The UFO show

The last UFO event I attended was the 2017 Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Well-fed caucasian seniors were there in abundance, as they usually are, and most of them were men, as per usual also. With few exceptions, the usual presenters said the usual things, and during breaks, attendees browsed the usual vendor tables laden with magic crystals, alien bobble heads, and print-on-demand books.

The conference was just an excuse, though. My real destinations were Eureka Springs itself and, 40 miles west, Crystal Bridges in Bentonville. That’s the town where, tugged by the same strain of curiosity that I assume sells tickets to Hitler’s treehouse on the Obersalzberg, I also made a quick tour of the Walmart museum on Bentonville’s town square. It’s housed in the space where Sam Walton opened his first five & dime in 1962 and, like all the other stores there, faces a lovingly maintained Confederate war memorial.

Please note that lovingly maintained Confederate war memorials are invariably creepy. So was the Walmart museum. So, I feel sure, would be Kehlsteinhaus.

There’s an excellent coffee lab in Bentonville called Onyx and a restaurant adjacent to it called Pressroom where I enjoyed three perfect tacos and a bottle of cucumber water before walking the footpath down to Crystal Bridges. Say what we might about the Walton family’s obscene wealth – and there’s plenty to say – the museum of American art they built in Bentonville is world-class spectacular, a jewel. The Gilded Age had Carnegie and Rockefeller, End of Empire has the Waltons.

Back in Eureka Springs, I’d worked out a pretty sweet deal at The Joy Motel: $25/night for 7 nights prepaid cash, no maid service or television, no pet fee for Miss Katz. Now under new ownership, The Joy was nearly empty and sinking fast, but I loved it for its shabby chic informality and post-war pedigree. It was easy to imagine the generations of traveling salesmen who’d slept there, the paneled station wagons and Cadillac convertibles, the crew cuts, silk stockings, fedoras and filterless cigarettes. Downtown Eureka Springs is a short walk away, too, just as everything in that town is a short walk away from everything else. Short and steep.

Built on the side of a mountain, Eureka Springs owes its existence to the purportedly healing hot springs that flow beneath it. Health and restoration seekers flocked there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the bones of that legacy now support a thriving tourist trade. Vintage stone buildings rise to a formidable but not overwhelming height above narrow, winding streets, and scenic overlooks waylay the hardy pedestrian as he hikes from granite pillar to iron post.

Many of the locals in Eureka Springs are veterans of the Haight-Ashbury era, a less self-conscious version of Asheville’s hillbilly hipsters. They’re retired revolutionaries, as I think of them, calmed-down but not sold out, living lives of quiet inspiration. Take for example the meditation meetup I attended at the Heart of Many Ways “home for all faiths and spiritual paths.” It was typical of what can be had at little or no cost if one side-steps the beaten path of quaint candle shops and upscale restaurants.

Later this month, if all goes well, I’ll drive to Knoxville for day one of that city’s two-day AlienXPO. Its oogity-boogity marketing bodes ill, but several of the Saturday speakers look promising. And failing that, there’s always the Sunsphere for me to contemplate as it soars like a giant golden joystick above the remains of the 1982 World’s Fair.