawn on the morning after, I was not in a good mood. Booz had been useless. If the car hadn’t had a stick shift, I don’t think my nerves would ever have settled sufficiently for me to get to sleep. And his snoring had been loud enough to attract a host of dangerous critters, some of which stared at me through the cracked windshield, the rest of which slithered through the rust holes in the doors. Worst of all, his snoring had drawn the vilest of critters — a Bonesman — to our sleeping place. How did I know? He had drawn his calling card in the dust on the hood:

What does 322 mean to Skull and Bones? I don’t know. Why was I still alive? I don’t know. I suppose the Bonesmen were waiting to catch me alone in a more isolated place.

No longer petrified with fear, I lit out of the Petrified Forest as soon as I had made myself sufficiently beautiful to hitch a ride. Shortly after noon, I walked down the dusty road to the highway where I stuck out my nylon-clad leg, real lady-like, just like Claudette Colbert did in It Happened One Night.

After two cars had brushed me back and a third had run over my big toe, I stepped well back from Interstate 40. (Controlled-access, four-lane highways are not the hitchhiker’s friend!) I stuck out my thumb from the breakdown lane and before you know it … two hours had passed.

Fortunately, Booz kept me company; I was understandably relieved to have him affirm while half-sober what he had declaimed while thoroughly drunk — namely, that he personally had taken the photo of the alien known as Minime in Roswell in July 1947.

The news excited me. It meant that at least one of the aliens had survived the crash of their flying saucer, which in turn meant that this picture —

might be authentic despite the fact that the “alien” (the creature on the lower left) isn’t green. Possibly the picture was taken at nightfall, which might have washed out the alien’s vivid skin tone.

In any case, I was now sufficiently convinced that aliens had indeed landed somewhere near Roswell in 1947 that I decided to head there even though the town’s proximity to the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain of Texas and New Mexico, made me wonder whether I was tempting fate by wandering around the lightly populated Great Western Desert. Might my own severed head end up on a stake, planted in the desert soil by Bonesmen as a scarecrow to safeguard their budding conspiracies?

Before such morbid thoughts could entirely undo my resolve to look for evidence and descendants of an alien landing, Sid, the owner of the diner, agreed to give me a lift to the nearest town. At first he had been reluctant, but after I promised not to make a pass at him, he drove me to Holbrook, Arizona, where I could catch a Greyhound express bus for Roswell.

Thirty-six stops later, I found myself at the Roswell Bus Station a block from North Main Street and, of prime importance, only a mile and a half from the Spring River Park and Zoo. On a hunch, I headed there first; where better to hide a space alien than in a baboon enclosure? Would anyone notice?

At Roswell’s zoo I found a prairie dog town, miniature horses, pigmy goats, and a miniature train — but no baboons. The reporter in me did, however, begin to sniff out a story. Why were the creatures and exhibits so small? Was it to entertain the aliens? After all, they’ve often been depicted as child-sized (like E.T.) — and green.

Convinced that I was on the right track. I headed over to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. While I didn’t expect it to display a stuffed alien, I was disappointed to find mostly a bunch of newspaper clippings and pictures. I didn’t expect these to reveal the truth. After all, the UFO Museum seemed to be peddling the myth that all of the aliens quickly died and were subjected to an autopsy; and I, thanks to Booz, I knew better. I thought it appropriate that the building had been a movie theater since it had so much in common with Hollywood mythmaking.

It was quite a trek back to my rental Smart car (since the parking lot nearest the museum was reserved for Unidentified Flying Objects) and while I trudged along in the searing heat, I resolved to spend the night in Gold Crown, the settlement closest to the crash site of the alleged UFO. (It’s been called the Roswell Incident because the wreckage and bodies, if any, were brought to a military base at Roswell. I’ve changed the name of the village to protect the innocent.) I was finding Roswell, population 45,000 a bit dull, and after so many nights in the desert I was looking for some entertainment; so off I headed to Gold Crown. (See map.)

