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