Alien museum outside Las Vegas operated by ‘X-Files’ alum

It’s as complete and perfect a circle as the ones said to have been left in fields by visiting spacecraft.

Tom Devlin’s first job in Hollywood, starting when he was 19, was creating aliens for the final two seasons of “The X-Files.”

In April, Devlin opened the Outpost 51 Alien Museum, filled with extraterrestrials he’s made, across the parking lot from his Monster Museum in Boulder City.

The truth, you might say, is in there.

‘I’m entertained by aliens’

“I’m not overly obsessed with aliens. I’m entertained by aliens,” Devlin says in his office inside the new museum. “I believe that there is something else other than us out there.”

Several of those “something elses,” re-creations Devlin constructed that are accompanied by text explaining their importance, are displayed throughout the attraction.

Three little green men surround a flying saucer that’s embedded in a rock face as an ode to the UFO that reportedly crashed just outside Kingman, Arizona, 72 years ago this week. Nearby, a mysterious skeleton found in 1973 near Nelson’s Landing is celebrated in its shriveled, bony form.

There’s also a speculative rendition of what the creature, nicknamed Buster and believed by some to have been part of the Kingman crash, may have looked like as an alien.

Other Southern Nevada connections are explored through the stories of famed Area 51 whistleblower Bob Lazar and Jason Sands, who was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in 1994 when he says he encountered a blue being that communicated with him telepathically.

“You can kind of tell when people are full of crap. And I believe that that’s their truth,” Devlin says of Lazar and Sands. “I believe what they’re saying is real to them.”

He’s also been burned by that belief. In 1995, Fox aired “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction,” a sensational special built around black-and-white footage that supposedly showed doctors cutting open an alien in the 1940s.

In the show, special effects wizard Stan Winston and members of his team marvel at the alien and reveal they can’t figure out how it would’ve been constructed.

If Winston — who won Oscars for his effects in “Aliens,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Jurassic Park” — couldn’t do it, Devlin reasoned, it couldn’t be done.

“As a believer,” he recalls, “I’m like, ‘It’s true. One hundred percent true.’ ”

During his stint on “The X-Files” from 2000 to 2002, co-workers in the effects shop, just to rattle him, would bring up “Alien Autopsy” and remind him that they made aliens every day.

“Of course, later (the producers) came clean and said it was absolutely a hoax,” Devlin says.

A re-creation of an “Alien Autopsy” scene is one of the first things he built for the new museum.

From Hollywood to Boulder City

After “The X-Files” ended, Devlin made the skeletons and mummy corpses for “The Scorpion King.”

For “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” he and his buddy Chuck O’Brien built a fully jointed 200-pound replica of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body that was hung from a hook and smashed through buildings during a chase scene. He worked on every aspect of Colin Farrell’s Bullseye for the “Daredevil” movie — including the body that crashes through a stained-glass window and onto a car below.

“Both of those instances, they put CGI over top of them,” Devlin says of his work. “So I don’t get to see it and be like, ‘I made that.’ But I made that. There’s no body there without me.”

Eventually Devlin, and his wife, Lola — whose credits include directing “Legend of the Sandsquatch” from a script she co-wrote with Devlin — grew tired of Hollywood and moved to Florida to get regular jobs.

He worked in a motorcycle shop, while she punched a clock at an airport.

They hated it.

In 2015, Devlin got a job teaching prosthetic makeup in Las Vegas. Two years later, they fell in love with Boulder City.

Within two weeks of moving there, they noticed a building for rent.

By year’s end, it was home to Tom Devlin’s Monster Museum.

A love of history

“The whole idea of the Monster Museum,” Devlin says, “is to preserve the art and history of practical effects.”

The draw may be Devlin’s re-creations of Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and the Face brothers, Ghost and Leather. But his passion is reserved for the tributes to the likes of Dick Smith, who did the demonic makeup for Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.”

“John Chambers changed the world,” Devlin says of another exhibit in the Monster Museum.

The makeup artist, portrayed by John Goodman in the Oscar-winning “Argo,” introduced moviegoers to foam latex masks with 1968’s “Planet of the Apes.” His technique, which replaced the phony-looking rubber masks upon which Hollywood had relied, soon became the industry standard.

“And right now,” Devlin says, “it’s going extinct because foam latex, although heavily used in shows like ‘The Walking Dead,’ has been replaced with silicon and CGI.”

Similar cinematic history is on display in the Outpost 51 Alien Museum, with reproductions of alien humanoids from “They Live,” the Xenomorph from “Alien” and The Predator, all of which were brought over from the Monster Museum.

“The big thing about The Predator is, it’s the first time Steve Wang was ever given freedom with an airbrush,” Devlin says of the effects artist. “And the paint job created on The Predator you see today in everything. Every creature ever from 1989 on had airbrushed dots and veins and speckles. And it all comes from The Predator. That creature is better than any CGI that’s ever been done.”

The perfect home

Devlin hasn’t given up on movies. He’s directed four of the type of B-movies he grew up on — one written by him, three-co-written by Lola — since the start of 2023.

During that time, he’s created special effects for six others, including the delightfully titled “Invaders from Proxima B” and “Karate Ghost 2: Dojo of Death.”

But he’s perfectly at home in Boulder City, which he calls “the town that time forgot” — in a good way. Devlin says this during a break from building a haunted house in the parking lot his museums share. “I’m starting in May,” he explains, “because it’s gonna be that good.”

Devlin scoured Las Vegas for a spot for his Monster Museum. He even considered the former Cyril S. Wengert mansion before it housed Zak Bagan’s The Haunted Museum. But Devlin says, much like him, his “weird and kitschy” museums feel at home in Boulder City rather than someplace where “crowds are bigger and people are a little bit snottier.”

“This is a roadside attraction. It’s not Madame Tussauds,” Devlin adds. “I build stuff with plywood and Masonite and cardboard and love.”

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.