Drag Illustrated Issue 137, October 2018 | Page 58
D.I. COLUMNIST
On the Road
with Van Abernethy
W
ho doesn’t love a qual-
ity UFO story? Oh sure,
there’s plenty of time-
honored tales, eyewitness accounts,
even the occasional abduction de-
bacle...and then there’s the “Roswell
Incident”. The latter is the most
well-known and celebrated UFO
story of all time, and it goes some-
thing like this: In the summer of
1947 “something” plunged to earth
and crashed onto a ranch just north
of Roswell, New Mexico. That much
of the story is pretty much unde-
niable. What’s very much deniable
(especially if you’re the U.S. govern-
ment) is the claim that the debris
found on a New Mexico ranch more
than 70 years ago was that of a fly-
ing saucer with alien occupants on
board!
While the military has long main-
tained their assertion that the crash
in Roswell was merely a weather
balloon (very common in those
days), there’s actually a surprising
number of people who swear by the
alien version of the story. There’s
even an astonishing amount of
people who have reportedly made
“deathbed confessions” that they
even saw humanoid bodies, either
at the crash site or at Walker Air
Force Base, where the wreckage was
hauled. In 1994, a film called sim-
ply “Roswell” starring Martin Sheen
and Dwight Yoakam was produced
about the incident, and honestly,
after seeing the movie decades ago
I’ve been pretty intrigued with the
tale, which has universally become
one of the most enduring mysteries
of the 20th century.
Intrigued or not, merely visiting
Roswell for the sake of saying I went
seemed pretty far-fetched (even
with my extensive travels), but when
I found out Roswell also had a drag
strip – the appropriately named
Alien City Dragway – it was just too
tempting to pass up! There’s even a
cool twist that links the drag strip
with the actual “Roswell Incident”.
The aforementioned Walker Air
Force Base is now the present-day
location of Roswell International
Airport, which actually leases one
of the runways to Alien City Drag-
way for NHRA-sanctioned races. I
recently visited the track mid-week
and was treated to an entertaining
tour of the facility by the
drag strip’s chairman of
the board, Ben Thomas.
“Just think,” says
Thomas, “whatever it was
that crashed that day was
hauled right here to this
very location and stored
in one of these hangers,
we just don’t know which one...but
I’m sure somebody would talk!” he
laughs, knowing full well he was
sending my extraterrestrial imagi-
nations into a frenzy.
For certain, ask anyone in town
and they’ll tell you that the “UFO sto-
ry” has done wonders for Roswell’s
tourism industry. Alien-themed
trinket shops line Main Street, and
if you
ever find
yourself
in Ro-
swell, be
sure to
visit the
Interna-
tional
UFO Mu-
seum and
Research
C e n t e r.
Even the
drag strip
capital-
ized on
the fly-
ing sau-
cer fame,
not only
with the
catchy
t r a c k
name,
but also
by erect-
ing a giant wooden alien at the top
of the staging lanes. “It’s what this
town is famous for,” laughs Thomas.
The drag racing scene here in
southeast New Mexico dates back
to the 1960s when a small track
in Roswell was opened by a local
car club. “Old school” is how those
early days are fondly described by
the older generation who lived it.
Not a speck of shade and a sea of
open trailers and blue tarps dotted
the pit area, and by the mid-1970s
the original track in Roswell had
barely advanced from flag starts
to the earliest, crudest
version of a Chrondek
portable timing system.
Every weekend, 1,320
feet of cable was rolled
out and connected to a
set of win lights, likewise
portable. The race cars
themselves were often
crude examples of hot rods, and
sometimes racers were known to
show up at Roswell with the inten-
tion of using a rope as a seatbelt.
It was like the Wild West of drag
strips during those early years, but
then the track received a fundamen-
tal dose of advancement when Rick
Callaway moved to Roswell from
San Diego, California, in 1974. Call-
away was
a
suc-
cessful
racer and
entrepre-
neur who
brought
Southern
Califor-
nia per-
formance,
not to
mention
a mea-
sure of
profes-
sionalism,
to rural
N e w
Mexico.
By now,
the car
club that
founded
the track
in Ro-
swell was
starting to fall apart and they per-
suaded Callaway to run the track.
He obliged, and successfully oversaw
the track’s week-to-week operations
for quite a few years while simul-
taneously operating a track in El
Paso, Texas.
Callaway met his eventual wife,
Tracy, through drag racing and they
had two daughters, Lindsey and
Jessi. Before long, operating drag
strips became a family affair, and
it was actually the Callaways who
opened the present-day version of
the track at Roswell International
Airport in 1996, originally called
Roswell Dragway. It was a success-
ful enterprise under the Callaway
family’s guidance, but in 1998 the
family was rocked with news that
their oldest daughter, Lindsey, had a
brain tumor. She fought the disease
bravely, but sadly passed away in
2000 at just 16 years of age.
The Callaways were devastated
and promptly sold the track shortly
after Lindsey’s death. The facility
was reopened by a variety of people,
but it never seemed to regain the
traction it once had. In 2013, the
track shut down, seemingly for good,
and remained shuttered for several
seasons. After much persuasion,
Rick and Tracy came back to give
it another go nearly 15 years later
and incredibly, they rekindled the
old magic when they relaunched
the track in 2015. “People waited
in line for more than two hours on
opening night,” Rick says. “It was
incredible to see.”
The reorganized track now oper-
ates with a seven-member board of
directors and a brand-new manager,
Roger Buck, who is set to succeed
Callaway later this year, as the Cal-
laways originally agreed to only re-
open the track and run it for two
seasons, although their tenure was
extended for a third year at the
board’s persuasion.
Alien City Dragway has a most
unique backdrop of hundreds of
commercial jets parked on the ad-
joining property, some of which are
awaiting repairs, while others are in
line to be scrapped, plus the bustle
of daily flights fr om Roswell to mul-
tiple destinations. Racers near and
far flock to this fabulously far-out
drag strip in hopes of winning a
“Nano” – a distinct trophy crafted
in the likeness of – you guessed it
– an alien!
I spent several days in Roswell
and enjoyed every second of it. The
Callaways, as well as all seven drag
strip board members, treated me to
a fabulous dinner and shared their
favorite stories. They sent me home
with an armload of florescent green
souvenirs, not to mention some of
the most out-of-this-world memo-
ries I’ve ever collected while out
solving mysteries and searching
for drag strips.
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Issue 137