Aliens Abduct City's IDentity

The Wall Street Journal

September 3, 1997

LEISURE & ARTS 

By Anne Midgette 


Roswell, N.M. -- When I was preparing to leave for college in the early '80s, I bought a souvenir of my hometown: a T-shirt bearing the legend "Roswell, New Mexico: Known for Absolutely Nothing." 

How times have changed. 

Roswell is known for something now, all right. Its citizens still aren't sure what hit them. I refer not necessarily to the object that struck the ground on July 6, 1947 -- although the debate rages on about whether it was a weather balloon, Soviet weapon, or genuine UFO. I'm talking about the notoriety that has struck the small city (pop. 48,000) with surreal force. 

The site where the object landed, on Hub Corn's ranch north of town, has returned to earthbound normalcy. But on Main Street every second shop window sports an alien; the local Arby's has a new sign proclaiming "Aliens Welcome"; and Bud's, a country dance bar, is billing itself as the "Unofficial UFO Crash Recovery Site." There are even two UFO museums: the modest, original UFO Enigma Museum in the south of town, about to relocate to larger premises, and the UFO Museum and Research Center, in an old movie theater right on Main Street, with an "Alien Caffeine Espresso Bar" consisting of a few cafeteria-style plastic tables and seats. And at the UFO museum in Midway, a couple of miles south, you can view videos of hundreds of onsite UFO sightings from the past three years alone. 

This is all new. No one talked about aliens when I went to high school in Roswell, and if our mascot at Goddard High School was a rocket, it was only because Robert Goddard actually did test his first rocket engines here (his workshops are preserved in the Roswell Museum and Art Center, which has nothing to do with UFOs). Now, I return home to find silver critters and flying saucers at every turn, and the town abuzz with talk of the 50th anniversary week, which drew 150,000 . . . well, 50,000 . . . well, maybe 25,000 visitors. The first figure was the projected attendance, the second the official one and the third the actual one, according to John Price, founder and executive director of the UFO Enigma Museum, who notes an official tendency to double figures. 

Some believers would have it that the reason residents like me knew so little about the incident is that the government hushed the matter up. According to my sources, one elderly volunteer docent who helped out at the UFO Museum during the anniversary week informed her audiences that the government told Roswellites that if anyone breathed a word, it would kill them all. The government must have undergone a remarkable change of heart, since the Roswell Incident has now appeared everywhere from the cover of Time magazine to Absolut Vodka ads, and since Roswell's UFO museums -- which display mainly press clippings and signed testimonials -- demonstrate that just about anyone with a claim to a story is entitled to speak his mind at length about the events of the night in question. My two personal favorites are the funeral-home employee Glenn Dennis, who remembers Army officers coming in the dead of night to order two child-size coffins, and the freelance cameraman who went out to film the site and saw an Army officer hit a wounded alien over the head with the butt of his rifle to loosen the creature's grasp on the object it was clutching. 

These days, Roswell's local government is represented by Mayor Tom Jennings, who seems to believe that any press is good press. He does, however, bear a grudge against The Wall Street Journal for having thus far overlooked what he sees as a first-rate business story. "This is a marketing feat," he informed me at a cocktail party, having handed me a Roswell lapel pin shaped like a UFO, with a grinning alien poised atop it. "Within three years, we have created an industry in Roswell where there was none before -- the tourist industry. We get 1,000 people a day through Roswell, and those people are buying airplane tickets, eating in restaurants." 

Mayor Jennings sees himself as something of a visionary. "I've had this UFO stuff on my letterhead, my business cards, since I was elected in 1994. My predecessor didn't want to hear about UFOs; he said everyone would think we're kooks." Too busy basking in his 15 minutes of renown to worry about whether or not his predecessor was right, Mayor Jennings went off, after our conversation, to open a trade fair in Groeningen, Holland, leaving his secretaries to curate his office, which, with its weight of UFO memorabilia and framed newspaper clippings, could qualify as Roswell's third UFO museum. 

I'm not the only one with mixed emotions about my town's new fame. While some residents hedge their bets, echoing Mayor Jennings's opinion that "it would be arrogant of our society to assume that we're the only life in the universe," others, like housewife and musician Tina Williams, dismiss the whole thing, seeing it as a waste of time and refusing point-blank to enter the UFO museums even in the cause of friendship. Some residents are merely indignant that the media portray Roswell as a hick town in the middle of nowhere, when in fact it's the population center of southeastern New Mexico and home to the nation's largest mozzarella factory. 

Some people, like my stepfather, Donald B. Anderson, up and left town to avoid the crowds during anniversary week. Mr. Anderson, a resident since 1946 and therefore a first-hand witness of events in Roswell on July 6, 1947, points out that UFO sightings were a common occurrence in America during that particular period: "The only thing different about the Roswell incident is that they actually had some pieces of something." 

The Enigma Museum's Mr. Price sums up the ambivalence of many locals. "I've made my wife's dream come true," he says. "We've put Roswell on the map. Everyone used to think we were part of Mexico. On the other hand, it's a circus, all this hype." Mr. Price has not contributed much to the hype, nor has he made a pile from the UFO craze; a genuine and principled believer, he is critical of the way the "other museum" publicizes every new UFO item, however spurious, thereby discrediting the whole incident in the eyes of skeptics. He recently sold his museum for a relatively modest sum, freeing himself up to pursue serious UFO research. 

But regrets or no regrets, Roswell is going to be the "UFO city" for years to come. Plans for next year's July 4th UFO spectacle are in the works, and some, like Barb Sauerman at the mayor's office, are already thinking ahead to the 100th anniversary in 2047. "Wouldn't it be great," she muses, "if something else landed here before then?"