ROSWELL OR BUST

A town discovers manna crashing from heaven and becomes the capital of

America's alien nation

By BRUCE HANDY/ROSWELL

The city of Roswell, N.M. (pop. 49,000), is the birthplace of Demi Moore. It

is also home to the nation's largest mozzarella plant. On warm spring nights,

visitors deplaning onto the tarmac at the local airport may be struck, in a

not necessarily unpleasant way, by the rich, manurelike odor rolling in from

the surrounding ranchlands. But none of these things is what Roswell is most

famous for.

A half-century has passed, and Roswell's citizens are still struggling to

come to grips with the strange events that put the city on the national map

and made its name a national buzz word connoting both otherworldliness and

governmental perfidy. "Some people come up to me and say, 'Gosh, I don't like

this. I don't want to be known as the kook capital,'" says Bill Pope, interim

CEO of the Roswell Chamber of Commerce, speaking with the easygoing charm and

booster's earnestness one expects in a Southwestern city father. He is

referring to next month's three-day gala marking the golden anniversary of the

alleged crash in 1947 of a flying saucer near Roswell. It is a civic

distinction that was long ignored by most Roswellians--Moore, for one, says

she never heard of it while growing up--until a recent surge of national

interest in extraterrestrial phenomena, both "real" and fictive, convinced

locals that rather than be ashamed of their heritage, they might instead make

some money from UFO-related tourism.

Pope puts it this way: "I've been in a lot of communities in my lifetime. I

was near a community in Oklahoma one time that had the champion

cow-chip-throwing contest. And there's a little community not far from us over

here that has lizard races. What it all comes down to is having something to

create an interest in your community. And we have something to create

interest, and that creates an inflow of people, and that creates dollars, and

that's what we're all about." He hands a visitor a lapel pin emblazoned with

the legend ROSWELL 1947 and the image of a smiling spaceman waving from a

flaming UFO shaped like a Stetson hat--a unique spin on an event that, if it

actually occurred, was surely one of the most momentous in history; no one

would argue that it doesn't trump lizard races. And so the town is gearing up,

not entirely wholeheartedly, for what it is calling Roswell UFO Encounter '97,

a celebration that will include a flying-saucer Soap Box Derby, films,

symposiums (speakers include Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the

Gods?) and what an organizer describes as "a UFO belly dancer." Crowds of

upwards of 100,000 are hoped for.

Outside city limits, the name Roswell speaks to less tangible concerns. Like

the black helicopters of the new world order or the racist-police conspiracy

to frame O.J. Simpson, the Incident, as it is known, is either pretty

sensational stuff or yet another of the ingenious tales those of us who

mistrust mainstream institutions tell ourselves to help make sense of a scary,

sometimes depressing world. In this case, it is a tale that combines deeply

American strains of spirituality and paranoia as well as--let us be frank--a

large scoop of native wackiness. One could even say, if one were inclined to

put yet another spin on the following cliche, that we have met the aliens and

they are us. In fact, to judge from the way they are most often depicted,

aliens have sprung from the same corner of the national psyche that has a

thing for Walter Keane's paintings of grotesquely doe-eyed children. Unless,

of course, aliens actually look like that.

Everyone agrees that something crashed in the desert outside Roswell in

mid-June or early July 1947. On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a

press release saying it had recovered the wreckage of a "flying disk,"

sparking incredulous news stories around the world. A few hours later, a

general at the regional Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, where the

debris had been sent for further analysis, announced that what had really been

recovered was a weather balloon. This is the indisputable core of the Roswell

Incident. Whether one chooses to believe that the government has been covering

up an affair involving extraterrestrials is, of course, a more subjective

matter. But because Roswell represents the only time the U.S. military has

gone on record saying that flying saucers exist, it has become a cornerstone

of belief for the UFO community. They are, by the way, quite a diverse and

fractious group of folks--studies say they tend to be better educated than the

norm--whose numbers include casual believers; so-called UFOlogists, most of

whom are pretty earnest in their efforts to document UFO sightings with

something approaching objective rigor; contactees, who believe they have had

telepathic communication with aliens; abductees, who believe they have been

subjected to experimentation by E.T.s; and cultists like the Heaven's Gaters,

who are an enormous source of embarrassment to their comparatively

sober-minded confreres. But despite their many differences, for nearly all of

them Roswell is central, a way into the darkness. Peculiar theories ripple out

from Roswell. So do further-ranging cultural tides.

