Nothing for You to Play Here... Move Along...

It was a Friday afternoon... A city council meeting was being held and outside in the quiet little out of the way town a few tractor trailers rumbled through the streets to the local landfill.

Unbeknown to the folks in the meeting, in a few days time they would be thrust into the middle of a strange situation.

As the next day came, so did more trucks. More and more trucks kept coming. The town youngsters were a buzz with stories of landfill diving and pawn shops reported a rash of Atari 2600 games being sold. Police took possession of the games thinking they might be stolen property and the town's city council went up in arms, as a company violated an agreement on the amount of waste to be dumped.

E.T. Trash Go Home...

A Quiet Little Town

A quote from Wikipedia:

Alamogordo is a city in Otero County, New Mexico, United States of America. The population was 35,582 at the 2000 census. The city name is a Spanish word meaning "fat cottonwood". It is the county seat of Otero County.GR6 Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range are two major military bases located near Alamogordo.

Alamogordo is located at 32 53 20N, 105 57 20W, which places it on the western flank of the Sacramento Mountains and on the eastern edge of the Tularosa Basin.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 50.1 km? (19.4 mi?), all land

The city also has a rich history of infamous events. A quote from Wikipedia:

History

Trinity Site: Site of the First Atomic Bomb

The very first atomic bomb in history was detonated at the Alamogordo Test Range on July 16, 1945. The site of the explosion, called Trinity Site, is located on property owned by the present-day White Sands Missile Range. This was the only nuclear test that took place at this location.

Col. John Paul Stapp, Fastest Man On Earth

On December 10, 1954 Colonel John Paul Stapp rode a rocket sled at Holloman AFB just outside Alamogordo that decelerated to zero from 632 miles per hour one and one-quarter seconds. His body experienced 46.2 time the force of gravity, in essence making him weight 6,800 pounds for that brief time. At the time he was leading an Air Force team investigating the effects on the body of high altitude ejection seats.

Grave of Ham, First Chimp in Space

Ham was the world's first astrochimp, trumpeted by the United States as "the first free creature in outer space". He blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 31, 1961, and traveled 155 miles in 16.5 minutes before splashing down safely in the Atlantic.

After Ham died in 1983 at age 27, his body was shipped west and was buried in the front lawn of the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, under the first slab of natural-tone concrete poured in Otero County.

Space Shuttle landing

In March 1982, Space Shuttle Columbia ended the third ever Shuttle mission, STS-3, by making the only landing to ever occur outside of California or Florida. The orbiter touched down at White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo.

One other point of interest, considering the cover-up and controversy that is the Atari Landfill... Alamogordo is just 50 miles away from Roswell NM, the location of the infamous "Roswell UFO Crash" of 1947. Some fringe conspiracy theorists place one of the crash sites very close to Alamogordo. However that is all speculation.

And Now...

You know the place... now onto the evidence!

Move Along to Part 3