No no it didn’t.
⋞Something Happened Here: Roswell prepares for Pentagon’s UFO report⋟
On the eve of the release of the Pentagon’s highly anticipated report on unidentified aerial phenomena, life here in one of the world’s UFO hotspots was exceedingly normal.
Downtown’s alien souvenir shops and the International UFO Museum welcomed a steady stream of visitors escaping their pandemic malaise on Thursday as coronavirus restrictions continued to loosen in New Mexico.
The US government will release a declassified report on Friday detailing its analysis of various unidentified flying phenomena. City leaders hope that outsiders’ enthusiasm about the report will pique their interest in visiting.
Pretty much lays it all out there. There are some fascinated folks, a fantacist or two, and some locals who never think a thing about it, except it separates the first two from their money.
Born and raised there in the early 60s, I never heard of it in detail until the 90s. My grandparents (with my mother and siblings in tow) moved to Roswell in June 1947, a few weeks before an Air Force/NYU screw-up experiment crashed 70 miles north. My grandfather may have mentioned it in passing in the 70s or so and people remembered it, but not as anything real. When the 50th came around, so did the tourists and their cash, and <ka-ching> Roswell, where Billy the Kid nosed around, had something going for it besides the fireworks factory (which blew up), the mozzarella cheese factory (no, really), the bus-manufacturing center (belly-up), and the airliner graveyard going for it. Ever since, it’s aliens everywhere.
The Plains Theater is where I saw my first movie in a theater (Walt Disney’s <em>Blackbeard’s Ghost</em> with the unfortunate press-ganging of Peter Ustinov and Elsa Lanchester—poor souls, it was like putting Leonardo da Vinci and Georgia O’Keefe into a Quentin Tarantino movie—into typical-for-the-period Disney fare with its ubiquitous Dean Jones, a movie that scared the bejeezus out of me and I started crying and my sister had to take me to the lobby—Disney movies still scare the bejeezus out of me. Ugh.). Anyway. The Plains is now the … ahem … “International UFO Research and Science Museum” or something like that, and there are lots of mannequins and green paint and some books, I’m given to understand, where I stood and cried at being forced to see Dean Jones try to keep up while Elsa and Peter wiped the floor with him.
Ugh.
Roswell is a farm town. The fields around the city on the Pecos, where my grandfather farmed from 1947 to 1971, grow alfalfa and dairy cows. My field trip in first grade at Parkview Elementary School was to a dairy. There’s some oil bidness that fluctuates and a lotta windmills.
And that’s it. No cosmic crash landings or autopsies, no gummint conspiracy, just miles of sagebrush and yucca plants and cows and antelope and pecans and a stupid attempt to fool the Soviets when both they and we were up to very much Double Plus-Ungood.
It’s my hometown. I’m proud of being a New Mexican. Being a Roswellian is more of a conversation piece, but heck I’m proud of that, too. Prouder of the mountains to the west and the state and the skies and wind and storms and sunsets. But if you want aliens? Drive up to Santa Fe and gawk at the Californians or to Ruidoso and gawk at the Texans.
