Roswell: The Loonies Have Landed

A visit to New Mexico’s annual UFO Festival

Hi and welcome to all of you new readers. Click around, see what you like, and if you’re so inclined, it’s so incredibly easy to buy a paid subscription. My old pal (and longtime foreign correspondent) Richard Ehrlich recently passed along this gem: on June 6 of this year, the Wall Street Journal X feed posted an irresistible clickbait: “UFO myths gripped America for decades, and the Pentagon finally figured out where a lot of them came from. It was the Pentagon.”

Apparently all UFO sightings can now be fully explained! They were the work of the U.S. government! It’s that simple! Read the entire WSJ story here (no paywall). But if you’re curious how it resonates in the UFO world, just read the comments: “No official documentation has emerged to support the WSJ's account, and the dismissal of credible witness reports without hard evidence seems less like journalism and more like a calculated effort to reframe history.” In other words, the truth is still out there!

This July 4 weekend marks 29 years of the Roswell UFO festival, based on the 1947 discovery of an alleged alien spaceship crash in New Mexico. During the X-Files/conspiracy zeitgeist of UFO paranoia in the 1990s, I got an assignment to this festival, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the crash. I met two zine publishers in L.A., Greg Bishop (The Excluded Middle), and Ralph Coon (The Last Prom), and we cruised through the desert to New Mexico, while they filled me in on characters like Art Bell and Bob Lazar, and the endless labyrinth of UFO subculture. We arrived and spent the week canoeing through a swamp of true believers and skeptics, abductees and opportunists, researchers and nut cases, and endless displays of alien merchandise. I filed three reports from Roswell, and an edited version appears below. It was 1997, so you’ll have to forgive the reportorial style of the era. Portions of this were originally published in Salon, The New York Times Magazine, and SF Weekly.

July 2, 1997

“I want a one-way ticket,” says a woman at the roadside fireworks stand outside Moriarty, N.M. She’s speaking about hitching a ride on a UFO at Roswell, 95 miles to the southeast. “I don’t want to come back!” 

Moriarty, she tells me, is the “pinto bean capital of the world,” and says that there are plenty of things to do in town, including blowing up Gulf War-strength firecrackers on July 4. But no. I’m due at Roswell to observe the 50th anniversary of the alleged 1947 UFO crash, the granddaddy, as we’ve learned from The X-Files, of all government coverups. Besieged by UFO nutbags from all over the world, the week-long festival, which began Tuesday, is doubling Roswell’s population of 50,000. The local Chamber of Commerce is billing it as the Woodstock of Flying Saucers, and a new Holiday Inn has been built just for the occasion.

Towns like this do their best to play the cards they’ve been dealt. Moriarty’s ball team is called the Pintos. Truth or Consequences, N.M., named after the old TV game show, has a Ralph Edwards Park, in honor of its host. But Roswell has them all beat. Ground Zero for advanced Western civilization’s current cultural obsession, it boasts an International UFO Museum & Research Center, a competing UFO Enigma Museum, two separate UFO crash sites, and a debris site. This week it is hosting tens of thousands of hardcore aficionados devoted to strange lights, unsubstantiated rumors, ominous acronyms like MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), black helicopters, mutilated cattle, probed abductees and Gillian Anderson. All in all, the makings of a very profitable summer.

The road signs indicate we’re nearing Roswell. “Crash here for best prime rib in the galaxy.” “Tastee Freez food is out of this world.” “The aliens have landed at Quilt Talk.” A local TV station’s studio foyer announces, “Take me to your news leader.”

We check in at the Chamber of Commerce building for press credentials. The trade show room is setting up for the onslaught of books, videos and the hundred gazillion separate products featuring the alien head logo, the smiley face of the ’90s. One table sells tickets to the various symposia of UFO supporters and detractors, bicycle races, pancake eating contests, films, plays and tours of the crash site. An Alien Espresso stand sells drinks. A few children scurry past in alien costumes.