I hadn’t done my research: a foolish mistake for an investigative reporter. It turned out that Gold Crown, a village with less than 170 people, was even quieter than Roswell. It had a post office, a couple of gas stations and cafés and some houses — but no place for a traveling reporter to stay overnight that I could see. Was it going to be another night sleeping in a car?

I pulled up my car in front of the Corral Café, tied the Smart car to the hitching post (as I was afraid that someone might otherwise carry it off), and in I went looking for food and gossip. I found both at the counter, served up in large dollops by Maria Isabella, the world-weary Polish-American waitress.

“You’re not from here, are you?” she said with a thick Portuguese accent.

I wondered which had given me away — my stylish clothes (bought in the finest women’s wear store in Stillwater, Minnesota) or my flair with a soup spoon. But before I could inquire, Maria Isabella asked, “What brings you to Gold Crown? We don’t see many strangers here. The UFO crowd don’t generally leave Roswell. Are you one of them, even so?”

“Yes,” I replied; “but with this vital difference — I am an investigative reporter. As such, I am uninterested in whether or not aliens from Outer Space visited these parts sixty-three years ago. Does it really matter whether we’re not alone in the Universe? So a handful of aliens tried to enter this country illegally in 1947; is that anywhere near as important as thousands of them crossing into New Mexico every night in the year 2010? I’m a reporter, not a historian. I’m only interested in space creatures if I can be the first to interview them. I want a scoop.” (In fact, I desperately needed a scoop, as it might bring me the notoriety required to make me too well-known for the Bonesmen to kill with impunity.)

“So you want to talk to a critter from Outer Space? Aren’t you afraid it might eat you?”

I shook my head resolutely.

“Ain’t you the brave one?” Maria Isabella said. “Well, the closest thing we’ve got to a space alien in this town is Mavis Hoffman. She lives only a block away — you won’t be missing the yellow shutters. Not only will you find her interesting to interview — or, judging from the width of your shoulders and size of your hands — you might even find in her a soul mate. Leastwise, she has an extra bed that she rents out to travelers like you. There aren’t many other options in the village.”

The house with the yellow shutters was easy enough to find. And when I found Mavis, I felt like I’d struck gold. Although not normally attracted to older women, I fell for her at first sight. But who wouldn’t? I’ve included here a snapshot I took of her in her living room (painted yellow like the shutters).

She too had broad shoulders and big hands, as well as a five o’clock shadow. Yes, she too was born a male, but had done a better job than I of transitioning. I doubt that anyone in Gold Crown suspected that she was a “she-male”.

Recognizing a kindred spirit, Mavis welcomed me not only into her home, but also into her bed, where I discovered not only that my hostess remained a male in parts and also that, judging from her silvery armpits, auburn was not her natural hair color.

After she had climaxed inside me for a second time, Mavis began to relate the story of her life. She had been a normal teenaged boy, she said, in the summer of 1947 when, out bicycling, she had come across the man who was destined to be the love of her life. Short and green-colored, and lying bleeding in a ditch, he hadn’t made a good first impression. But when Mavis stooped down to check to see whether he was still alive, the little green man had forced a kiss on her — his long lizard tongue giving her the ultimate soul kiss.

As people grew up quickly where the little green man came from, he considered fifteen-years-old more than old enough for coupling. Not only did Mavis lose her virginity in that ditch (the little green man came equipped with an anal probe), but she also resolved to become both wife and husband to the little man.

“My lover was a she-male, as was everyone else in his species, and so I naturally became one too. Alas, unlike Cockney — that was my true love’s name — I was unable to give birth. When he did, I began to suspect that he came from …”

“Outer space,” I interjected.

“But how did you know? You are fast on the uptake, aren’t you? Well, I’m slower and, being an innocent adolescent at the time, it took until I actually saw our baby emerge from Cockney’s mouth that I realized that my lover didn’t come from this solar system. Not being a xenophobe, it never bothered me, however, that Cockney came from a galaxy far, far, away and that he had probably gone supernova even before we’d met.”

“Do you have a photo of Cockney for me to see?” I asked. I wanted a picture, not a thousand words from her.

