‘UFO Town’ Finally Begins to Have Some Fun With Mystery Crash in 1947

ROSWELL, N.M. —  Something crashed out here nearly 50 years ago, out where the town gives way to the empty hills and the bright stars.

Maybe it was “a flying saucer,” as the Army first said. Or just a weather balloon, as the Army said the next day. Or a listening device for spying on the Soviets, as the federal government announced only last year. But there are old-timers here who will always look at the big, clear sky with the slightest shiver and wonder what really happened.

Nobody knew it then, but on that evening in early July 1947, the fate, and the very identity, of this unassuming town was forever sealed. The theories about forces beyond our ken, the dark whispers of governmental cover-ups, the hopes of believers everywhere in alien journeys and visitors in silvery suits, have come together in this far-flung spot: Roswell, the UFO Town.

“People didn’t want to have fun with this for a long time,” said Stan Crosby, 45, a lifelong resident who is organizing the town’s second annual UFO festival for this summer. “This was a military town. People kept their mouths shut. There are still tender feelings about this. And some people felt like Roswell didn’t need to be known as a kook city.”

Were it not for the mystery of 1947, Roswell, population 45,000, might have been nothing more glamorous than the cheese capital of southeastern New Mexico, a city of overachieving retirees in a rolling but not terribly picturesque landscape of artesian wells and dairy farms.

But in the town square on Main Street sits the two-year-old International UFO Museum and Research Center, a flying saucer proudly launched from its roof. Within, volunteers such as Hugh Barker speak knowledgeably about aliens emerging from “the mother ship.”

“My interest is the interest of believers everywhere,” said Barker, who retired here a dozen years ago from Chicago.

Nearly 80,000 people a year, from all the states and 60 countries, come to Roswell and this museum, looking for something.

There are differing degrees of belief in the UFO Town. Mayor Thomas Jennings tries to sell the area’s agricultural strengths, but the official Roswell pin is still shaped like a flying saucer beaming down rays of otherworldly light.

The tongue-in-cheek return address for the festival committee is Roswell, N.M., USA, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy. Out beyond the town limits 25 miles, at Eden Valley Farm, owner Hub Corn directs guided tours of the cracked earth where the glittering wreckage was strewn, for $15 a person; last time Japanese visitors were here, they rented helicopters. The town’s embarrassment has gradually turned into cheerful enterprise.

This land has been part of a shadowy outpost of government activity situated among the talismans of the Atomic Age: Los Alamos, White Sands, the Trinity site. In the 1930s Robert Goddard did his early experiments with rocketry in Roswell; the 509th Bomb Group, still stationed at Roswell Air Field in 1947, was trained to deliver the Big One.

With that kind of background, believers venture, the town would have been an obvious curiosity to any unearthly forces wanting to look things over.

It was only about 10 years ago, with the first books claiming to rip the lid off the Roswell secret, that curious and long-withheld facts began to emerge. Then, as interest in the otherworldly began to steamroll, with television hits such as “X-Files,” the stigma of believing in a world beyond began to dissolve. People in Roswell began to talk.

The events of early July 1947 are preserved on the front pages of the Roswell Daily Record. First came this startling headline on July 8: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” with the information that a respected hardware store owner and his wife had watched from their front porch several evenings earlier as a glowing object zoomed through the skies and disappeared over the treetops.

The Army offered few details, except to say that the disk was flown “to higher headquarters.”

But the next day, July 9, the newspaper reported a “never-mind” attitude from top brass at the airfield. Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey coolly announced, according to the article, that the “mysterious objects found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless, high-altitude weather balloon--not a grounded flying disk.”

In a separate story, rancher W. W. Brazel, then 46, on whose property the remnants were found, said he was sorry that he had ever mentioned the wreckage.

“If I find anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it,” Brazel, now deceased, was reported as saying.

The mystery and the madness of those first days are vivid memories to Walter Haut, then a young first lieutenant who worked as press officer at the airfield.

Instructed by his superior, who was supposedly acting on orders from Washington, Haut wrote the initial press release reporting the flying saucer. But, curiously, he said, after the weather-balloon report came out, no one at the base ever mentioned the episode again. It was taboo.

Haut, 74 and a founder of the nonprofit UFO museum, is not sure if he believes in alien craft--”although we are darn foolish if we think we are the only ones”--but he does believe that there was a government cover-up of something.

“As time goes by, the story changes. More witnesses have come forward,” Haut said. “The current theory is, as I see it, there were two craft, they had a midair collision. . . . If the government could prove it was a weather balloon or something else, we’d say, well, thank you. We want proof one way or the other.”