July 4 today marks the 246th birthday of the country’s founding. But there’s another anniversary of note this week. It was 75 years ago, in 1947, the world learned about something that happened in the New Mexico desert which later became known as the Roswell Incident. Over time–like more than 40 years–the affair morphed into a fantastic account that an alien flying saucer crashed and recovered alien bodies sat in a morgue somewhere amid a giant government cover-up. Notoriety about the Roswell Incident helped spur public interest about UFOs, which continues to this day. Last year, the Pentagon admitted to Congress that it can’t explain 143 incidents dating back to 2004 of what it now calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
Long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I lived in New Mexico and had occasion more than a quarter-century ago to delve at length into the legitimacy of the Roswell Incident. I took a hard look at the evidence and interviewed a lot of folks.
I’m not here to opine about all the other UFO claims out there (although I once wrote on another blog about the Maury Island Incident, a debunked UFO episode in Washington State the same summer as the Roswell Incident). But I am here to tell you there’s no good evidence that anything extraterrestrial happened around Roswell. And no bodies. The only noteworthy element I found was the ability of the Roswell Incident to turn alleged little green men into actual big green dollars for an army of enthusiasts including certain authors and some Roswell residents. (Las Vegas and Nevada are not immune from UFOs as a business opportunity, either, as I wrote here in 2017.)
In August 1996, I published my investigative findings in Crosswinds, at the time New Mexico’s largest alternative newspaper, co-owned and edited by my good friend, Steve Lawrence. Sadly, both Steve and his publication are now deceased. The lengthy story was entitled “Now where was it those aliens crashed?” The text, with any substantive updates [in brackets like this], is reproduced below. (A version of this post was published in this space in 2019.) Were I writing it from scratch today, I’m not sure I would revise anything beyond adding more evidence of the grift. A later article by me in 2001 also in Crosswinds debunked the Roswell Incident in even greater detail.
The New Mexico map illustrating this post was published with my 1996 story in Crosswinds. Please refer to it as you read, as it pretty much gives away the Roswell con. Continue reading
