This post is contributed by Connie Corcoran Wilson. She is the author of five books (Training the Teacher As A Champion, Performance Learning Systems, Inc.; Both Sides Now, AuthorHouse; Ghosts of Route 66: Vol. I, Quixote Press; It Came from the ‘70s, Baer Press; Out of Time, Lachesis Publishing).

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I always wanted to visit Roswell, New Mexico to see the alien museum and visit Area 51. [Area 51 as all “X-Files” fans know is where the government conducts secret experiments on a variety of things, presumably on aliens, UFOs and all other such inexplicable things. You are not allowed anywhere near Area 51...so I settled...for the Alien Museum, that is.]

While driving across Route 66 (and all parts Southwestern), we drove from Amarillo (TX) to Roswell, New Mexico and visited the world famous alien museum. This took about 3 hours. [We didn’t know that Area 51 is in Nevada. No visit(s) there. My status as navigator/investigator was downgraded to “bystander who should listen to the lady on the GPS.”

How was the Roswell UFO Museum, you ask?

Disappointing, I answer.

The museum itself is in a run-down building downtown with a concrete floor. The displays consist primarily of yellowed newspaper clippings from the July 7, 1947 incident near Roswell (NM). The original materials actually came to earth 30 miles outside of town in Mac Brazel’s field, but Roswell has a military installation and the military came to be in possession of the strange metallic debris that did not burn and seemed oddly malleable.

What did Mac Brazel find out in the field amongst his sheep? When interviewed by the Roswell Daily Record (7/8/1947), Brazel told the reporter, “The balloon which held it up (if that was what it was) must have been 12 feet long. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks made a bundle about 3 feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick.” Brazel estimated “the entire lot would have weighed maybe 5 lbs. ..There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were some letters on some of the parts...” The museum displays in the UFO Museum describe the “letters” as resembling hieroglyphics more than any known written language.

Colonel Blanchard of the Roswell Air Field assigned two men, Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt, to interview Brazel. He also released a press release about the debris. Colonel Blanchard was, at that time, the commandant of an elite group, the 509^th Bomb Group, the atomic bomb group, then stationed in Roswell. He was widely known to be a “no nonsense” individual. [Blanchard went on to become a 4-star General and Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.]

The debris was ordered flown 400 miles away to Fort Worth, where General Roger Ramey, Commander of the 8^th Air Force Group at Forth Worth issued a press release the next day saying that the debris that had been found in the field was nothing more than a metallic weather balloon. The press was never allowed a close view of the debris. For 30 years, this explanation held and little was thought of the Roswell incident.

Years later (1978) Stanton T. Friedman (a UFO investigator) interviewed Jesse Marcel, one of the original investigators assigned to the case, who said, “It was not a weather balloon, nor was it an airplane or a missile. It would not burn. The material weighed nothing...it’s so thin. It isn’t any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes. So, I tried to bend the stuff. It wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a 16-lb. sledgehammer and there was still no dent in it.” In other words, the debris was very unusual, indeed. It was soon whisked away and the entire incident was hushed up and seemed to have gone the way of the dodo bird.

It is a matter of public record that there had been numerous sightings of “flying disks” during June and July of 1947. What were they? Was it true that the debris in Mac Brazel’s field also contained the bodies of “little men,” and that autopsies were performed on them after they died? The “National Enquirer” interviewed Marcel in 1980, and interest revived in the case. Even more interest was drummed up by the detailed personal account of former mortician Glenn Dennis, who, in 1989, told of alien autopsies carried out at the Roswell base. Add to that the signed, notarized statements of several relatives of those involved in the original finding (on display in the UFO Museum), which consisted mainly of dire threats from government officials to anyone who spoke of the finding(s) and you have a mystery that endures to the present day and has been the origin of a number of movies and books.

I wandered past the blurry photos of sightings of UFO’s and declarations of sightings (one of them by former President Jimmy Carter) and the large wooden Aztec or Inca carving that was presented as a possible frieze portraying space travel. The tacky sparkly silver alien leaning against a large speaker near the ceiling was pretty hokey. The aliens near the door (E.T., anyone?) were pretty lame, alas.

And now for the kicker....

We drove 3 hours to see the Alien Museum. In the middle of the museum, inexplicably, there is a horse covered in newspaper clippings. Why a horse? (Another mystery.) They are building a new museum “near the McDonald’s shaped like a flying saucer,” according to the gift shop employee to whom we spoke. The girl in the gift shop, who looked supremely bored, when asked what else there was to do in Roswell a town of 45,000, (besides visit the Museum, of course) said, “Nothing.”

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Here are some pictures from the tour:

1. Roswell Crash Evidence

2. Horse covered with newspaper clippings