“Here’s what my wife and husband looked like in his prime.”

“I know I have seen him somewhere before,” I blurted out. “But where? I’ve never been in New Mexico before. Did he travel widely?”

Mavis smiled: “Do you mean widely after he traveled 16  ½ light-years to get to this planet? No, once he got to New Mexico and married me he never left Lincoln County. He was quite the lounging-around lizard until he died ten years back.”

“Then why does he look so familiar?” I still wondered out loud.

“Well, out of all out children, our oldest son Chauncey looks the most like Cockney. He works for an auto insurance company. Possibly you’ve seen him making a pitch for them on television?”

“Do all your children look like … well, to put it bluntly, like toy lizards? Can I ask you, Mavis, is this by any chance a child of yours?” I handed her the picture I had ‘borrowed’ from Booz in the Petrified Forest —

“Why that’s our second son, Mini Morris. We named him after his place of conception. How did you come by this photo? Have you actually met him? Do you know where he’s now? Ever since his disastrous, heart-rending ménage á  trois with Mike Meyers and Beyoncé Knowles, I’ve lost contact with him.”

After I had suggested that Mavis contact Booz for more information, she produced the photos of the rest of her children — Sinead, Musgrave, Persis and Gene. “Don’t you think,” she asked, “that Gene also takes after Cockney? Look at that tongue!”

When I observed that Gene seemed to be the only one of her children not to inherit Cockney’s green skin, she laughed: “Gene, not green? She’s the most lizard-colored of all my children. She’s been fortunate to work in a rock band where she’s been able to wear makeup and several layers of clothes. Like Cockney and her siblings, Gene is as bald as a ping-pong ball underneath that frightful wig.”

I lay awake in Mavis’s bed long after she had fallen fast asleep. My mind was whirling, trying to take in the bewildering implications of what Mavis and Booz had told me: first, that an alien spacecraft had indeed crashed near Roswell in 1947 and that at least one of its lizard-like crew, Cockney by name and accent, had survived into old age while raising six green-skinned children in a town of less than two hundred inhabitants.

How could it be? Why had word never gotten out? It just didn’t seem possible. There was a missing link and I had to find it.

The next morning, after I had softened up Mavis by offering myself to her probe, I deemed her ready to answer the most difficult question I could conceive: “As I understand it, you and Cockney spent your entire married life here in Gold Crown, raising five green-skinned children, one of whom looked like exactly like his father — like a rubber lizard. How was that possible? Why didn’t the villagers go after you with torches and pitchforks?”

“Because Cockney persuaded me to go the Lincoln County School of Cosmetology. I’ve been a cosmetician, a makeup artist, since my teens. And a very good one, I might add.”

“Are you saying that you used your skill with cosmetics to disguise your spouse and children — to make them look 100 percent human?”

“Of course, that’s what I’m saying. There is no limit to what I can accomplish with lipstick, eyeliner, foundation, camouflage, blush, mascara and rubber prosthetics.”

As demonstration, she showed me official school photos for three of her children.

“I think I recognize them, I said. The small one on the left is Chauncey, right?”

Mavis nodded. “As he looked the most like his father, there was a limit to what I could accomplish. I gave him lifts to wear; even so, he has always been a dwarf by human standards. Still, no one in Gold Crown saw through his disguise. Now that he’s a successful huckster on television, he can at last remove the makeup and be himself.”

“You’re weren’t entirely successful in making over the child in the second picture either, were you? There is still a bit of the alien in him. That must be Gene.”

Mavis had a good belly laugh. “How did you guess? Yes, I wasn’t able to make Gene look 100 percent human. I guess that’s why he retreated emotionally into heavy metal during his teen years. That’s Musgrave in the third photograph. He always believed I didn’t get his eyes right — hence the eyeshades. I am very proud of Musgrave; he was the first of Cockney’s children to return to space.”

“Do you have a photo of Cockney in makeup? I’d like to see him as the villagers did.”

