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Desert Motorcycle Ride

Winslow Meteor Crater Motorcycle Ride (My Daughter, The Alien – Part 1)

Well, you’d assume this would be a dull subject and that my daughter’s heritage would be pretty much the same as mine and you probably don’t give a rat’s ass about that. And you are assuming that this topic has little or nothing to do with motorcycles, but you would be very unobservant and quite wrong in these assumptions. Here’s why. For about 12 years after my daughter Bailey was born, I never suspected her heritage was anything but the same as mine, but during her teenage years I became convinced that her heritage and mine differed significantly. There was something other-worldly, extraterrestrial and twilight zoney about her.

Anyone raising a teenage female stays up nights trying to figure out where this mentally morphing creature that used to be their daughter has come from. To shield themselves from responsibility for this monster, most men blame the milk man or the plumber, a throw-back Neanderthal gene or perhaps a connection to the Salem witches. Women seem more resigned to teenage female behavior because most of them were that way themselves. Being a well-grounded engineer, I came to the conclusion that it was some extraterrestrial genetics at work.

When she was 16, Bailey came to me and asked if she could have blue hair. What? Blue hair? Nothing in my life had prepared me for considering a question even remotely this outrageous. Who other than perhaps an extraterrestrial would want blue hair? I explained to Bailey in broad terms that blue hair might alienate some people and in her current teenage female state she could use about all the friends she could find. The next day she had blue hair.

Alien Painting

Alien art at the UFO Museum, Roswell, NM

In all those teenage years, my attempts to communicate with Bailey in English seemed not to penetrate her brain at all which lead me to assume that she perhaps communicated in a non-terrestrial mode which involved a lot of eye rolling, violent hand gestures, outraged shouts, flaring nostrils, crying and various views of her back as she walked away. I never figured it out.

Teenage boys are mostly just normal. Maybe a little sports activity, some skate boarding, a little drinking or smoking and doing well enough at school to keep their parents off their case seem to get them by. Other than trying to deal with the female space creatures in their midst, teenage boys mostly just move on with their lives in a combination of oblivion, resignation and general self-interest.

Though this theory of my daughter’s extraterrestrial heritage had been cemented in my mind for many years, it wasn’t until 2013 that I was able to combine my motorcycle riding and tangential thought processes to launch a search for proof of my theory.

Desert Sunset

Acknowledging that I have a lot of theories about life that are real slim on proof, I oriented my mind for this tour with more care than I often do. I mapped out a route that took me through the pine forested and desert parts of Arizona and New Mexico with a loop up through southern Colorado. There were enough potential extraterrestrial contact places along that route to prove or disprove my theory.

Two days before my departure, I monstrously sprained my left wrist in a bad fall while escaping a swarm of bees and tripping backwards over a sand bag I had placed there only a few minutes earlier. Wish it were something more heroic or interesting, but that was what went down. The injury put that wrist on injured reserve, rendering it almost unusable for holding a motorcycle handlebar or pulling in the clutch for gear shifts, both near constant and unequivocal requirements of riding. But I was on a mission to uncover my daughter’s teenage alien heritage and I would ride one handed as often as possible and let the pain keep me focused. I fired up the Road Glide and headed out across the southern California desert and into Arizona on a hot late May evening.

Oh man, riding at night in the desert is way up there on the riding pleasure scale, even on an interstate highway. It’s still around 100 degrees, but no sun is beating on you and no wind, just the slowly declining heat in the darkening, still desert. I didn’t mind sharing the peaceful highway with some other cars and trucks riding those wide lanes stretching themselves across the open desert. I rolled at about 75, a spectacular southwest sunset violently coloring the sky in my mirrors.

My first destination was the Winslow Meteor Crater out on I-40 near Winslow, Arizona, location of The Eagle’s song Take It Easy. I was thinking that I might find some old foot prints or other evidence of an alien invader who surfed down out of the universe on that meteor to establish a beachhead on this planet from where they could start messing with human minds. Finding that the meteor had inconveniently landed a full 6 miles from I-40, I sucked up the additional painful gear shifts and rode stoically out to the monument.