According to a TIME/Yankelovich poll, 34% of Americans believe intelligent

beings from other planets have visited Earth; of those, 65% believe a UFO

crash-landed near Roswell, and 80% believe the U.S. government knows more

about extraterrestrials than it chooses to let on. But those numbers don't

quite capture Roswell's current hot-button status. "Five years ago, if you

made an offhand reference to Roswell, nobody would know what you meant. Now

everybody does." So says Kevin Randle, a UFOlogist who, as co-author of the

seminal UFO Crash at Roswell and its follow-up, The Truth About the UFO Crash

at Roswell, is one of the Incident's heartiest champions. His efforts achieved

a not entirely positive validation on Dec. 1, 1995, when President Bill

Clinton, on a state visit to Ireland, said the following during a speech in

Belfast: "I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if

you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as

far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in

1947. [Pause for laughter, according to an official transcript.] And, Ryan, if

the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me

about it either, and I want to know. [Applause.]" UFOlogists will tell you

bitterly about the way Jimmy Carter, while running for the presidency,

admitted he had seen a UFO, but then, once in office, reneged on promises to

open the government's flying-saucer files.

A lost opportunity. But on the cultural radar, presidential recognition

barely registers next to playing a pivotal role in a popcorn movie. In last

year's Independence Day, the seventh highest grossing film of all time, Bill

Pullman's President Whitmore also assures an audience the government has

nothing up its sleeve concerning UFOs and Roswell, only to be told by his

Secretary of Defense, "That's not entirely accurate." Well, sure--otherwise

the movie would be finished halfway through. Fortunately, the embattled

Earthlings are able to use the recovered Roswell saucer against the invaders

and triumph. Talk about vindication.

Roswell's pop-cultural apotheosis has been as an inescapable reference on Fox

Television's The X-Files, a paranormal Dragnet that details the efforts of two

wooden, underacted FBI agents to expose what has metastasized over the show's

four seasons into an increasingly baroque conspiracy between the Federal

Government and sinister extraterrestrials--a fiction whose particulars have

been cherry-picked from among the wilder theories flitting through the UFO

community. Its perspective is offered by John Price, founder of Roswell's UFO

Enigma Museum, which began in 1988 in the back of his video store and today

sprawls through four big rooms and features a homemade diorama of a crashed

saucer with blinking lights, surrounded by four dead-alien dolls and a stuffed,

seemingly unconcerned jackrabbit. Says Price: "The old sci-fi films were just

kind of made up from someone's imagination. But The X-Files calls us every

once in a while for information; a lot of the shows do. So a lot of your

sci-fi is based on facts, so to speak. And that makes it something that a lot

more people will watch, because they're getting more than just entertainment."

This observation is more or less true as well for two of this summer's

potential movie blockbusters: Men in Black, an inventive action-comedy loosely

based on lore about mysterious dark-suited agents who harass people who've

seen UFOs; and the more solemn Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel and said

to be, in the words of its director Bob Zemeckis, the rare alien movie "rooted

in true scientific believability." "We've done more for them than they do for

us," says Price of Hollywood. A handsome, weather-beaten man with surprisingly

still, pale blue eyes, he has no apparent enmity toward Hollywood, even though

he once got what sounds like the brush-off when he tried to persuade his second

cousin, the late producer Don Simpson, to make a movie based on Roswell.

