Roswell: story of a city haunted by UFOs
Roswell, a city in the middle of the New Mexico desert, looks like something out of a science fiction movie. It is not a metaphor. Whoever walks by, even for a few minutes, can see almost anything with a UFO stamp on it. There are street lamps with alien heads, billboards decorated with spaceships, shops of all sizes filled with space-themed objects or hotels with facades decorated with aliens. The McDonald's that is not lacking in any city in the United States, is shaped like a flying saucer, is silver in color and is surrounded by neon lights that light up at night.
This city of almost 50,000 inhabitants lives on UFO tourism. Since the 1990s, a constant flow of visitors and onlookers have made a pilgrimage to the site, either to investigate the supposed extraterrestrial phenomenon with their own eyes or simply to buy a souvenir. "All this, fueled by the successful world premieres of The X Files in 1993 or Independence Day in 1996, productions that addressed the famous Roswell UFO incident of July 1947," explains Spanish writer Javier Sierra, author of Roswell: State Secret (Edaf, 1995).
That incident dates back to the morning of July 8 of that year. The United States woke up with a surreal news that monopolized some headlines in its newspapers. "Military Capture Flying Saucer on Ranch Near Roswell," read the front page of the Roswell Daily Record that morning. From that day on, this lonely and somewhat boring little town ceased to be the dairy capital of the Southwest and became known as one of the most mysterious places in the country.
The alleged interplanetary encounter had occurred a few days before the media scandal. On July 2, “Farmer William Brazel was walking across the grassy pasture toward his flock of sheep. A summer storm had swept across the desert the night before. Suddenly, an unknown sight caught his attention: metal debris lay on the ground,” describes the article Roswell's Mysteries Are Life's Mysteries published in The New York Times in 2017, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the case.
Brazel reported the event to the police. Authorities inspected the find. Days later, the US Army claimed that the Roswell UFO was actually a weather balloon. “These communications disproving the spacecraft theory quickly block the case and from there Roswell was forgotten for many years. In the early 1980s, some retired soldiers revived the mystery,” says Sierra.
There was a renewed interest in the mystery. The television series Project UFO: UFO Investigation (1978-1979), a kind of precursor to The X-Files, popularized the concept of Project Blue Book, as the US Army calls UFO studies carried out by the Air Force to determine if they pose a threat to national security. Within these reports (and the series) is the one from Roswell. In 1980, two occult authors, William More and Charles Bitz, published The Roswell Incident. Here, too, the matter was dealt with in detail. It would be the model that many other volumes followed later. The key word here is speculation.
In the 1990s, other disseminators turned to Air Force reports to clarify the true nature of the alleged Roswell UFO. The important thing, they said, was not the Blue Book but Project Mogul. "This project tried to detect (by means of balloons capable of reaching great heights) Soviet nuclear weapons," wrote science popularizer Carl Sagan in The World and Its Demons (Planeta, 1995).
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For some believers in the UFO phenomenon, the Roswell case will never cease to be indisputable proof that we have contacted aliens. The rest believe, it is true, that it is a completely terrestrial event fueled by conspiracy theories and sweetened by an aesthetic that has evolved almost into parody. But in the end, today, defenders of both sides come to this curious city in search of answers at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, the most emblematic site of the place.
“In the museum there are two very interesting things: the press cuttings from 1947 and the dummies that were used in the fifties to do resistance tests. Some people believe that these dolls could have given rise to the legend of the alien bodies of Roswell”, explains Sierra, referring to those famous fraudulent videos that came to light in 1995. Supposedly, an alleged autopsy was shown to the dying aliens that captured from the ships.
“The rest of the museum is pure folklore. Perhaps the most valuable thing is a huge room where the best public library dedicated to the Roswell case and the UFO phenomenon in general in the United States is located”, recalls Javier Sierra, who has visited this city three times: in 1991, in 1997 and in 2019.
The other contribution of the Roswell story to the world, that of popular culture, is very extensive. There are hundreds of references to the case in movies, series, books, comics and music. There's the romantic series Roswell, New Mexico (1999), about an urban teenager who discovers her boyfriend is an alien disguised as a human; the conspiracy B-movie Hangar 18 (1980), directed by James L. Conway, and the visit of the world's most agitated archaeologist in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). The song Roswell 47, by the Swedish gothic metal band Hipocrisy, adds roars, long hair and guitars to the story.
Where the incident has truly changed lives is among the people of Roswell. Every year during the first week of July, the UFO Festival is held, a festivity that includes a costume contest –including mascots–, concerts and talks with researchers and ufologists. In fact, it is one of the most important events in New Mexico.
Do the Roswellians themselves believe that the incident that marked their city has any truth to it? “When I went I did not find survivors or people who have had a direct relationship with the case. However, many local people are faithful believers that there was an encounter with aliens in 1947”, highlights, for his part, Javier Arcenillas, photojournalist and author of UFO Presences (RM, 2018), a photobook that shows the most iconic UFO places and close to Area 51, located in southern Nevada. “The people who work in the museum and those who live in Roswell are never obliged to believe it, what they do is invite you to take a trip through a certain area and discover if that is interesting for you or not. ”, Arcenillas points out.
At the beginning of last June, the United States Government released a report on the unidentified flying objects seen by Navy pilots between 2004 and 2015. The main objective was to clarify what they were. Although the White House has not accepted that they are of an extraterrestrial nature, it does not know what they are either and acknowledges that there are facts that are difficult to explain. This is the same thing that has happened with Roswell: over the years there have been countless documents and speeches that talk about the subject. All of them with a different explanation and theory. "The UFO phenomenon is a great intellectual challenge, it is there to remind us that we do not know everything that is around us," concludes Sierra.