The main speaker at Tuesday’s press conference is Robert O. Dean, sharply dressed in sportcoat, tie and slacks, his hair pulled back in a gray ponytail. Dean is a retired U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. who was attached in the 1960s to SHAPE, the military arm of NATO. He says he was once shown a NATO Top Secret document that admitted NATO’s knowledge of UFOs and extraterrestrials, and now lectures on government coverups. Press nerds take notes and munch from the complimentary buffet. Dean tells us that the kids walking around in alien costumes are fine, and add color to the proceedings, but that we shouldn’t laugh. The issue is real.

“There are many young people out here,” he says to the room, “who are going to win Pulitzers about this. If you dig deep enough, and don’t believe the government BULLSHIT.” Five days to go. Plenty of time to win a Pulitzer. 

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July 5, 1997

Perhaps 150 people shuffle into a ballroom at the Roswell Inn, armed with notebooks, camcorders and varying degrees of patience—an ill-dressed bunch of locals, crackpots, ersatz researchers, and media. Tonight’s debate could be called the Clash of the Titans: the UFO believers vs. the Project Mogul crowd. Was the 1947 Roswell crash indeed an alien spacecraft out for a joyride, or was the debris simply a top-secret military balloon project, with human-sized test dummies? The room buzzes with anticipation.

Kevin Randle, former Air Force intelligence officer and co-author of two books on Roswell, plays to the cheap seats. His pro-UFO stance attracts a built-in audience of true believers and adheres to the classic “Release the files!” position about the incident. His books are guaranteed to sell, but he loves the camera too much for many.

At this moment the high-energy Randle is being interviewed by a camera crew. The Project Mogul balloon explanation, released just a few weeks ago by the Air Force, is “absolutely preposterous.” When the sound bites are over and a producer strokes him with a “Nicely done ... thank you, sir,” Randle beams and replies, “I tried to be ...” making a gung-ho motion with his fist. Everybody nods. It looked great.

Randle ascends to the dais, where his nemesis, Karl Pflock, is already seated. Pflock has also been researching Roswell for several years, boasting credentials from the Justice Department and the CIA, and has done many recent national TV appearances. Both men scribble in copies of their respective books for fans. While Randle’s tomes are hardback with flashy color covers, Pflock’s published works are stapled and photocopied monographs. Somebody needs a better literary agent.

For the next two hours, Randle and Pflock square off in the arena of Who Has Done Better Research, like two pimpled Ivy Leaguers in the College Bowl championships. The absence of certain facts in the Roswell case does not deter either:

“I have this directly from his daughter, in writing,” claims Pflock at one point.

“I fully intended to get this on tape,” Randle says later of one key witness, “but then he got sick.”

Unfortunately, both men are so careful to appear professional and thorough, the grandiose, obviously specious elements of earlier researchers—from my point of view, the sole attraction of the entire UFO debate—are lost. Where are the fudged testimonies, the ludicrous exaggerations, the data copied verbatim from other books without regard to fact-checking?

(My personal favorite of the UFO sub-genres is the Historical Re-creation, in which the writer lovingly re-creates the scene of the alleged UFO sighting, mixing in all known facts and jargon with strangely dense details, as in: “Dawn was just breaking on the morning of November 7, 1948. The air was crisp and clear, with a smattering of high-level cirrus clouds that would burn off by mid-morning. Captain Steven Montell was a pilot with the Arizona National Guard 137th Fighter Squadron, and had logged 2,867.25 hours of flight time, with an impeccable safety record. At exactly 0640 hours he pulled the stick back on his oxygen-equipped F-51D and the sleek silver bird rose gracefully off the cold tarmac at Saguerro Field. His fuel tanks were full. St. Montell’s breakfast had consisted of the usual: coffee, toast, and a handful of DR-31 aviator roto-compression tablets, designed to counteract the servotrack neuro-relay syndrome, i.e. a force of 5 Gs or more....”)

