Aliens, Snoopy & Needles, Oh My!
— by David Eugene Perry
Ahoy! On our first road trip in our new all-electric Subaru Solterra, we stop to recharge in Needles before heading on to Oatman and Kingman.
While the car charges we stop in the iconic Wagon Wheel Restaurant and instantly encounter an Extraterrestrial.
Not outside in the Mojave sky—though this is certainly the sort of place where one might look up and expect to see something unusual—but right inside the restaurant itself.
There he stands: a lanky green alien wearing a black cowboy hat and holding a pair of revolvers like some interplanetary marshal of the desert. Suspended above him, a silver flying saucer hovers permanently in mid-landing. The effect is both hilarious and oddly appropriate. Because if there is a town in California where such a scene makes sense, it is Needles.
Needles sits on the Colorado River at the far edge of California, where the Mojave Desert opens toward Arizona. Long before Interstate 40 whisked travelers past at seventy miles per hour, this was one of the great gateways into the Golden State. Railroad crews working the lines of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway stopped here to change engines and crews as trains crossed the river. Later the caravans of U.S. Route 66 arrived dusty and sunburned after the long desert drive from Arizona.
The Wagon Wheel feels like a museum of that entire era.
Every surface seems to hold a memory: a wall plastered with hundreds of badges and stickers from travelers, vintage vending machines promising to tell your future, glowing retro refrigerators, motorcycles resting as if their riders stepped out only minutes ago, and a general air of cheerful roadside Americana. Hovering above it all, of course, is that flying saucer.
And the UFO theme is not entirely whimsical. The Mojave skies around Needles have produced their share of strange stories over the years.
In 1953, radar operators near the California-Arizona border tracked a mysterious object moving at remarkable speed over the desert. Pilots who attempted to intercept it reported a brilliant light maneuvering erratically before accelerating away. The incident later appeared in files compiled by Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s official effort to catalogue unexplained sightings during the Cold War.
Two decades later, in the 1970s, boaters along the Colorado River near Needles reported seeing a glowing sphere hovering silently above the water at dusk. According to witnesses, the object slowly descended into the river without a splash, the light continuing beneath the surface for several seconds before vanishing. Stories like that helped fuel later theories about so-called “transmedium” craft—objects able to move between air and water.
But the region’s strange sky stories go back even further.
During the great 1896–1897 mystery airship wave, railroad workers and travelers passing through the Colorado River corridor reported seeing cigar-shaped flying machines with powerful searchlights moving across the desert night. Newspapers speculated wildly that some secret inventor had perfected an airship decades before aviation would truly arrive.
Whether misidentified balloons, imaginative journalism, or something else entirely, the stories became part of the folklore of the American West.
Needles even has a charming connection to one of the most beloved figures in American popular culture. As a young boy, Charles M. Schulz spent part of his childhood here when his father worked in town. Schulz later recalled seeing a strange moving light in the desert sky one evening—something he jokingly described as perhaps a spaceship before laughing it off as likely a meteor. Fans enjoy the coincidence that the creator of Peanuts—and the world’s most famous imaginary aviator, Snoopy the “World War I Flying Ace”—once gazed up at these same mysterious desert skies. If you followed Peanuts, you will recall that Snoopy’s mustached brother, Spike, lives in the desert outside Needles.
Standing inside the Wagon Wheel Restaurant today, surrounded by Route 66 relics and an armed alien lawman, it is easy to see how such stories take root. The Mojave night sky remains vast and startlingly clear. Experimental aircraft from nearby testing ranges—including Edwards Air Force Base—still cross these horizons, sometimes producing lights and movements that would puzzle anyone not expecting them.
Outside, our Subaru Solterra quietly drinks electrons from its charging station—an entirely modern ritual in a place whose identity was once defined by steam locomotives and gasoline caravans.
Soon we will continue on into the Black Mountains toward Oatman, where wild burros roam the streets, and then on to Kingman, another proud survivor of Route 66.
But for a moment we linger here beneath the flying saucer.