“Quite impressive,” I remarked. “You’ve completely eliminated the lizard in him. Still, I find it queer that that Gold Crown embraced such an odd-looking man and family. How do you account for the remarkable tolerance for difference that you found here? You grew up here. People must have known that you transitioned from one sex to another — or, more accurately, from a single one to both. Why were you able to stay?”

“To keep the elementary school going, that’s why. This town is lucky to add two inhabitants a decade, which means the school was set to close until me and my six kids came along. Of course, there was considerable prejudice against us, but it was a case of either embracing my odd-looking family or the village’s welcoming Mexicans and Negroes. Occasionally people here suspected that we too were people of color, but if forced to choose, Gold Crownings preferred green to black or brown. So they bit their tongue and looked the other way if one of the kids messed up his makeup. Kermit the Frog had it wrong: it’s relatively easy to be green — at least if you’re Church of the Nazarene in Gold Crown.”

“You regularly attended church?”

“Of course. I know how to fit into village life. Cockney, who brought with him something he called a Sorcerer’s Stone, gave more money to God than anyone else in southeast New Mexico. Cockney said it was the least he could do for his friendliest neighbor on his home planet.”

God a resident of a planet populated by talking lizards? There was no way I was going to ask a follow-up question. I suspected, however, that Cockney was namedropping to impress his spouse and had never met God — at least, while still alive.

“I reckon,” Mavis said, “that you also want to know why Cockney and his team came down to Earth. And why to rural New Mexico of all places? Why not to Washington or Moscow?”

Yes, not only did I want to know, I needed to know. Otherwise, I couldn’t see how I could get published. I hazarded, “Was it the nuclear test at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945? Did it alarm the leaders of his planet? Did they react to the blast by sending a peace mission or investigatory commission?”

“Somer, I thought you were mentally sharp, but you just asked a slew of dumb questions. Didn’t I tell you that Cockney’s planet is 16  ½ light years from here? That means he couldn’t possibly have been dispatched here in response to the nuclear bomb. There wasn’t time. According to Cockney, his mission owed to news of World War I. That news reached his planet in 1931, and they naturally had to send out a team to investigate whether the war, as had been predicted in 1877, destroyed the Earth. After a journey of 16  ½ years, his spacecraft reached this planet whereupon it soon crashed.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did the people on Cockney’s planet believe that the Earth would be destroyed in 1914? Whatever or whoever gave them that idea?”

“Why the Watch Tower Society, that’s who. It wasn’t until Cockney’s ship reached our solar system that its crew learned that the Society had changed its name to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931. What they did know was this — that the Watch Tower Society in 1877 prophesied the end of our world in 1914. This was such an unnerving concept to Cockney’s people — that there was a vindictive angry God who destroyed entire planets (a being most unlike the amiable neighbor that they knew) — that they felt duty-bound to investigate.”

“I see — Cockney came here to see if the Earth still existed because his home planet wanted to learn more about the nature of God. But if that’s the case, why did his spacecraft ever get close enough to Earth to crash into it? Why venture any closer than Mars or Venus?”

“Curiosity? Empathy? Or maybe lust. Cockney wasn’t in charge of the ship. So he’s not sure which of these overcame his captain, a spotted lizard named Hister. All Cockney knows for sure is that Hister became obsessed with visiting Las Vegas after hearing radio waves announcing the completion of the mafia-built Flamingo Hotel.”

“Huh, Vegas? What was its special attraction to space aliens?” As soon as I asked the question, I appreciated that it sounded a bit stupid. Vegas had allure to everyone who was at all different and who was more different than a sentient space alien who looked like a gecko?

Cockney replied that Hister had told the crew that the construction of the Flamingo meant that Las Vegas would become the destination for ‘girls who wanted to have fun.’ The town was undoubtedly attracting, he said, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, multisexuals, polysexuals, adulterers, the sexually promiscuous and permissive, the ‘just experimenting’ crowd, as well as zoophiles. (Captain Hister thought the last group especially likely to mate with his species.)

