The American, Maria Celestis, had spent years trying to prove that aliens had landed on Earth in that barren Mexican wilderness, setting down their spaceships on landing strips in the desert whose marks could still be seen. It was a small story, and it probably wouldn’t have been printed at all if Maria Celestis at seventy had not been a woman of striking beauty, wild-haired, majestically tall and slender, with black ferocious eyes. 

She had been coming and going across the US-Mexican border for much of her life and when she was young the men in the frontier town of Parallelville had all lusted after her, but none of them got close. Lately she had begun to drink, and it was in Orson’s bar in Parallelville, when she was in her cups, that she first told the story of the celestial globe buried in the desert, a globe made of stone. “I suddenly saw,” she said, “that the stars were in the wrong places, that this was a globe whose point of view was not Earth-bound. Not human.” She claimed to have found the Rosetta Stone of UFOlogy, an artifact that proved that we had been visited by migrants from across the galaxy, or from another galaxy far away.

“Those damn illegals,” said Orson the bartender. “No telling how far they’ll come just to get into the USA.”