No Waco, No Roswell, No Bunker Hill

No Waco, No Roswell, No Bunker Hill

Many a person has traveled to Roswell, New Mexico to see the famous [alleged] flying saucer crash site, only to learn when they arrive that NOTHING crashed in Roswell (if indeed anything crashed at all). Even those who claim the crash actually occurred do not claim it occurred in Roswell; rather, that something crashed in nearby Corona.

A similar situation occurs when people travel to Waco, Texas expecting to see the ruins of the Branch Davidian Compound still smodering in the center of the city. In fact, this horrific event took place in Elk, Texas out in McLennan County, not in Waco at all. If you go back and watch the media clips from the event, you will see that almost all of them are tagged "Near Waco Texas." Other places near Waco include Temple (a really nice town with a great VA facility - similar to the one in Waco), Lorena (home of Ruthy's with its truly great Tex-Mex food), and Crawford (home of President Bush's ranch).

And don't even get me started on Bunker Hill (check it out on Wikipedia). It seems we have, from a time even before the US was a separate country, had a tendency to name things for events that transpired somewhere nearby. I'm not sure why. The overwhelming majority of what we call the "Battle of Bunker Hill" during the Revolutionary War ["Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"] actually occurred at nearby Breed's Hill.

In the case of Roswell and Waco, I think those sites were chosen for publication purposes because they are easier to find on a map than Corona, NM and Elk, TX. Their use may also have arisen because they were the nearest place a reporter could file a news story ["Deadline: Roswell"]; the nearest place a reporter could find a motel/hotel room for the night(s), and, just maybe, the nearest place with enough electricity.

Still, whatever analysis you bring to it, there seems to be an underlying unfairness about it all. Why should a city get labeled as the flying saucer capital of the world when nothing of the sort occurred there? And why should a perfectly nice city of over 100,000 normal people be seen as the location for such a tragedy as occurred at the Branch Davidian Compound?

I know it's not enough, but perhaps this little blog will do a tiny bit toward righting the scales. Do you know of other locations that have been wrongly labeled, for whatever reason? Let me know.