A signal from 1999

The Show That Started It All

This domain has been online since 1999, when it began as a fansite for Roswell. What follows is a short history of the show, this site, and the reason a teenage fan's obsession quietly shaped everything that came after.

About the Show

Roswell premiered on The WB on October 6, 1999, and ran for three seasons, moving to UPN before it ended in 2002. Across sixty-one episodes it followed three teenagers in Roswell, New Mexico, Max, Isabel, and Michael, who looked like ordinary high schoolers but were the surviving hybrids of the 1947 crash. They spent their lives hiding what they were, until Max healed a classmate named Liz Parker at the counter of the Crashdown Cafe and the secret began to come apart.

It was based on Melinda Metz's Roswell High novels, and it arrived in the same late-nineties wave as Buffy and Angel. The science fiction was the hook, but the show was really about something quieter. It was about the loneliness of being different, the fear of being seen, and the small relief of finding the few people you do not have to hide from. Dido's "Here With Me" played over the opening, and for a certain kind of viewer, it landed hard.

About This Site

When this site went live in 1999, it was one of many fan-built homes for the show, full of episode notes, screen captures, favorite lines, and a guestbook that real people actually signed. Twenty-five years later most of those old pages are gone, but the links to them still live on across the web, in webrings, forum signatures, and other fansites that never came down.

If you followed one of those old links to get here, welcome. You found the right place, just a few chapters later. The address stayed the same even as everything behind it grew up.

A Note From Emma

A Note From Me

I was a teenager when Roswell aired, and I did what a certain kind of teenager does with a show she loves. I built it a home on the internet. That fansite taught me HTML, taught me how to gather people around a shared obsession, and taught me that I could make something real out of nothing but enthusiasm and a dial-up connection.

Everything after that traces back to it. The fan communities became FanBolt, a site about the shows and films I could not stop talking about. FanBolt led to Women's Business Daily, and to years of writing about movies as a critic. And the question the show kept asking, about who is really out there and what it means to look up and wonder, never left me. It pulled me toward the study of UFOs and UAP, and eventually toward the quieter, more personal kind of seeking this site is built around now.

A show about people who could not be normal, who were hiding the very thing that made them different, set all of it in motion. That is not a small thing to owe a teen drama from 1999. But I owe it, and gladly.

If Roswell brought you here too, I am glad the old link still leads somewhere.

Wherever the sky finds you,

Emma · Leaving Normal