By Beccy Tanner/The Journal
Something out of this world brought about 1,000 people – mostly Kansans but some Nebraskans and Missourians, based on license plates – to the state’s UFO capital last summer.
It may sound a bit out there, but not only has this community of 236 souls staked its claim, it’s raised its deflector shields to ward off any competitors. Add a guy with a daring and wacky sense of looking at things, plus a museum board’s vision, and you’ve got a happening.
The end result is that Geneseo, about 100 miles northwest of Wichita in Rice County, is trying to take a portion of the state’s motto – “to the stars” – to a whole new parsec. It doesn’t matter what kind of being you are; the local humans just ask that you show up.
In Geneseo, there is a sign at the entrance of the city museum beckoning visitors – from anywhere in the universe: Space Ships Welcome.
To make things even more extraterrestrial, the town last year unveiled two metal sculptures – an alien astronaut, Gort, and his eight-foot protector, Klaatu – on the grounds of the Geneseo City Museum. They arrived just in time for the Dimension G Festival on July 6, also Kansas UFO Day. The festivities included a UFO parade.
The two sculptures are a product of a $5,206 Kansas Tourism Attraction Development grant and many local donations that made up the balance of the $13,600 project. They play off the 1951 cult film classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and were placed near the museum’s mysterious Roswell Compass. (Yes, there was a movie remake featuring Gort and Klaatu in 2008. The plots are different though.)
There was talk of making the pieces interactive by having light beams shoot from their eyes. At the last minute, the lights were pulled from the project. They were too costly.
Along with the museum and sculptures, a mural is on display downtown. It’s on a wall of what used to be Geneseo’s lumberyard, across from the present-day City Hall. The mural features a flying saucer with a cowboy wearing boots and spurs taking a wild ride across town.
“We are doing our best to provide the Sci-Fi/UFO folks with a place to call their own,” says Jim Gray, chairman of the Geneseo museum board. “We may be a small town, but we have big ideas. We hope you will want to be a part of making Geneseo an unforgettable experience for everyone who loves looking into the night sky and wondering, ‘What if’?”
Why UFOs and a Dimension G Festival?
Geneseo’s transformation into a UFO capital has its origins in the pandemic. Janet Splitter, the museum’s secretary, remembers how everything shut down.
“In some ways, it was a gift,” Splitter says.
Much of the museum’s collection was originally gathered by Elmer Janzen, a local chiropractor and avid UFO enthusiast. The museum first opened in the 1960s, and when Janzen died in 1977, he donated his house and collection to the city of Geneseo.
“The board had just formed in 2018. I joined in 2019,” Splitter says. “And the board began talking about 8,000 slides that Dr. Janzen had – but they were slides. And as you know, projectors die, and the old slides don’t want to work on carousels. So, I knew that the only way we could use them was to digitize them.”
And the pandemic meant people in the community had plenty of time.
“Nobody was going anyplace or doing anything.”
The museum board and volunteers sifted through everything in the museum.
Before that, the museum’s focus had been to help tell the stories of Janzen, along with the history of northern Rice County – including railroad history and early pioneer families.
As volunteers painted walls and put new flooring in, they also uncovered boxes and boxes in the attic filled with UFO stories and artifacts. Those soon were placed on display.
Attendance started increasing.
“In 2021, we had about 130 people that signed our guestbook,” Splitter says. “In 2022, we had 230. And, in 2023, we had 330.”
A different kind of museum
The collection defies generalization.
Some exhibits recall Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast of 1938 that terrified many listeners, and TV episodes of “Lost in Space” and “My Favorite Martian” from the 1960s.
There’s mention of John Dean from Nickerson, who drew multiple illustrations of spaceships, both inside and out. He collected spring water from Buck Nelson’s farm in Missouri, where space aliens liked to drink.
There’s the hair of a dog from Venus, because apparently just like humans, alien races like to travel with their pets.
It’s perhaps fitting that one of the creative forces behind the museum is unique, too.
Jim Gray is not your typical cowboy. He’s gone from his own experiences ranching and herding cattle to researching and writing about Kansas cowboy history to now being a down-to-earth docent at the museum.
He’s a fifth-generation Kansan who lives in Geneseo and whose great-grandmother was Euphemia Cody Gray, a cousin to William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill.
As chairman of the Geneseo City Museum board, he’s one of the people responsible for the museum’s space alien exhibits.
“Originally, the museum was mostly something that attracted alumni and people who had at one time lived here,” Gray says. “We began to promote the UFO information that we have and describing our displays and making that known – and gosh, we’ve had much more interest from outside the community. The nice thing about it is Geneseo has a very unique collection beyond the flying saucers and aliens, and that sort of thing that people would never get to experience if they weren’t drawn in by the unusual interest in our outer space collection.”
Whether one believes in extraterrestrials or not, Gray says, is not the point.
Outer space, UFOs and space alien stories are part of the human experience.
