Roswell - International UFO Museum and Research Center

Traveling through New Mexico, I couldn't have resisted the temptation to visit the city of Roswell, famous for the alleged UFO Incident that some believe happened there at the beginning of July 1947. Supposedly, an UFO crashed there and several alien corpses (and maybe even alive aliens as well) were found then.

The United States military maintains that it was not an UFO crash, and that the debris found at the site belonged to an experimental high-altitude surveillance balloon belonging to a classified program named "Mogul". However, accounts of many inhabitants of Roswell seem to contradict that.

We expected both the city and the International UFO Museum and Research Center to be totally overdone and kitschy. However, they weren't. There were a few pictures and statues of aliens and UFOs here and there, but by no means, it was out of whack.

Also, I expected the UFO Museum to be mostly targeting kids and UFO-maniacs, and hence, to be full of weird artifacts and sensational stories. Surprisingly, that was not a case. Just the opposite, I am sure that most kids would find the museum incredibly boring as it almost only displays (pseudo-)scientific documents, affidavits from people who lived in Roswell at the time of the alleged UFO crash, and newspapers reports from those days. Lots of reading, very little fun.

Welcome to the International UFO Museum and Research Center:




One of the first newspapers' reports about the crash:


A photo of the material found at the crash site:


For the most part, the museum is filled with scientific and historical articles, newspaper reports, written statements and photographs:




Just next to exit there are figures from the 1994 movie Roswell:

Roswell - Extraterrestrial Hwy 285 and city

From the Great Sand Dunes NP we took Highway 285 to Roswell, the city where (allegedly) an UFO crashed in 1947. The part of the highway that goes through New Mexico is sometimes called "extraterrestrial highway" as, apparently, there were many UFO sightings along that road. (Second, more famous, extraterrestrial highway is Hwy 375 in Nevada.)

Driving along lonely Route 285 we could definitely imagine why aliens would decide to land there. For miles and miles we did not see any cars, and all in all during 300-mile drive we might have seen maybe 10 cars going in the same direction as we did, and maybe 25-30 in the opposite. It definitely felt a bit eerie to be driving on such desolate road. Still, to our great disappointment, we did not see any UFOs. But at least we learned that our little car can go 100 miles per hour :) (Maybe even more, but I was not too keen on testing it further...)

The sole reason that we decided to go to Roswell was to visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center located there. But since we were staying in the town for a night anyway, we decided to go for a short ride and see how people live there. Of course, I took pictures of all aliens and UFO's that I encountered :) Unfortunately, there were not too many of them...

I was positively surprised to see Roswell's Walmart decorated with UFOs:


Specialized "alien" shop in downtown Roswell:


Even some cars were decorated with aliens...