Welcome to Goldwater, Tx.

Goldwater, Texas was for the longest time, a sleepy little town nestled on Highway 40 just before the Texas/New Mexico boarder, serving as that last little taste of the Lone Star State to truckers and travelers headed west. Sedate and laid back in the matter of northern Texas towns, it boasts a population of about 4000 residents, but in truth that encompasses all of the surrounding farms, villages and ranches. Founded in 1923, it served first as a resource to the nearby Army tank training base, Fort Chumley, then later to the oil field complexes that thrived for a few years. Life was good for the residents of Goldwater until just after the second world war when Congress moved (a little TOO quickly some would say) to decommission Ft. Chumley and gross mismanagement of Presidio Oil all but shut the fields down. With their two biggest sources of income gone, Goldwater slipped into that quiet obscurity of a ghost town in training. Only the truck stops on the interstate kept the little town afloat, though most of the remaining citizens seemed okay with this, and the town threw itself into the role of the oasis in the sea of wilderness.

The noted travel writer E.J. Hartnel once described Goldwater as a semi colon in a drive to California while maverick oilman T. Boone Pickens once tried to buy the town outright (for reasons that to this day remain unclear), and legions of Patton’s tankers will talk glowingly of the towns hospitality and tolerance of the odd Sherman tank that might accidentally run wild and driverless through the downtown one September evening, as they trained to deliver a swift one to some Nazi backside. Life in the town remained good if somewhat steady state until the mid 80’s. No one remembers the exact date or even who was the first, but starting sometime in 1985, various writers, researchers and curious folk began showing up in Goldwater and began poking about in the town’s history. Most were courteous and polite in their inquiries, and while they asked a wide array of questions, their interest seemed to center on a particular incident in 1947, something about a brushfire in the oilfields out to the east of town. A brushfire… and perhaps something more…

To the bewilderment of every single resident of the little town, every one of these researchers was convinced that Goldwater was the sight of a UFO crash and subsequent retrieval by the Army in the late 40’s. None of the remaining oldtimers had ever heard of such a thing. Sure, there was a brushfire back in 47’, most likely more than one, that sort of thing just comes with oil work. But there’d never been anything more to it than that, and certainly nothing involving the Army. As the inquiries began to go both ways, the townsfolk of Goldwater began to learn that various writers in the field of UFO studies had become convinced that a flying saucer had crashed outside of town, and quickly recovered and hushed up by the Army. The fact that no one in town could verify this story and that there seemed to be not a shred of supporting evidence did little to slow down the UFO hunters; there were out to find the TRUTH, no matter how much of it they had to fill in with educated guesswork!

And so it was that Goldwater, Texas entered a new phase of it’s existence; ground zero for the LEGIONS of tourists that flock from around the globe to see the birthplace of modern UFO mythology. Annually, some 10, 000 seekers of one sort or another come to visit, and Mayor Dixie Cartwright does her utmost to make sure that they leave feeling that it was all worth they’re time and effort, while the residents of Goldwater make absolutely sure that they leave without so much cash weighing them down…