Ghost towns, haunted hotels, UFOs — it’s America’s spookiest road trip

The Alien Center is really just a petrol station with your standard diner, gift shop and brothel attached. But since I’d been on Route 95 for a couple of hours after leaving Las Vegas, it seemed a good place to take a breather.

I scanned the shelves of intergalactic tat (shot glasses reading “I believe!”; flying-saucer pilot’s licences) and bought a cold drink. Melting in the 40C June heat outside and watched over by extraterrestrial murals on the shopfront, I gazed out across the Amargosa desert as it stretched west towards the Funeral mountains and Death Valley National Park, which mark the border with California.

The road north to Beatty, a town of about 600 where I’d be spending the night, offered a stark panorama of flat, scrubby desert hemmed in by barren hills. This was widescreen America: simple, vivid, hypnotic. I’d pass the occasional lorry or camper van, but otherwise it was just me, a dead-straight road and a country music radio station that I couldn’t work out how to change.

When Shorty Harris and his pal found gold in 1904, in the Bullfrog hills a few miles west of Beatty, word spread quickly. The rush was on.

Mining communities began to spring up, with Rhyolite the largest. Before long it had a population approaching 10,000, as well as newspapers, saloons, three railway lines and an opera house. One of the banks on Golden Street even had imported-marble stairs and stained-glass windows. However, by 1909 the gold had run out and soon after that the last train left the station. Rhyolite was left to the desert.

Welcome to the the Little A’Le’Inn on the Extraterrestrial Highway near Area 51

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Today it’s one of the best preserved of more than 600 ghost towns in Nevada. Few are more than a pile of bricks in the dirt, but Rhyolite is the real deal, with shells of several buildings lining the hillside, including the once splendid bank and the railway station.

I was completely alone as I walked along Golden Street, apart from the wild burros up in the hills, descendants of the donkeys brought here by miners then set loose once the work dried up. I noted the signs that warned of rattlesnakes and peered through some fencing at a house one miner had built out of 50,000 discarded bottles.

It was hard to believe that Rhyolite had once bubbled with avarice and ambition. That determined, desperate people had battled here through the desert in the hope of making their fortune. That in some ways it had been a prototype Las Vegas. Now it was a desiccated husk of a place, the atmosphere one of melancholy and isolation.

The next morning I checked out of Beatty’s cheap, functional Motel 6 (room-only doubles from £70; motel6.com) and carried on north to Goldfield, another town that went through a rapid boom and bust at the start of the last century. Unlike in Rhyolite, some people stuck around and the place limped on.

About 200 people live in the so-called “living ghost town” that is Goldfield

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Today a couple of hundred people call this “living ghost town” home and there’s an active historical society that works to preserve spots such as the impressive fire station and the apparently haunted Goldfield Hotel. If any ghosts are reading this, I’d certainly recommend Goldfield over Rhyolite. There’s much more going on here, including a couple of good bars that could become regular haunts, such as the Mozart Tavern, where Wyatt Earp used to sip his whiskey (mains from £9; fb.com/the.mozart.tavern).

Religion has its place here too. Up a dirt track to the south of town a couple of artists have created the International Car Forest of the Last Church, where graffiti-covered cars and buses are stacked on top of each other or half-buried in the dirt, pointing to the heavens. It’s unclear what churchgoers are meant to be worshipping here, but there’s something strangely primal about walking among these great hunks of metal that have been cast on rocky ground (free; internationalcarforestofthelastchurch.com). And to the north of town there’s the local cemetery, where hundreds of gravestones tell grim tales from the gold-rush era. Such as that of the hungry drifter who died after eating sweet-tasting library adhesive out of a bin, and the elderly gravedigger who fell into the hole he’d just dug and couldn’t get out.

With a population of almost 2,000, Tonopah, 30 miles north of Goldfield, is very much the biggest kid in the infants round here. This old silver-mining camp has supermarkets, a few good hotels and a pair of excellent free museums. It also lays claim to “America’s scariest motel”, a garish pitstop decorated with peculiar clowns and bargain-basement horror-movie imagery (room-only doubles from £65; theclownmotelusa.com).

Those with coulrophobia may wish to swerve Tonopah’s Clown Motel

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Christopher Alefeld, a native of New Jersey who blew into town three years ago and works at the motel, showed me their collection of 5,000 unsettling clown figurines and tried to convince me to join the ghost tour that evening.

“Come out tonight and I’ll show you the haunted rooms,” he said.

And what about that cemetery next door, I asked. (Because of course there’s a cemetery next door.) Had he ever seen anything … unusual?

“Well, sometimes people see a boy, just from the waist down, running between the graves.”

I politely declined. Not only did I already have a room at the rather comfortable, clown-free Belvada Hotel (B&B doubles from £160; belvadahotel.com), but I also had to go and inspect Russ Gartz’s globular cluster.

After a dinner of chicken wings and damn fine IPA at the Tonopah Brewing Co (mains from £11; tonopahbrewing.com), I headed for the outskirts of town and the stargazing park. One of the benefits of southern Nevada’s wide-open spaces and tiny population is the lack of light pollution, which means endless dark skies.

