50 Years After Roswell, UFO Buffs Look Back on a Hazy History

ROSWELL, N.M. (June 16, 1997 00:14 a.m. EDT) -- Squint hard enough against the bright desert sun, true believers say, and you cannot help but make it out -- the burn where the spaceship crashed against the red-streaked rock, the dent like a giant heel print that it left in the bluff, the protrusion off to the right where military policemen found the alien holding a small black box on that fateful July morning in 1947.

Hub Corn, whose sheep ranch happens to contain the site of the most momentous event in the hazy history of flying saucers, charges $15 for a viewing. But he doesn't give his visitors the hard sell. He doesn't have to.

"When I first started doing this I was afraid in my own mind that people weren't really getting what they wanted," Corn said. "I felt like everybody that come out would want to see a spacecraft, or at least some material. But people seem happy just to be here. They seem happy to believe."

Or at least WILLING to believe. Fifty years after what has become known in ufology circles as the "Roswell Incident," America's fascination with unidentified flying objects has never been more intense, or as widespread.

More than 100,000 sky watchers and conspiracy enthusiasts are expected to attend the golden anniversary celebration here during the first week of July, according to event organizers. Festivities will include an all-night "rave" dance party at the Corn ranch and a soapbox derby-style race of homemade alien vehicles.

Such summer merriment in the desert, where temperatures can rise to 110 degrees, is testament to the emergence of a mainstream belief in UFOs. A recent Gallup Poll found that 42 percent of American college graduates believe that flying saucers have visited Earth in some form.

In a measure of the shift in public attitudes, a Roper Center survey two decades ago found that 30 percent of college graduates believed in UFOs.

Thousands of Americans have reported being abducted by aliens in recent years. And John Mack, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who was subjected to a harsh review by the school in 1995 after publishing his view that many of these reports are true, is gaining adherents and will be a keynote speaker at the Roswell weekend.

Mack survived the review by his peers uncensured, and in August nearly 200 mental health professionals are expected to attend a conference that he will convene to discuss alien abductions.

Attribute it to concern over the approaching millennium or anxiety over technology that advances faster than a layman can understand. Chalk it up to the public's suspicion of official Washington.

Whatever the causes, the long-held tenets of the flying saucer buffs -- aliens are visiting us, and the government knows it and is covering it up -- now permeate the public consciousness and the popular culture.

The hit television series "The X-Files" features two agents of the FBI looking into just such a cover-up.

At least five alien-theme movies are scheduled for release in the next few months as producers hope to repeat the success of last summer's "Independence Day," in which the U.S. military finally coughs up the Roswell alien just in time to save Earth from an invasion by the creature's angry relatives.

And Art Bell, whose syndicated late-night radio show on UFOs once drew only the paranormal faithful, now consistently ranks as the nation's fourth most popular radio talk show host, behind only Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Howard Stern.

"There are millions of Americans who probably know more about aliens than they do about thermodynamics," said Benson Saler, a Brandeis University anthropology professor and co-author, with Charles Ziegler, an anthropologist, of "UFO Crash at Roswell," soon to be published by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Saler sums up the common wisdom this way: "We know what they look like -- they're tall and slender with huge heads and almond eyes. And the hope is that these beings with superior technology will enter into communion with us and help solve our problems."

The book maintains that the Roswell story has all the elements of a modern myth, serving as an expression of anti-government sentiment and the age-old yearning to believe we are not alone in the universe.

"This kind of myth is symptomatic of a great divide between the gov- erned and the governing," said Ziegler. "The government is the monster, hoarding the knowledge that we are not alone."

Scientists and skeptics -- the late astronomer Carl Sagan most prominent among them -- have warned that the embrace of pseudoscientific ideas like alien visitation and abduction threatens to undermine the critical thinking by an educated public that a democratic society requires.

And critics point to the recent suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who believed a spaceship traveling behind a comet would carry them to the "next level," as a tragic result of the blurring of science and science fiction.

But even as science relentlessly unravels life's greatest mysteries, it may be hard to dispel the popular belief in superior technological beings -- whose very existence is beyond the means of our own scientists to verify or debunk. For some, aliens replace or augment conventional religious beliefs.

"One of the things that attracts me to this whole realm is that it's something that we don't know," said Katherine Heenan, a 34-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, discussing on an Internet e-mail list her belief that aliens have probably visited Earth.

"Technology changes so rapidly -- the things we used to believe we no longer believe," she said. "I was raised to believe in God, but I don't believe what I was raised to believe in."

