Roswell, New Mexico, was a couple hours out of my way.  But something drew me there…

No, it wasn’t my tabloid background.  As a reporter for the National Enquirer in the late 1970s, I did work alongside many of the real reportorial talents on the alien front, but my meagre experience in that field consisted of a few wasted evenings in an Ohio reader’s backyard waiting for the UFO to show up.  It never did.

So, what supernatural force was drawing me….

It wasn’t on my way, that’s for certain.  It was two hours or more south of old US Route 66, the path I was taking eastward through New Mexico on my way back to Connecticut.

It was only when I got there that I realized the power that had pulled me: the town’s visitor center was in a very nicely recycled gas station!  Another one for my collection!

But seriously, Roswell was All Things Alien, as I had hoped.  A day on the road for me is complete only with a stop at an interesting town.

Even staid Wikipedia sums it up thusly: “Roswell’s tourism industry is based on aerospace engineering and ufology museums and businesses and well as alien-themed and spacecraft-themed iconography.”

Roswell, of course, is famed for the reported crash of a flying saucer on the Foster ranch, about 30 miles outside of town, in 1947.   

Briefly, here’s what happened back then: On July 6, a ranch foreman reported debris on the property to the local sheriff, who notified the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).

The next day RAAF officials went to the ranch and brought the debris back to Roswell and on July 7 announced they had recovered a “flying disc,” but the Army quickly retracted the statement and said instead that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon.

And there the story died, basically.  It was off the national scope for nearly 30 years, until the 1970s, when a retired lieutenant colonel stated that the weather balloon account had been a cover-story.

The “Roswell Incident” then blew up, blossoming over the ensuing years into a full-fledged media extravaganza, with enough conflicting theories to suit every UFO conspiracy theorist and naysayer in the land.  The circus included countless experts, real and self-described, and an official government investigation.

To simply read Wikipedia’s digest of all the claims and counterclaims from the 1970s to today is exhausting and confusing. 

I am not going to attempt to summarize it all, so let’s move right on to the photos.  Clicking on one will open up the slide show.

Visitor’s Center

Around Town

International UFO Museum and Research Center