Probably one of my favorite t-shirts; it goes in the dark. I bought this while I was visiting a Mariachi convention in New Mexico. My interest in aliens goes far back to the first time I saw the movie Signs. As a child, that movie scared the daylights out of me. I couldn't sleep. I thought I was going to see an alien everywhere, especially at night. This deep fear of aliens went on for years but at some point sort of switched over to a thirst to know more about them. So I would do research. My favorite source, and the one I believe to be most true is Serpo.org. I recommend reading enough on there at least to the point where you learn what the website name means.
Here is what I've learned:
There were two ufo crashes in New Mexico in the 1940s. One was found so late that all the bodies were in an advanced state of decay. The other, however, was found shortly after the crash and one being was still alive. It was named EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity; now known as EBE-1 as there were many more visitors that were kept by our government after this first one). It is believed President Eisenhower met this being. EBE-1 was extremely intelligent and helped the Americans build a rudimentary communication system which could relay messages between the stranded alien and its homeworld. Eventually a meeting was scheduled. However, EBE-1 died in 1952, but its remains were still returned to the planet. The real plan for the U.S. though was to send 12 brave humans to EBE-1's planet as part of an exchange program and the U.S. would receive an alien that would impart us with advanced technologies. The aliens weren't ready by the first meeting so they arranged a second meeting known as the Holloman Landing in 1964 at the air force base of the same name. There were two ships that set out with one landing elsewhere and being witnessed on the same exact day (documented police account: the Lonnie Zamora Incident). The actual exchange, with the twelve Americans boarding the alien ship, is depicted at the end of the classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a private screening of the film for him, then-president Ronald Reagan apparently told Steven Spielberg that Spielberg himself had no idea how much of the movie was actually true (I've always believed Spielberg does know because he makes a lot of movies about aliens and he claims his favorite props from all his movies are models of the motherships from Close Encounters and from E.T. )
Carl Sagan became a part of the project here on Earth as well and ended up writing a book based on his work called Contact, which was adapted into a film. By the way, when you watch the film, many of the astronomical distances (measured in light-years) they mention between stars add up to certain years in which important milestones happened when using the year that the movie Contact came out. I've never read the book however and don't know how it differs from the movie or how many years later the movie came out and if that is important. Very interesting conspiracy to get into. On the Serpo.org site I mentioned earlier, there is even an account of some of what happened during the 14 years those Americans spent on that strange world. Some of the survivors were reported to have died in the 2000s in the U.S. with completely different identities...
Hope I encouraged you to visit the site. Haven't been there myself recently, hopefully it's still up. Tell me what you think of all this!