Like most legends, the Roswell tale traces its genesis to a real event. In early July 1947, a ranch foreman, W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material littering the ground near Roswell, in southeastern New Mexico. He turned the material over to the sheriff, who gave it to the military authorities at the air base here.

On July 8 of that year the Army Air Forces, which later that month became the Air Force, a separate service under the newly established Department of Defense, issued a news release about the landing of a "flying disk." This resulted in a headline in the local newspaper, The Roswell Daily Record, that said, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region."

Military officials recanted the next day, calling the curious debris merely a downed weather balloon. With that, the matter was largely forgotten until the early 1980s, when the first of more than a dozen books on the subject was published.

Colored by post-Watergate cynicism and fueled by the advent of popular television docudrama series like "Unsolved Mysteries," these versions of the Roswell story variously held that Brazel, who by then had died, was harassed into abetting what was said to be a government cover-up; that the crippled craft crashed on what is now Corn's land, and that the military retrieved three to five alien bodies, which may now be stored in another stronghold of UFO lore, the Area 51 military installation in Nevada.

In 1994, aiming to defuse speculation about what happened at Roswell, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report disclosing that what it had claimed was a weather balloon was in fact a classified experiment designed to detect nuclear tests conducted by the Soviet Union.

But for a suspicious populace -- 71 percent of Americans polled by Gallup say they believe the government knows more about UFOs than it lets on -- the Air Force report did little to deter the cover-up theorists.

"People would panic if they knew the truth," said Jill Headstream, 44, a legal assistant from Austin, Texas, who had made her second pilgrimage to the UFO Museum and Research Center here. "It might be like, if we're not the only ones, why do we live the way we do? Why do we have the kind of government we do?"

But the most persuasive evidence for many museum visitors are the statements in books and videos of Roswell residents and retired military employees who say they took part in the events as they unfolded.

Walter Haut, who was the public relations officer at the Roswell base in 1947 and still resides in the same house where he lived when he wrote the famous news release, is a bit bemused by all the recent attention. "The 25th anniversary in 1972, nobody noticed," he said.

Haut, now 75, continues to argue that his original news release was on the mark. "I think something extraterrestrial fell out of the sky and landed on a ranch north of Roswell in 1947," Haut said. "But I have to tell everyone that asks, none of my knowledge is first-hand."

In a recently released book, "The Day After Roswell," (Pocket Books, 1997) Philip J. Corso, who served on the National Security Council under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, contends that he personally directed an Army project that transferred to the military various types of technology -- including fiber optics and a microchip -- recovered from the alien ship that crashed in the desert.

Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, wrote the foreword to the book by Corso, a former Thurmond aide. But after the book's release, aides to Thurmond said he regretted having been associated with it. The senator, they said, had understood he was writing the foreword to a Corso memoir about his career in military intelligence.

Thurmond issued a statement criticizing the book's claim of a government conspiracy to cover up an alien visitation. "I know of no such 'cover-up,' " the senator said, "and do not believe one existed."

The nation's interest in UFOs began at the dawn of the atomic age, when fears over the Cold War and anxieties about new doomsday technologies coincided with thousands of reported sightings in the years that followed the Roswell incident.

Aliens, the thinking went, must have figured out a better way -- an assumption perhaps best expressed in the 1951 movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still." In the film, a flying saucer lands in Washington and its pilot warns that unless the people of Earth learn to use atomic power for peaceful purposes, the planet -- and even the galaxy -- would be destroyed.

The aliens of today's postmodern pop culture are not always so pure of motive.

"What's happening is science and technology have accelerated to a point where they may be beyond our ability to comprehend," said Chris Carter, creator of "The X-Files," whose aliens appear to be conspiring with shadowy elements of the federal government in a diabolical secret project. "We need mysteries, we need stories, we need something beyond the temporal," Carter said.

Of course, many of those publicizing and perpetuating the Roswell myth are also making money from it. That includes the city itself, which even before it caught the 50th anniversary fever, had made a cottage industry of extraterrestrial refrigerator magnets and stuffed alien dolls.

Motel owners say that about one-fourth of their bookings are alien-related. ("Crash here" reads a sign on the Super 8 motel on Main Street.)

"Do I believe it?" said New Mexico's tourism secretary, John Garcia, who was here early in June to help plan the July festivities. "Sure I believe it -- all the way to the bank."

--By AMY HARMON, New York Times