Neither Randle nor Pflock produce such seductive tinsel, but Randle does save the evening from complete boredom by resorting to cheap theatrics. As Pflock rambles on about the Project Mogul balloon construction materials, and how the Scotch tape and wood and foil obviously match exactly the witness descriptions of materials found at the crash site, Randle cuts him off:

“You want some Scotch tape? I’ve got Scotch tape!” He pulls out a tape dispenser and stretches out a few feet of tape. “Wood? I’ve got wood.” He snaps a piece of wood over his head. “Kite string? Foil?” He shows them to the crowd, then throws it all dramatically to the dais and declares, “THAT’S Project Mogul.” The crowd roars with laughter and applause.

Pflock looks perplexed, deboned like a fish in a frying pan. Many people get up and walk out. The debate continues, but it’s all downhill now. The two find many points upon which they agree—the dubious nature of certain witnesses, the credibility of other researchers and, most significantly, the contaminated nature of the entire Roswell case.

Finding out what happened at Roswell is not why people are still driving into town with “Roswell or bust!” scrawled on the sides of their RVs. It no longer matters what happened 50 years ago. All the publicity has made it impossible to discern fact from fiction. The two museums don’t care if aliens exist or not, as long as the tourists keep buying up the T-shirts and jars of “Alien Salsa.” 

What matters most, and what will endure long after all the original witnesses and researchers are food for worms, is the quality of human stubbornness—that strength to stick to your convictions, allow little or no room for opposing views, filter in only the information that are essential, pore over the details, think about all of the lies and corruption that prevent your views from achieving final incontrovertible truth, and settle in for a lifetime of simmering unfulfillment.

I wander over with a few UFO friends to the lounge of the Roswell Inn. Three tables are shoved together, filled with chain-smoking veterans of the UFO convention circuit.

“Is it over yet?” barks one middle-aged woman over the flamenco guitarist.

“It’s been going on for two hours.”

“It’s been going on for 25 years,” announces another. The table laughs. 

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July 7, 1997

New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson stands outside the Roswell Convention Center, wearing a blue work shirt, jeans, and an alien-head pendant around his neck. News cameras weasel in for the sound bites, to be blasted across the nation:

“I visited the museum, and it was unbelievable,” says the governor enthusiastically. “An amazing story. It was all there, except for a few facts.” He then puts his arms around two little girls clad in alien costumes with almond-shaped eyes and spindly fingers, and strolls into the building, chased by chubby cameramen.

The Convention Center entrance has transformed into a cheap circus. Next to the Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride floats a 20-foot inflatable alien, tethered to a truck parked on the lawn. Competing radio stations blast Pink Floyd and that silly hippie song “White Bird.” A big tent provides shade for reporters to deliver live updates for MSNBC. In the middle it all, painted green and sporting fuzzy emerald antennae, a poor burro offers rides to children. 

Seminars and speakers continue, some of them attracting sellout audiences, but most of Roswell doesn’t care about inductively coupled plasma testing of space minerals or abductee confessionals. They’re here for the junk. 

The aisles of the main expo room have been choked all week with white-trash stomachs and butts, noisy baby strollers, and the occasional human time bomb—a greasy-haired individual wearing a “Take Me to Your Dealer” T-shirt and pointing a camcorder at everything. 

There is no burning need for anyone to own a genuine homemade “Indian Alien Napkin Holder.” God did not create rocks so that one day someone in New Mexico could spray-paint them gold and dab in a pair of alien eyes. Society does not cry out for Alien Artificial Insemination Kits (a package of Palmolive dishwashing soap, a sponge and an eyedropper). A package of “alien” earrings bears the soothing message “The Alien family is a motley collection of interplanetary characters whose primary goal is to bring humor and good will to a serious society of earthlings.” These products do have one thing going for them, however. Unlike Roswell’s excessively discussed extraterrestrial visitors, they actually exist.

More booths. One display pitches The Book of Urantia, purportedly written by 23 aliens, and features a slinky young girl in a black form-fitting catsuit with sunglasses, coyly asking passersby, “Are you fully developed?” 

