From: RSchatte@aol.com
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 14:30:59 -0400 (EDT)
Fwd Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 23:30:41 -0400
Subject: Re: Aliens Abduct City's Identity

By Anne Midgette, The Wall Street Journal

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 -- polled Herefords grazing their way toward
feedlot mortality with bovine indifference toward anything alien to their
alimentary calling.

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?"

Copyright (c) 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.


Transmitted: 9/3/97 11:15 AM EDT (L100YVyM)