“When a small group comes into the museum … there’s almost always someone in that group that has had some sort of an experience that really means something or has known someone,” Gray says. “There’s a connection to a sighting or something like that. It’s the sort of thing where they know they’ve seen something in the sky that has either kind of appeared out of nowhere or has been hovering for a long period of time and suddenly just dips off. Those are the kind of stories that we get. I’ve never had anyone say they had contact.”
A regional draw
So far, museum visitors have been mostly from Kansas and Missouri. But with an annual Dimension G Festival, that may change. In the past couple of years, the festival has multiplied the town’s population on festival day.
Paranormal expert Margie Kay, who was one of the featured speakers last year, believes once word gets out about Geneseo, even more visitors will come.
“It is extremely unusual, and that’s why it is so very important,” Kay says.
She says she is aware of only a handful of museums like it in the nation – the most famous being in Roswell, New Mexico, known as the alleged 1947 UFO crash site.
“They (the Geneseo collections) are unusual, and that’s very important,” Kay says. “They have things that are very rare and difficult to find – newspaper articles, magazine stories, photographs – all in one place.”
Growing an idea
Still, museum board members are painfully aware that Geneseo could be classified as a small town that’s dying.
Drive the streets and there are potholes, vacant downtown buildings and more.
Is the museum’s new approach enough to rocket the town’s fortunes to the stratosphere?
Probably not by itself. But it is a start.
“As far as the town itself, we have gotten to the point that we have built very little tax base. We have little money to work with as a city,” says board member Reed Rolfs. “We have no institutions here in town. Of course, the school has been long gone. (It closed in 1980.) We don’t have any businesses left except one little place out here on the highway. So, we don’t have any centralized unity within the town where we can really work towards improvement, in my estimation.”
Despite the out-of-this-world optimism of residents such as Gray, it’s hard to ignore the challenges, Rolfs says.
“This little town has deteriorated so much in the last 50 years. … It is almost impossible to do much rebuilding. I’ve said if we had somebody who could dump $7 million on us, we could make a start – but it would literally take that much with today’s prices.”
So, what’s a small town to do? A Mos Eisley Cantina, the dimly lit tavern from “Star Wars,” would surely be a draw, but the actual tavern sure seemed to draw a rough crowd.
Gray says to think big and use the abridged state motto “to the stars” to its maximum advantage.
Mayor Jonathan Dietz agrees, saying the museum’s otherworldly exhibits are a positive.
“It’s brought some people to town. People that I don’t think probably would have come into town,” Dietz says. “To me, it is a positive thing no matter what. It brings something positive to the forefront – something that’s fun and interesting as opposed to just another small town that’s slowly dying.”
Most people don’t have to look far to find a public obsession with extraterrestrial life. That’s despite the fact that in March, the Pentagon released a report revealing decades of U.S. government investigations into UFO sightings – saying there is no verifiable evidence of sightings that were extraterrestrial in origin. Still, TV shows such as Netflix’s “Encounters,” the History Channel’s “Unidentified,” and Apple TVs “Alien Chronicles” can be binge-candy for those who do believe.
Tourism destination sites on those subjects may be just the ticket, according to Stacy Clark, the recently retired former Rice County economic development director.
“We have some entrepreneur classes every few years, and I think we had one in 2021 and one of the Geneseo board members came to that class,” Clark says. “Everyone went around and said they were thinking of starting a business and she said, ‘We just want to get people here. We want to show what we have.’
“So the next thing I know, they come to me and say they want to have a UFO Day. ‘We want to declare Geneseo the UFO Capital of Kansas.’ Here, we have a small town, and they are taking something unique in their museum and blowing it up. … I’ve been super proud of them. The people work so hard. Everyone gets involved. The American Legion gets involved. The senior center gets involved. There’s museum volunteers …”
On festival days, it is not unusual to see people wearing aluminum foil hats strolling the streets and yards festooned with green inflatable Martians and plastic spaceships.
Visitors also like to gaze at the Roswell Compass, a mark near the museum in the concrete curbing poured in the 1940s that sort of resembles a compass rose and a UFO. Might it be pointing in the direction of Roswell?
Whatever it is, it’s part of the wonderment.
Creating the sculptures
Bruce and Brent Bitter are brothers who grew up on the family farm near Susank and Hoisington, about 35 miles west of Geneseo, and decided to form their own metal art business – B&B Metal Arts.
That was nearly 25 years ago, and now many of their works are on display throughout the nation.
“I went out to Vegas in 2005-2006 and I diddesign some fabulous furniture and it was kind of the hit of the show,” Bruce Bitter says.
“I got three commissions … and when Icame back … I’ve been busy ever since.”
Gort and Klaatu are his babies, so to speak.
“What’s unique about this project is that if I tell someone about the 9/11 sculpture that I did, you get a serious look on the face,” Bitter says. “But when I start talking about this robot that shoots rays out and that was in a 1950s sci-fi movie, everyone smiles. I mean, UFO Capital of Kansas?”
This article was republished here with the permission of: KLC Journal