Two little boys in enormous cowboy hats sit behind a table of antique pocketknives, most notably “The Roswell Incident Knife,” a gleaming pig-sticker emblazoned with an alien face. The boys say the knife is the brainchild of a friend of their grandpa’s: “He designed the alien head, and they made it in Germany.” 

Pamela Stonebrooke, aka the Intergalactic Diva, plays her music on a boom box. She has been abducted and impregnated by extraterrestrials four times, and her cassette tape includes songs about her alien-sex experiences.

It’s really a great country, when you think about it.

Not all locals are alien-friendly. Throughout the week, a steady grumbling can be heard from the bowels of the city as citizens watch their innocent hamlet become a Fellini film. “I’m sick of it,” says a high school girl pouring coffee at the Alien Caffeine booth. An onsite masseuse named Katy scowls: “This is so commercial it makes me sick to my stomach.” Another local, attending a banquet for legendary UFO writer Whitley Streiber, adds: “The only little green men in Roswell are the faces of the dead presidents on fives, tens and twenties.”

In search of more informed perspective, I track down James Moseley, who has been covering the UFO scene since the 1950s. He publishes a witty gossip magazine called Saucer Smear, devoted to the latest in flying saucer discoveries, laced with skeptical, irreverent coverage of the names and faces jostling for space in the field. All the major players read it. Its slogan, “Shockingly Close to the Truth,” is also the title of his upcoming autobiography. (Another occasional subtitle, “A boil on the ass of ufology,” was contributed by an enraged reader.) Over a couple of stiff Seagram’s in the Pecos Pub lounge of the Roswell Inn Hotel, Moseley talks about the weirdness of Roswell and the UFO field in general. 

“The Roswell thing is one of the most fascinating phenomena within the UFO field that I can possibly imagine,” he says. “I am delighted to be here because I’ve never before gone to a festival honoring the 50th anniversary of nothing.”

According to Moseley, the country was primed for Roswell because it had already been driven into a state of minor hysteria by the so-called Arnold Sighting in 1947, which made national headlines. 

“Had it not been for all the background of all the newspaper stories following the Arnold report, they would have realized this is basically garbage the guy found on his farm.” He stops himself, realizing how damning the statement is.

“I mean, that is sacrilege. That is heavy sacrilege. In the ’50s, when I was first interested in saucers, and I incidentally had a chance to talk to some very important people, I never asked them about Roswell or MJ-12 [government documents about UFOs], because these had not been invented yet. It was not part of our culture. In all those early years, Roswell was never mentioned in the early UFO books. It just wasn’t a big deal until it was made a big deal by professional writers who had obvious motives.”

I mention that both UFO museums in Roswell offer very little in the way of an opposing view about the Roswell case.

“There is very little money in writing negative books, on anything,” answers Moseley. “Especially saucers or the paranormal. It’s like going to the Vatican and arguing atheism. You don’t get a big audience.”

What does he think of the claims of a massive government cover-up? 

“The government is so incompetent, in general and specifically, that it is insane to believe that they are capable of holding a conspiracy together for 50 years, or even five years or five months, because somebody’s gonna spill it,” he says.

“They are not just one monolithic force against us, the people. They are a bunch of nuts just like we are, and they make mistakes. People talk about former military people who supposedly won’t tell the truth about Roswell because they’re afraid of losing their pensions. Now think about it. If you had an artifact from another planet, or proof that there was a landing here or anywhere else, do you think you would worry about losing your pension? You’d get a million dollars from the National Enquirer right off the top, and you’d go on making money for the rest of your life. I love paranoia, I get that way myself sometimes, but you can really overdo it.”

How has the UFO field changed over the years? 

“The basic format, the kind of people, the kind of minds that are attracted to it, are not different at all,” he says. “The aliens are getting weirder. But the fun thing is, they don’t kill people, and when people are abducted, they always come back.”