On the Hollywood end of things, Peter Roth, the Fox Broadcasting Co.'s

Entertainment Group president, readily concedes that aliens have been good to

Fox: besides its well-rated The X-Files, the company's movie studio produced

Independence Day, and the network broadcast the patently hoaxed autopsy of a

creature supposedly recovered at Roswell. But when pressed as to his personal

feelings on the subject, Roth is willing to admit only that "there's something

in the cosmos that suggests there may be a presence elsewhere." Dean Devlin,

co-writer and producer of Independence Day, comes to the field more naturally:

he was steeped in UFO culture as a boy by a mother who dragged him to UFO

conventions. Although he's skeptical of official explanations of the Roswell

Incident, he doubts extraterrestrials were involved: "I don't know what it

was, but our government is so bad at keeping secrets, I have a hard time

believing that after all these years, the smoking gun hasn't appeared. I live

by the watchwords 'Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained

by incompetence.'"

Consumers who are interested in learning the thoughts of true believers

unmediated by people who drive Land Rovers can turn to the Internet, of

course, and to local bookstores. Over the past decade, the publishing industry

has pumped out dozens of books on Roswell and hundreds on UFOs in general. In

fact, according to Books in Print, there are nearly as many titles available

about UFOs (256) as there are about the Kennedys (266), who probably represent

the gold standard when it comes to unwarranted public interest in a subject.

Not surprisingly, many more Roswell books will be hitting the shelves just in

time to capitalize on the Incident's anniversary. The most notorious is Pocket

Books' The Day After Roswell, the volume that features a foreword by Strom

Thurmond that the Senator disavowed two weeks ago when he learned what the

book was actually about. Written by Philip J. Corso, a retired

Army-intelligence officer and former member of Thurmond's staff, The Day After

Roswell numbers among its many revelations the claim that ever since 1947,

when the Roswell crash put the military on alert, the U.S. government has been

fighting "the 'real' cold war" against what Corso says the military calls EBEs,

or extraterrestrial biological entities. Fortunately, it turns out, Ronald

Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative tipped the balance of power. As Corso

writes, "[The U.S. and U.S.S.R.] both knew who the real targets of SDI were

... When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit

for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew that they knew that we had our

defense of the planet in place."

With the '80s finally explained, we can return to the question of what really

happened at Roswell. According to which experts one chooses to believe: there

may have been more than one crash site; the U.S. government may have recovered

dead aliens (the number varies) as well as a salvageable spacecraft; the craft

may have been a secret government prototype and the dead aliens may have been

test chimps with their fur eerily singed off or, as Popular Mechanics

hypothesizes this month, imported Japanese pilots who had been flying similar

experimental craft during the war; then again, the wreckage may really have

been extraterrestrial, and one of the aliens may have been taken into custody

alive (the docudrama Roswell, which aired on Showtime in 1994, even implies

that the suicide of James Forrestal, Harry Truman's Secretary of Defense, was

caused by his inability to deal with the enormity of what had been

communicated to him telepathically by a captured alien); government scientists

may even have reverse-engineered alien technology, as Corso claims, and come

up with Stealth bombers and computer chips.

If alien society is anything like ours in its leanings toward tragicomedy,

the most believable explanation may come from Kristin Corn, the daughter of

Hub and Sheila Corn, ranchers whose property 30 or so miles outside of Roswell

is home to one of the alleged crash sites (Sheila offers pleasantly homespun

tours at $15 a head). Kristin's theory: the crash was caused by alien

teenagers who slipped away from a mother ship and went for a joyride, little

knowing that alleged film of one of their autopsies would one day appear on the

same network as World's Scariest Police Chases.

