As Carnal approached, he recalled the top of the cockpit lifting to reveal two people sporting green, alien-like glasses. The driver raised a hand and gave Carnal a Vulcan salute, the famous gesture from the TV series “Star Trek.”
“I come in peace,” Carnal said the man told him.
The traffic stop was one of four that lifelong alien-enthusiast Steve Anderson experienced during his multiday drive from Indianapolis to the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico. After being pulled over twice in Missouri and two more times in Oklahoma, he said, he was also welcomed to Roswell by officers who knew he’d be arriving, awaiting his lunar landing in the parking lot of his hotel.
Anderson, 67, told The Washington Post that he has loved aliens since he was 8 years old, when he said he witnessed his first flying saucer. He recalled looking up at the daytime sky when he spotted a saucer hovering, observing him. Anderson said it quickly moved side-to-side, and then jetted away. The memory stuck with him, and about a decade ago, inspired him to seek out a UFO-themed car.
“I thought, how cool would it be to get to ride in a flying saucer?” he said. “So since I don’t have the technology to make one that flies, I built a driving saucer.”
Anderson bought a tiny 1991 Geo Metro and rang up Dennis Bellows, a mechanic friend who had built a few other cars for him. Anderson asked Bellows if he could transform the Geo into a flying saucer, like the kind in old sci-fi movies.
Bellows, 50, said he spent his evenings over the next eight months making the saucer come to life, squeezing in his extraterrestrial overhaul after working his day job at a local mechanic shop. When he wasn’t cutting up the Geo or welding its new frame, he researched the rules of the road to make sure his creation was legal.
The car’s bubble-shaped top — adorned with an antenna — took an extra bit of ingenuity. Bellows ultimately warmed pie slices of plexiglass to form the contraption.
“A little finagling and a little bit of heat and anything will go,” Bellows told The Post.
Anderson first attended the Roswell UFO Festival last year, sans space cruiser, but decided to bring the vehicle to this year’s event. He and his friend Marilyn Dicks, a longtime UFO Festival attendee who’d flown to Indianapolis from her home in Florida, set out for New Mexico on June 28 — and were pulled over for the first time by Carnal later that same day.
The encounter was one for the scrapbook, Carnal said, and rife with enough corny jokes to make it to the moon and back. Anderson’s dashboard features extraterrestrial-themed toggles along with more mundane features, like a turn signal. The horn is rigged to make laser sounds.
The Crawford County Sheriff’s Office later posted about the stop on Facebook and attached photos of the vehicle.
“Well, you never know what will be traveling through Crawford County but this one was a little out of this world,” the June 28 post said. “ … There was a brief conversation about his out of space, correction, out of state registration, but he assured us that he would take care of that issue when he returned to Krypton.”
The traffic stop, which ended with warnings to update the car’s registration, was followed by another stop later that same day in Missouri, Anderson said, and then two more after crossing into Oklahoma.
On July 1, Oklahoma State Trooper Ryan VanVleck saw the saucer whiz by.
“I was on the shoulder of the turnpike, and I saw this vehicle coming from behind,” VanVleck told The Post, referring to the Turner Turnpike. It took him a moment to realize he was watching a UFO.
“It was pretty neat. You don’t see that every day,” he said, adding that he pulled Anderson over because his license plate was obstructed.
When Anderson finally arrived to Roswell around 5 a.m. on July 2, a few officers met him in the hotel parking lot. This time there were no warnings, just a few photos and demonstrations of the car’s gadgets.
Anderson is used to being stopped by law enforcement while he’s driving the space cruiser — one of roughly 45 cars he keeps at his home in Indiana. He said he often hands over a gag driver’s license identifying him as “Al Ien” and tells officers that he’s from the planet Krypton, before handing over his real identification.
When Anderson and Dicks reached Roswell, festival attendees took photos with the car and paid “a small fee” to have Anderson drive them around in it, he said. Anderson led the event’s nighttime parade, with his saucer lit up by red and green lights and flames from its rocket-like exhaust pipes glowing. His car won the “Best Alien Encounter” award during Saturday night’s UFO parade.
Anderson, who is still in Roswell, is offering Earth dwellers a ride in the saucer as long as they abide by three rules. Passengers must wear the alien glasses they are provided with, operate the toy ray guns affixed to the hood and act like a kid again.
“That’s what this car is all about,” he said. “It’s about sharing, it’s about giving. I want people to have fun, I want them to laugh, have joy, to have a good time. Because life’s too short.”