Winslow Meteor Crater

A boxed in picture does not do justice to a mile wide meteor crater. The crater is slowly filling in from erosion and those white things at the bottom are research buildings. I did learn some interesting facts about this event.

1) The impact happened while mammoths, giant sloths and other large mammals were wandering that area which was a lot grassier than the stark desert it is now.

2) The 150 foot wide piece of metal (half a football field), traveling at 40,000 MPH whammed into the earth to create a nearly mile wide crater, probably causing a massive outbreak of frightened mammoth and giant sloth bowel evacuation.

3) At 40,000 MPH, if the meteor had flown over Paris, it would have been spotted in New York 5 minutes later and 3 minutes after that it would have slammed into the Arizona desert.

4) This metallic meteor lost only 1% of its mass traveling through our atmosphere. Most of it liquefied at impact and small spheres of the metal have been detected nearly a half mile deep into the rock which fractured beneath the crater.

Winslow Meteor Crater Metallic Meteor

This is the largest piece of the meteor that was found. It weighs 1100 lbs. After surviving a 40,000 MPH crash into the earth the museum people don’t worry that human touch is going to hurt it much and at that weight, nobody is going to run off with it.

Alas, I had found no evidence of alien arrival here. Either they covered their tracks well or maybe they were all eaten by sabre tooth tigers who were tired of dodging big ivory to bring down those huge mammoths or it was just possible there were no aliens on this meteor. My wrist reminded me that the Road Glide was waiting for more riding and I headed back to I-40. The bike and I pointed east toward the exit for Chinle. Chinle is the home of the Navajo Tribal Headquarters and also the location of Canyon de Chelly, the beautiful red rock canyon formerly occupied by the ancient Anasazi people. I had heard there might be petroglyphs in the canyon which depicted gods or possibly aliens and that was the next logical destination in my search for Bailey’s extraterrestrial heritage.

Read more by Jefe, and check out his new book, Life, America, and the Road, A Biker’s Perspective on his website – or read the next part of Jefe’s adventure: Navajo Canyon De Chelly Motorcycle Ride (My Daughter, The Alien – Part 2).

About Jefe

Jefe Smith continues to ride across America, 140,000 miles in the past 12 years. His irreverent storytelling of road experiences, life experiences and the America he discovers can be accessed in his first book, LIFE, AMERICA and the ROAD A Biker's Perspective, which has been well received by the motorcycle community. The ebook is available in the Amazon Kindle Store and signed hard copies are available at www.jefestours.com. A second book, LIFE, AMERICA and the ROAD to KEY WEST A Biker's Perspective is due out in July of this year.

4 comments

  1. I thought terminal velocity would be 200-400 mph, not 40,000?

  2. Hey Gary: Valid thought. Here’s the difference. If your body drops out of a balloon or off a bridge, the friction from the air in our atmosphere will gradually limit the speed of your drop to about 200 mph. As you noted, that is called terminal velocity and it is plenty to splat you seriously when you hit dirt, concrete or water. Meteors zooming around in space can be running at far higher speeds – the earth itself is moving at about 66,000 mph around the sun. When most small meteors hit our atmosphere, their incredible speed and the friction of our atmosphere causes them to burn up in the “shooting stars” we see. The Winslow meteor was too big, too dense and too fast for the atmosphere to burn it up or slow it down much. It blasted straight through the atmosphere and hit the ground at about 40,000 mph. Imagine the force of that impact. Well, you can by looking at the size of the Winslow Crater. Jefe

  3. RT @YouMotorcycle: Winslow Meteor Crater Motorcycle Ride (My Daughter, The Alien – Part 1) https://t.co/awGIpBFSOE https://t.co/OxQOytoQpx

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