Ruth is a woman with few doubts. You’re not going to tell me that we are the only live planet in the solar system, she says. There are millions of galaxies out there, and do you mean to tell me that not one of them has life? That’s absurd. No one in the limousine headed for legendary Building 84 contradicts her. A retired singer who now works in education,

Ruth moved from Detroit to Albuquerque a year ago. She has short brown hair and wears a Star Trek T-shirt. She clutches her yellow bag close to her chest, obscuring the pointy-eared Leonard Nimoy. Building 84 is where the Enola Gay was parked after its mission over Hiroshima. Ruth says that real estate around here is booming. It wasn’t long ago you could buy a house near the base for 5K. Now an acre of land is going for 85K. At Building 84 you can see is a mock-up of a UFO and captured aliens. Ivan the attendant flips a knob to switch on the model’s blinking lights. Ruth asks Ivan how long the wreckage was kept here before its removal, as she puts it, to points unknown. Ivan doesn’t know, but he adds that there are over four dozen 60-watt light bulbs in the model UFO. The aliens are not quite four-feet tall and look a little pissed. One is wounded and lies on the cattle bumper of an army jeep.

Greetings From Roswell

Jeff and Jen are from Juarez, city of three million.They build houses for the poor, Jen says. Jeff is a fifty-six year-old in khaki shorts, polo shirt, and baseball cap. He wears a small diamond earring in his right ear. His face looks older than the rest of him. Jen is a full-sized woman who looks Bavarian but claims to be Mexican. Jeff is impressed by Roswell’s UFO museum. He expected a mountain of kitsch, but the archival displays )photographs, newspaper clips, memos, letters, military documents, memorabilia( proved to be more

Je f f Por t e r

“respectable” than he would have imagined. Next he wants to visit Building 84, three miles south of the city on old Walker Air Force Base. He’s been told that’s where the wreckage and bodies of the Roswell flying saucer wound up before being transferred to Wright Patterson Air Force. Jeff’s father was stationed at Wright Patterson in the mid 1950s. He wonders if his father heard something about the crash. He has a box of unread letters from his dad that he would now go through carefully. Last summer, Jeff and Jen visited the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona, twenty miles south of Tucson. Eighteen Titan missile silos surrounded Tucson during the Cold War. This was a hardened command center, Jen says with authority. You pass through a couple of six-thousand-pound blast doors and walk along a scary corridor to the silo. Then you go down fifty steps into the launch bunker. A little sign above the stairwell said watch out for rattlesnakes. Jeff asked the tour guide where this Green Valley Titan was pointed, but the guide, a silo veteran himself, didn’t know. Even the attendants who oversaw the missile site in the heyday of the arms race had no idea where the 110-foot-tall missile would go when launched. The high point of the tour, Jeff and Jen agreed, was the turning of the launch key. It is said that scenes from the Star Trek movie Generations were filmed here.

At Starbucks, sixteen-year-old Thomas is enjoying the July 4th festivities. He’s wearing a red T-shirt and green apron; long bangs dangle across his forehead. He works with three efficient older women, middle age, and like him Hispanic. They smile more than your usual Starbuck baristas. Thomas grew up in Roswell. He has heard stories of the peculiar

tin-foil that could not be bent, of a young girl who found strange debris in the desert north of town and later disappeared. Roswell in July is the mother of all UFO festivals, he says. In the past, everyone dressed up in 1940s costumes, drove old cars, and behaved very seriously. Everything was brown and green. They tried to make the town look like it was 1947. This year the focus is on the aliens. I like it better that way, he says. I’m happy when the tourists come to town. During Winter we forget about this stuff. When the tourists come we remember who we are. There’s a steady line of customers ordering scones and Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccinos. On the cork board are facsimiles of the Roswell Daily Record, July

8, 1947. “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region. No Details of Flying Disk are Revealed,” adds the paper, in the understatement of the century.

Dee is the owner of the only Bed and Breakfast in Roswell and says that northern New Mexicans come to the southern part of the state thinking they are visiting a third-world nation. Dee grew up in Alamogordo. She was a military kid whose father worked at White Sands in the sixties. Later she was a flight attendant for Northwest and moved from Tennessee to buy the B-and-B. Roswell is booming now, says Dee.

Adelaide and Leon look on shyly as Ruth talks about the Phoenix lights of 1997. It was a massive V-shaped object, she says. It cruised silently over Arizona and was reportedly spotted by hundreds of people in smaller towns. By evening the huge object drifted over downtown Phoenix where it was photographed and videotaped by thousands of witnesses.

Ruth pauses for dramatic emphasis. It’s one of the most well-documented UFO cases ever. Adelaide is from Albuquerque and Leon grew up in Brooklyn but now lives in Scottsdale where he is a portfolio manager. He flew to Albuquerque and then drove the 150 miles with Adelaide to Roswell. Not much to see along the way, he says. This is Leon’s first visit. It’s a kind of cool thing to do, he says. Leon describes how when the Phoenix lights were first spotted Arizona Governor Fife Symington staged a fake press conference at which an aide impersonated an alien in handcuffs. At the time of the sightings, Arizonans were on the brink of hysteria, Symington explained. “I wanted them to lighten up and calm down, so I introduced a little levity.” Symington has since admitted to having seen the lights himself and has gone on record with his belief that the they were some form of alien space craft. Ruth nods with evident satisfaction.

Nina Hagen is walking down the sidewalk; she’s the 1980s operatic punk-rocker from East Berlin who wrote songs about UFOs, god, and sex. She is followed by a German camera-crew filming a documentary on her visit to New Mexico, seven young men with goatees, dressed in paratrooper fatigues, their hand-held cameras bobbing up and down, fixed on Nina Hagen’s every gesture.