To put it as plainly as possible — After 16  ½ light years of forced sexual abstinence (for otherwise the spacecraft would have been overrun with child lizards), Hister wanted to give his crew ‘full liberty’ in Las Vegas. Or he simply wanted it for himself.

“Why didn’t the spaceship make it safely to Las Vegas?” I asked.

“Cockney told me that the crew made the mistake of consuming the last of their firewater (distilled, he said, from igneous rocks) when they entered the Earth’s atmosphere, with the unfortunate consequence that the spaceship’s helmsman had become blind drunk. He didn’t see the ground coming at him fast. Cockney was the sole survivor of the Roswell crash.”

Mavis sighed, then wept, from memory of Cockney’s unlikely survival, marriage and death.

We had sex to relieve her sadness. We both thought as hard as possible about Cockney as we coupled. Afterwards, I thought she was ready to answer the last question that occurred to me: “Do you have any idea why the US government and army covered up the crash between Roswell and Gold Crown and deny to this day that aliens ever visited the Earth?”

Mavis pulled herself upright before saying: “I don’t think the government and army ever learned that Cockney had been part of the crew. He got to Gold Crown unobserved — except by me. After that, no one blabbed about him. This is a close-lipped community. I doubt that anyone ever tells the “feds” anything about local goings-on. As for the rest of the story — as to why the government and army denied that an alien spacecraft had crashed near here, I think they didn’t want to reveal that the aliens that they found dead or dying were all she-males.”

“Why would that matter?” I asked.

“Think hard, Somer, as hard as you can make me. The United States in 1947 was still seriously uptight about sex. It was far more Puritanical than the Puritans ever were. Adultery, group sex and sodomy were still illegal, and transgenders existed only in pulp fiction. You had to slink furtively about New York City if you wanted to find even a ‘medical’ discussion of transsexuality. Town libraries weren’t going to contain that sort of ‘filth’. Even university libraries kept it in a cage under lock and key.”

“Yeah, I know. The only thing legal or acceptable was missionary sex between husband and wife — provided they only did it to have a baby. I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at …”

“Somer, now you understand, right? There was no way that the US government was ready in 1947 to admit that she-males not only existed, but that they had created a more advanced society than ours. Such a revelation would have led, the government feared, to sexual anarchy, gay marriage and communism.”

Admittedly, Mavis was merely speculating about the government’s motives. While she is obviously an expert on the thinking of space aliens, and has the best explanation so far as to why they visited our planet and crashed near Roswell, the thought processes of most government bureaucrats are ultimately unfathomable to Mavis and your intrepid reporter.

Nevertheless, I do urge the brotherhood of UFO Hunters to investigate whether there has been a conspiracy — yes, conspiracy, the word is appropriate — since 1947 to cover up the fact that there is at least one planet in the Universe where heterosexuality is not the norm. There is instead a planet far happier than ours more than sixteen light-years away where she-males rule and only one or two freaks lack the external sexual characteristics of both our sexes. And all can give birth.

I, alas, cannot go to Washington, D.C. to unravel the entire tapestry of conspiracy that U.S. authorities wove in 1947 (and on which they have been retying loose knots ever since).

Still on the run, I am heading off to Mexico — exactly where in that fair land of jumping beans I dare not say for fear of alerting the Bonesmen (and any other enemies my writings have aroused) — but I can confirm that I intend to investigate the rumored plot to bring the world to an end in 2012.

As I said, I do have to be ultra-secretive about my actual destination in Mexico, but if you’re not a Bonesman and you’re attracted to transgendered girls, do look me up — and down. I’m the girl (well, woman of a certain age, to be more accurate) you’ll find poking about the ruins with this symbol sewn on the seat of her shockingly brief shorts.

It’s Mayan for LAMAT and it means that I want to learn more about love. Doesn’t everyone? But studious as I am, I do have to work for a living, and I promise to keep you informed as to whether there are any conspiracies you should know about — not that I personally believe in conspiracy theories.

Post scriptum: Those who know their Nostradamus might appreciate that I have in passing revealed the true identity of Hister.