The idiosyncratic International Car Forest of the Last Church is home to half-buried cars that point to the gods

When I arrived Gartz, a local photographer and astronomer who runs stargazing parties (£85 per group; tonopahnevada.com), had his enormous telescope trained on a collection of thousands of stars in the Milky Way, bound together by gravity: a globular cluster. We picked out constellations and talked about how mining had shaped the rural Nevadan communities we see today.

“This is where the Wild West had its swan song,” he said. “Where it hit up against industrialisation.”

And what about that sky, I asked. Had he ever seen anything … unusual?

“Just the other week I saw something from my backyard,” he said, “something moving quickly. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a star or a plane.”

Obviously it was a flying saucer.

Bob Lazar would probably agree. He was the guy in the late Eighties who claimed to have worked for the government, reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology, and said he knew what was really going on in Area 51: alien stuff. Suddenly Rachel, a settlement of about 50 near an unmarked road to the secretive base, became an intergalactic hotspot.

Tonopah has a population of almost 2000

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Pat Travis and her late husband, Joe, were running the local diner when all the excitement started and the crowds began turning up. They hadn’t given much thought to aliens and the like but, hey, business is business. So they changed the name to the Little A’Le’Inn, hung a flying-saucer model outside and put up a sign saying “Earthlings welcome”. Now you can tuck into an alien burger before buying an Area 51 coffee mug, playing a game of Pac-Man and admiring all the pictures from celebrities who have filmed round here (mains from £9; littlealeinn.com).

“I’ve had enough of the movie people,” said Pat, 80, who had taken a break from the kitchen. “All these people come here filming, Independence Day and so on, and I never get a dime. They should have bought me a truck.”

And what about aliens, I asked. Had she ever seen anything … unusual?

“I’ve had encounters,” she said. “Sometimes I sense Joe sitting at the bar. And once something made me slow down on the road out there, just before a cow walked in front of the car.” That road is State Route 375, better known as the Extraterrestrial Highway, a nod to all the UFO sightings that have been reported along its 98 miles.

A few minutes later a group of guys came in, obviously excited, and sat down, announcing to the room that they’d “just been”. After checking which turn-off to take, I said goodbye to Pat and jumped in the car.

Now, I would never suggest that you drive ten miles down a dirt track into the desert, to a top-secret, heavily guarded military base where there’s absolutely nothing to see except gates, security cameras and warning signs. But if you’re asking whether I personally drove up to the back gates of Area 51? And whether I personally saw little green men and broken-down spaceships. Well, I’m afraid the answer is no, I did not. But I would say that, wouldn’t I.
Mike Atkins was a guest of Travel Nevada (travelnevada.com). Ten nights’ room only on the Experience Nevada package from £1,091pp, including flights and car hire (americaasyoulikeit.com)

Three more alien-spotting hotspots in the US

By Richard Mellor

Joshua Tree National Park, California

The Integratron in California was designed by the ufologist George Van Tassel who he claimed it was capable of rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel

KATRINA KOCHNEVA/ZUMA WIRE/ALAMY LIVE NEWS

UFO sightings have been reported since the Fifties inside Joshua Tree’s bounds at Giant Rock, North America’s largest freestanding boulder. It was also back then that one George Van Tassel erected the nearby Integratron — a 12-metre high spaceship imitation — following instructions he claimed were provided by visitors from Venus. Its present owners offer sound-bath experiences (£42pp; integratron.com); you might combine those with a visit to summer’s Contact in the Desert convention (contactinthedesert.com) in Indian Wells while staying at the allegedly haunted Joshua Tree Inn.
Details Room-only doubles from £116 (joshuatreeinn.com).

San Luis Valley, Colorado

The “Bermuda Triangle of the West” is a hotbed for dancing lights and mysterious sightings

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Known as the “Bermuda Triangle of the West”, San Luis has been the scene of mysterious airborne vessels, dancing lights and inexplicable cattle mutilations for centuries. Its three-metre high UFO Watchtower was built in 2000 for believers to better scour the clear, vast skies above the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Sangre de Cristo mountains. You can also do that just south down the so-called Cosmic Highway, towards a town called Hooper, outside the Rustic Rook Resort’s glamping tents.
Details B&B tents for two from £111 (rusticrookresort.com).

Roswell, New Mexico

Roswell’s association with alien lore dates to the famed storm of 1947

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This hitherto anonymous city was never the same after a powerful 1947 storm supposedly forced a flying saucer to crash. As much a hub for conspiracy theories as alien lore (that saucer was said to have been whisked off to Area 51), Roswell nevertheless attracts thousands of fanatics annually for July’s speaker-packed UFO Festival (ufofestival.com) and its International UFO Museum & Research Center (£5; roswellufomuseum.com). A classic Fifties-style motel, the extra-terrestrial-themed Roswell Inn is where to stay.
Details Room-only doubles from £46 (roswellinn.us).

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