Jerry and Vernon are waiting in line at the ticket counter when the Germans enter the UFO Museum. Jerry smiles, Vernon winces. Jerry is a small woman, only half the height of her husband, but she does all the talking. Vernon is responsible for the occasional wry aside, such as in, “that woman has on enough beeswax to waterproof an army.” Vernon is referring to Nina Hagen’s cabaret-

style lipstick, thickly applied and vaguely roguish. Retirees in their mid-seventies, Jerry and Vernon have been on the road for the past three weeks, down from Springfield, Oregon, home of the annual Filbert Festival. Vernon used to make pulp for Weyerhaeuser. He wears a Route 66 cap and has a large hearing aid in his left ear. They are blue-highway types spending much of their time on the road. Recently they drove through northern Nevada to legendary Area 51. We were in the vicinity and decided to drive over, Vernon says. It was a huge area, says Jerry. We couldn’t really see anything. It was just so big, the area. But I could feel that someone was watching us, Vernon adds. Jerry has white curly hair and a discreet hint of red lipstick. This was their second trip to Roswell. They had come ten years ago but had skipped all the museum’s scheduled events. Today they plan to attend, and their first session is “Roswell’s Deathbed Confessions, The Truth Revealed.” I was torn between “Deathbed Confessions” and “Alien Implants are Real,” says Jerry.

Europeans are intrigued by America’s fascination with flying saucers, says the one with a steadicam. Nina poses theatrically for the cameras outside the International UFO Museum on Main Street. In a loose white cotton dress with red fish net sleeves, Nina, flamboyant as ever, moves towards the entrance, her Jesus tote bag embellished with bumper stickers )Kucinich for President/Atom Kraft Nein Danke(. Hagen herself witnessed a UFO in Malibu Beach in 1981. “It was a round lightship hovering right outside my bedroom about twenty feet above the house.” She later wrote a song about the sighting, “Zero Zero UFO.”

Jean and Lana have travelled eight hours from Phoenix. This is their first trip to Roswell. The Arizonans sit next to the Oregonans at “Deathbed Confessions.” The room is packed. Attendees are young and old, mostly middle-class, with as many women as men. Jean isn’t sure she believes in aliens, but likes to keep an open mind. Jean is in her mid sixties, dressed in a white blouse, tan pants, and white sneakers. She resembles a town librarian, an attractive senior with an air

Jean and Lana walk from the lecture to Roswell Landing, an alien souvenir shop stocked with T-shirts, exotic books, and Venutian skulls. The owners are Rick and Dagmar. Ten years ago Dagmar migrated from Mannheim, Germany to Colorado Springs, where she met Rick from Raleigh, North Carolina, online. They corresponded electronically, later married, and then moved to Roswell. Dagmar says that repeated visits to America made Germany seem claustrophobic. She could no longer drive in Europe. The roads were too small. Here, she says, the sky is so big and near, and the stars are so bright she can never go back.

of impeccable competence. Her salt-and-pepper hair is cut short and smartly. “As you know, in courts of law deathbed confessions are given extra weight,” says Tom Carey, one of the speakers. Carey stands besides a screen on which power-point slides flash by, photos of military personnel connected to Walker Air Force

Base who have died during the past ten years. Carey describes one case in particular, that of Sergeant Melvin Brown of the 509th Atomic Bomb Wing, who was told to drive an ambulance out to one of the two crash sites. When he arrived, Carey explains, his vehicle was loaded with a large container. His supervisor was insistent. “We want you to take this box back to town. Don’t let anybody near it. Above all, whatever you do, don’t look under the tarpaulin,” he said. Well, who wouldn’t look after hearing that. Sergeant Brown told family members that he had seen the bodies recovered at Roswell when he peaked under the tarp. According to him, they were humanoid and no more than four-feet tall. Their skin was yellowish-orange in color and had a texture like that of a lizard—leathery and beaded but not scaly. The attendees listen intently to Carey. Lana is nodding her head and pursing her lips. Three rows back a teen-ager costumed in a space-age jump suit made out of aluminum foil is writing in a little notebook. During Q-and-A, he will ask the speakers how large the heads of the aliens were. His space suit will sparkle in the light.

Carol is a short blonde in her early 30’s who works the counter at Walgreen’s on main street. She is amused by the UFO festivities, but her husband, Sid, is absolutely swept up in the myth. Although she did not use the word myth. Sid convinced Carol to move to Roswell so that he could be closer to the ground zero of the greatest cover-up in modern history. Sid was an avid reader of the newsletter Sightings and The International UFO Symposium Proceedings. Dan Aykroyd, the actor, is a big enthusiast of the Mutual UFO Network )MUFON as it is called by those in the

know(. According to a Roper poll conducted in 2002, one in seven Americans say they or someone they know has had an experience involving a UFO.

The prettiest little town in the west, as Will Rogers once said of Roswell. In the 1970s when the Walker Air Force Base closed, Roswell lost over 50% of its population. By the 1990s, the downtown area was half vacant. If not for Leprino Foods, one of the world's largest mozzarella factories, Roswell would be a ghost town too. In 1997, the town of reinvented itself. Since then, things have been looking up. “Roswell has something to offer all of our special visitors,” says Mayor Sam LaGrone, “whether they come from this planet, or from a distant galaxy.”

Jean buys a black T-Shirt with the legend “I crashed in Roswell” in green letters. Lana advises her to wear it to the next meeting of her reading group.

jeff-porter@uiowa.edu