Just another weather balloon?                  Linda Wells, longtime Roswell resident      Take me to your leader

Close Encounters of the Roswell Kind

ROSWELL, N.M. — If you’re looking for T-Shirts, novelty mugs and posters with aliens and UFOs, just drift up Main Street. Nearly every shop has something with green skin and black eyes for purchase. But if you’re looking for the truth about what really happened on Forest Ranch six decades ago, that hunt may be a bit more difficult.

So much has been written about, speculated on, and rumored concerning the alleged crashlanding of an alien spacecraft, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. The theories on what happened are widely divergent: everything from a high-altitude balloon test to Russian spy planes to alien spacecraft.

Whatever the truth, the fact remains that aliens and UFOs have turned into a cottage industry for the small city (pop. 48,400). Each year, thousands of visitors from the world over descend on Roswell and pump the area with tourism dollars. Most out-of-towners leave with a souvenir, a chuckle, and photos with alien displays. Still others are left with more questions.

“There's no denying that something happened at the crash site,” said Mark Denney, a local store owner and Roswell native. “But what happened exactly is up to the individual to decide.”

Roswell UFO Festival
For those with burning questions, there’s the Roswell UFO Festival held annually, July 2nd through 5th (1-888-ROS-FEST). In addition to live music, amusements and a festival parade, you can attend any one of several lectures featuring Ph.D’s, researchers, writers and other investigative types, there to speak about new findings. Lectures are located at several locations along Main Street (check with the Roswell Visitor Bureau for more information).

“Roswell is the Holy Grail of UFOlogy, and all the stars of the UFO investigative community come out for this,” said Gene Frazier, co-owner of the Roswell Landing souvenir store on Main Street. Because of the festival’s popularity, hotels are usually booked three months in advance, he said. But the festival welcomes day-trippers and sightseers passing through the area. “Even unbelievers are welcome,” he. said.

Roswell, UFOs, Coincidence
If any area was primed for an alien encounter in 1947, it was Roswell. The city makes up the southeast corner of what’s known as the “Nuclear Triangle,” the other corners being Los Alamos, the current headquarters for the Department of Energy (DOE) and place where nuclear bombs were developed; and the Trinity Site, location of the first atomic bomb test (north of what is now White Sands Missile Range). Theorists speculate that the energy from the Trinity explosion was so powerful, it created an interstellar calling card for visitors monitoring the earth from billions of miles away. Add to it that the first rocket tests were performed in Roswell in the late 1920s by the father of modern rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, and you've got a melding of rockets, research and atom splitting that would’ve incited the curiosity of any off-world spectator.

Six decades later, the mystery lives on. Using night vision goggles, some Roswell locals claim to have seen mysterious lights zig-zagging in the night sky. Is it just static electricity, or a covert military craft reverse engineered from the 1947 alien craft?

“I've see the tapes, I've read all the material and I'm convinced there were aliens here,” Skip Cooke, a longtime Roswell resident, said. “There were too many conincidences then, and still too many unexplainable things going on now.”