If you’ve ever driven down the heavily trafficked Interstate 10 through Eastern Arizona, you have probably encountered a few billboards for a mysterious roadside attraction:
“THE THING? YOU’LL BE AMAZED!”
“THE THING? IT’S A WONDER!”
“THE THING? YOU WON’T FORGET IT!”
In a distinctive shade of sunny yellow, these cryptic billboards arrive every fifty or so miles down the highway and have been turning heads since the 1960s. If you’re a connoisseur of tacky roadside attractions like me, they’re highly effective at making you memorize that exit number (exit 322) and flick that righthand turn signal when you see it.
When I finally arrive at the exit, a matching yellow building promises a museum and gift shop.
I enter to find a typical southwestern travel center. Think Native and Mexican goods, and snowglobes of landscapes that have never seen snow. I am directed to the far corner of the store, past the aisles of t-shirts and talavera pottery. In this corner, there is a door under a chain of neon lights.
“Hi,” I say to the woman sitting by the door. “I want to see the Thing.”
“You’re in the right place. Cash or card?”
I am charged five dollars to see the Thing. I have not been given any further information about what I’ve just paid for, but I still have a feeling this is a bargain.
Now, if there is any chance you’ll ever find yourself on this lonely stretch of I-10, I suggest you stop reading here before I spoil the entire surprise. This is the sort of attraction that you have to enter blindly.
Ticket in hand, I go through the door with absolutely no idea what is on the other side. It opens into a long, colorfully lit hallway.
The first thing I notice is a giant statue of a dinosaur. The second thing I notice is a flying saucer surrounded by alien mannequins. These are tied together with a series of plaques and murals that begin with one bold declaration: Aliens visited Earth during the time of dinosaurs and conquered them using mind control helmets.
Okay. Definitely a bargain.
I read every word of every plaque, and the story unfolds. After eons of cerebral interference from the aliens, the dinosaurs gained sentience and started fighting back, and eventually their interplanetary enemies send the Chicxulub asteroid to wipe them out.
The aliens go home, they come back millennia later, they find humanity, and they proceed to guide us through our entire history, which is told through more displays (including a life-size model of Winston Churchill riding in a Rolls driven by an alien, because you can’t prove that never happened).
All of this information is delivered with passionate seriousness and just enough “What if…”s to maintain plausible deniability.
I would have considered this money well-spent if the museum ended here. But this is all pretext, the preparation, the prologue — we haven’t even seen the actual THING yet. A plaque before the final room informs me that the attraction’s founder, Thomas Prince, acquired it in 1950 through methods that are “shrouded in secrecy.”
I enter the final room. Speakers are looping the X-Files theme. It’s a darker room than the others, lit by the glow of something roped off in the corner.
As I approach the exhibit, I see a glass coffin containing a mummy. It’s holding a second, child-sized mummy. They are ambiguously inhuman, in a way that suggests either unearthliness or advanced decay.
This is the titular THING: two mummies, supposedly unidentifiable as terrestrial beings. They’re here to ground everything we’ve just seen into some kind of tangible fact. The rest is just statues and storytelling, but here we have the evidence.
The exhibit ends here and I am guided by signs back into the glaring fluorescents of the gift shop.
“What did you think?” asks the lady who sold me my ticket.
I am still absorbing many things, including the fact that I just witnessed a truly Barnum-esque sideshow in 2025, that I am absolutely going to write about this for JFC, and that I’ve drunk coffees that cost more than that experience.
“I thought it was great.”
“Oh, good. I’m so glad.” She is visibly relieved.
I suddenly get the vibe that this woman has dealt with disappointed tourists many, many times.
Because THE THING? isn’t designed to impress, not genuinely. Like most roadside stops along American interstates, the ridiculousness is the attraction. It’s an entire niche culture built on irony. Not everyone understands it, but if you want to get the most out of an American road trip, you have to let yourself in on the joke.
You shouldn’t show up to a spot like this and feel disappointed when it turns out to be silly — you should show up because it will probably be silly. Because there’s just something special about driving through hours of Nebraska farm land and finding a replica of Stonehenge made out of vintage cars, or going out of your way for the world’s largest ball of twine. To paraphrase Ken Smith of Roadside America, a good highway attraction isn’t about what it actually is, but the fact that you’ll always remember seeing it.
When it comes to memorable hooks, it doesn’t get much better than dinosaur mind control and alien mummies. And that was an intentional marketing ploy.
Do some Googling, and you can find a true, honest-to-God backstory for this funky exhibition. The aforementioned Thomas Prince is the source of those cryptic and eye-catching billboards, having displayed the Thing along the highway until his death in 1969.
The mummies were then purchased by Bowlin Travel Centers (a familiar name in these parts — nearly every service station seems to be under their jurisdiction) and Bowlin decided to dress up the mummies with a tale about aliens and dinosaurs.
After all, you gotta earn those five dollars, and sci-fi sells big in this part of the country. Just ask Roswell, New Mexico. Or Amargosa Valley, Nevada, where the mystique of nearby Area 51 drives folks towards UFO knick-knacks and a (legal) alien-themed brothel. If you’re operating a funky attraction in the deserts of the Southwest, the real money is in making Ed Wood look like Spielberg.
But all of this only explains the events after Prince put the mummies on show. So… what are those mummies, then? Where were they found? Are they… real?
That’s the thing about the Thing — officially, no one knows. There are a few competing theories (most involving some arts and crafts), but there are no definitive answers. If anyone at Bowlin has real concrete provenance for these figures, they’re not talking. The secret of the mummies just might have died with Thomas Prince.
I think that’s for the best. That last kernel of mystery makes it easier to forget every official bit of history and enjoy the gaff. A weary driver encounters enigmatic billboards, surrounded in every direction by miles of empty desert, and is offered a rare and glorious chance to suspend their disbelief to Fox Mulder levels.
It’s roadside gold, an exhibit so sincere in its irony that it has drawn in visitors for six decades. Because it’s not about whether those mummies were clearly papier-mâché, it’s about the fact that you’ll remember them forever.
So if you’re ever driving down I-10 an hour east of Tucson, hit the brakes at exit 322. You won’t forget it.