'UFO TOWN' FINALLY BEGINS TO HAVE SOME

Internet UFO Group Media Archive

From:smitty@schmitzware.com
Title:'UFO TOWN' FINALLY BEGINS TO HAVE SOME
Source:Los Angeles Times
Date:Feburary 25, 1996


'UFO Town' Finally Begins to Have Some Fun With Mystery Crash in

1947

New Mexico: Roswell plans second annual festival for this summer.

But some still wonder what really fell to Earth on that long-ago night.

By SUE ANNE PRESSLEY, WASHINGTON POST

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."

Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times, 1996.

DAVIS, DOUGLAS, 'UFO Town' Finally Begins to Have Some Fun With Mystery

Crash in 1947; New Mexico: Roswell plans second annual festival for this

summer. But some still wonder what really fell to Earth on that long-ag.,

Los Angeles Times, 02-25-1996, pp B-4.