The real truth, assuming it doesn't involve a weather balloon, is made harder

to get at by the sometimes mutable memories of aging "witnesses" and the fact

that some of the most provocative evidence is secondhand. Industrious

UFOlogists may spend years tracking down slim leads like the one attributed to

a former cafe owner in Taos, N.M., who told interlocutors that an old

customer, a desert rat named Cactus Jack, once told her he was "out there when

the spaceship came down" and saw dead aliens with blood "like tar." But

despite the best efforts of Kevin Randle and others, no one has yet been able

even to confirm Jack's existence, let alone his veracity. Hunting spacemen can

be as daunting as finding the lady who dried her poodle in the microwave.

And yet it is the very murkiness of the Roswell Incident, the sense that it

is both knowable and yet never quite confirmable, that the answers are

hovering just beyond the horizon, that gives the Incident its enduring appeal;

after all, if the government ever really said "jig's up" and produced a

preserved alien for our delectation, we would be stunned for a day or two,

perturbed for a week longer, and then we would move on to the girl who gave

birth at the prom. As the makers of monster movies know, the unseen is always

more compelling than the seen. The particular appeal of Roswell's elusiveness,

and allusiveness, is captured in the canny words that appear at the end of The

X-Files' credit sequence: "The truth is out there." The point is made more

succinctly by the pins sold at the Enigma UFO Museum that read, simply,

BELIEVE. What we are talking about is a leap of faith.

Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler, professors of anthropology at Brandeis

University, have just published a study of what they call the Roswell Myth,

which in their view has "religious-like" elements without being religion per

se. Its primary purpose, Saler and Ziegler say, is twofold. One is as a means

of social protest, in that the Roswell story is in great part an

antigovernment narrative; as Zeigler points out, the Incident was largely

ignored until the late '70s, when it resurfaced and resonated with a public

made cynical by those twin devils, Vietnam and Watergate. By then too, the

Federal Government had grown so large and its concerns so cosmic--what with

the space program and a nuclear arsenal that could, if push came to shove,

wipe out humankind--that covert interactions with an alien culture might very

well seem within the realm of possibility (curiously, the supposedly advanced

alien race of Independence Day takes days to wipe out Earth's great cities,

when everyone knows we could do the job in a matter of minutes).

By positing a government conspiracy with limitless resources, the more

fervent believers in the Myth also inoculate themselves against heresy: any

concrete evidence the government or anyone else unearths to prove that the

crash was strictly terrestrial is obviously engineered-- it's a cannier brand

of fundamentalism. The appearance of skeptical articles in a national magazine

like this one could be part of a disinformation campaign to distract

letter-to-the- editor-writing UFOlogists from more fruitful pursuits. For all

you know, this author may be a member of an ultra-top-secret National Security

Council committee with a terribly spooky acronym.

But no one would work this hard to hash out such an enthrallingly elaborate

belief system-- the human imagination is depthless, the anthropologists point

out--if more profound needs weren't being met as well. At its core, the Myth

is a secular way to give the universe meaning, and humanity a renewed place at

the head of the table: not only are we not alone, not only are the skies

populated by superhuman beings, but their visits here are prima facie evidence

that we are of some consuming interest. In Saler's words, the Roswell Myth is

"an effort to put enchantment back in nature." UFOlogists, he says, "are

employing idioms of science in what is really a romantic pursuit. I find that

fascinating, even inspiring in a way."

An informal survey suggests that Roswellians themselves are generally less

inspired by the whole thing than amused, although some--Christian

Fundamentalists in particular--are offended by the city's growing embrace of

its unique legacy. "There's kind of a love-hate relationship with this thing,"

says Stan Crosby, a self-described oil-and-gas man who is the chief organizer

of Roswell UFO Encounter '97 (he is married to the director of the

International UFO Museum, the glitzier rival to the Enigma). "It's not like we

have the prettiest beach," admits Crosby, "or the Carlsbad Caverns. But you

know, we've got to go with what we've got. And it sure brings them in." He is

already thinking three years hence, when the theme will be Roswell UFO

Encounters: On to the Millennium.

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

June 23 1997 VOL. 149 NO 25