Roswell, New Mexico: The Town Where “We Believe”

By Anya Petrone Slepyan

Recently, I traveled around 6,000 miles from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico to visit friends in Finland. Under their guidance I ate reindeer, drank vodka, marveled at public infrastructure, and spent hours in the sauna. I also had lots of conversations with Finns about politics, cultural differences, and of course, aliens.

In part, that’s because I was doing research for Crop Circle Cinema, our new podcast about rural alien movies. But the topic came up organically, too. I was an ocean away from the southwestern high desert, but in our world of globalized mass media, New Mexico’s reputation preceded me. Many people brought up the hit TV show “Breaking Bad.” The rest wanted to talk about Roswell.

Roswell is the county seat of rural Chaves County in southeastern New Mexico. It’s an easy day trip from three different national parks, and just a few hours away from the historic Trinity Site, where the first nuclear bomb was tested. But these attractions are secondary for most people who visit the town.

Roswell gained infamy in 1947 when mysterious debris was found in a rancher’s field, and the staff of the Roswell Army Air Field issued a statement identifying the debris as part of a “flying disc.” That statement was quickly retracted, but it did little to squash the alien-based theories springing up around the event. The result, nearly 80 years later, is that Roswell has become synonymous with extraterrestrial encounters. And the town, with its official motto of “We Believe,” is more than happy to encourage that connection.

A multitude of Roswell-based movies and TV shows, as well as curated tourism destinations like the International UFO Museum and annual UFO Festival, have created a feedback loop that continues to build the town’s reputation as the place to go for all things alien. Local stores and global chains put UFOs and little green men (or in some cases, giant green men!) in storefronts and on signs. It’s also the setting for my favorite teen-soap of all time, ‘Roswell’ (1999) in which four royal aliens (it’s a long story) go to high school and deal with lots of other teenage stuff while trying to save multiple planets. One of them even works at the UFO museum!

But while Roswell is the most famous ‘alien’ town in the country, it’s far from the only one. Dozens of small towns around the United States host alien festivals, while others like Green Bank, West Virginia, home of the world’s largest radio telescope, have more scientific connections to outer space.

This relationship between real rural communities and alien-based media, tourism, and local identities is the focus of the fourth episode of Crop Circle Cinema. In our final episode, we explore how tales of UFOs and abductions have been transformed into modern-day folklore, and how rural communities from Roswell to Spruce Pine, North Carolina have been shaped by associations with extraterrestrial life.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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