At Roswell Festival, Doubt Is an Alien Concept

Reptilian overlords aside, the aliens have been pretty good for little Roswell, population 45,000, which in recent years has embraced the 1947 flying saucer crash as a boomlet for tourism dollars. "We're told the motels are absolutely packed," said Roswell assistant city manager Bob Thomson. Is he a believer? "There's a lot of excitement this year," he said diplomatically.

Downtown, the street lamps of Roswell sport lights depicting almond-eyed ETs. The local liquor store's sign offers "aliens, beer, wine." Perhaps not in that order. At the Wool Bowl, thousands came out to hear the Alan Parsons Project play. At the convention center, a company is offering tours of the crash site, which is on a ranch west of town. They're selling alien cat scratches, glow-in-the-dark soap and Area 51 coffee mugs.

The crowds at the festival appear relatively sane. Many are from New Mexico, and they say they are here for the fun carnival atmosphere in tidy, laid-back Roswell. Some of the out-of-towners, the real enthusiasts, can be a little intense. They're like trekkies at a "Star Trek" convention, except that they pepper their conversations with the phrase: "And that can be authenticated."

Guy Malone is one of the official organizers of the weekend event. "There are a lot of views expressed here, and I share them all," he said. "Angels, fairies, demons, succubuses, ETs and aliens. They might all be the same phenomena."

Please, continue. "Hundreds of years ago," Malone explained, sporting black alien-style sunglasses, "it was elves and fairies taking you to a cave and poking you with wands or having weird sex in the woods." And today? "We call them aliens."

Why does the public not know all this? "The single largest number one roadblock to disclosure is the mainstream media," Dolan said. For example, he said, last year there was a UFO sighting in Chicago. Did you know that?

"A flying saucer-like object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon," according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration blamed "a weather phenomenon," but really, what else could they say? The problem, said Dolan, is not that the major media avoid such stories completely, "but they don't follow up."

The U.S. government, of course, has issued its share of reports debunking UFOs. Here in Roswell, those reports are generally seen as desperate attempts to whitewash the truth.

Yet there is hope for the Roswell set. Apparently from the French, who have declassified some of their UFO files. The British and Brazilians have or will soon open their cases for scrutiny. But the treasure trove belongs to the U.S. government, and strangely, disclosure has not yet become an issue on the presidential campaign.

The question is why.