Alien Abduction

The Australian press takes a look at Roswell, NM:

Aliens are everywhere. They're on T-shirts, postcards, socks and keychains. There is an Army-themed restaurant called the Cover-Up Cafe ("where all the recipes are secret"). Green, two-toed footprints meander down Main Street to the local souvenir shop. The McDonald's restaurant mimics a UFO and another eatery has a sign out the front proclaiming: "Aliens Welcome."

About 35,000 people descended on Roswell at the weekend – nearly doubling the southeast New Mexico town's population – for the annual Amazing Roswell UFO Festival. The event was set up in the 1990s to debate what really happened when a supposed flying saucer (later officially claimed to be a top-secret weather balloon) crashed on a nearby ranch in July, 1947.

Besides concerts and costume parades, attendees were treated to lectures on topics such as "UFO files from the United Kingdom and government surveillance of ufologists" to cater for those who believe the US military is still hiding the truth about the crash and the existence of alien life.

It's an enduring mystery; evidence is inconclusive but tantalising enough to fuel the fervour of believers.

It all started on July 8, 1947, when the Roswell Army Air Field issued – and later retracted – a press release about a "flying disc" it had recovered from the nearby ranch.

The US military maintained it was instead a weather balloon, and fitting debris was displayed to quell the drama.

More than 30 years passed and the incident was generally forgotten.

But then, an Army officer who took part in the recovery of the debris, Major Jesse Marcel, came forward to assert that it had been from an alien spacecraft, and that the government had engaged in a cover-up.

Eventually, the Air Force disclosed it had been part of Project Mogul, a top-secret effort to monitor Soviet-era nuclear testing. But that story never satisfied believers who advanced tales of alien bodies recovered in the desert.

The Roswell Incident was born and, with it, a fascination that spread from supermarket tabloids to the popular imagination. Last month, the true believers' cause received a boost when Lieutenant Walter Haut, the public relations officer at the base in 1947 who issued the conflicting press releases, made a posthumous declaration that not only was the weather ballon story a cover up, he had actually seen the alien bodies.

It's a stunning claim, one sure to fire further fascination in the desert site – a fascination that a few hardy entrepreneurs hope will prove a money-spinner.

One keen American duo have a dream: Earth Station Roswell, a $78 million resort and conference centre for UFO enthusiasts featuring a 1000-seat concert centre, an exhibit hall, fine-dining restaurant, cafe, delicatessen, lounge, a 400-seat theatre and lecture hall, a lagoon-style swimming pool and a massive underground parking garage.

The anchor would be the "Mothership", a 23m high, 300-room hotel that one of the hopeful developers, Gene Frazier, calls "the world's largest replica of a flying saucer".

It's not just Roswell's business people who see dollar signs on space aliens.

The city is accepting proposals for a builder-operator to run the UFO amusement park, a multimillion-dollar project that could open by 2010.

The local UFO boom really began in 1992, when Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis – a local mortician who claimed a nurse on the base had told him of autopsies performed on aliens taken from the wreckage – founded the International UFO Museum and Research Centre.

Now the resort proposal and the plan by city officials to build a UFO-themed amusement park – complete with an indoor roller coaster that would take passengers on a simulated alien abduction – have fuelled talk: How much should Roswell exploit its little green men?

There are those, like Haut's daughter Julie Shuster, director of the UFO museum he co-founded, who question if UFO exploitation has gone too far.

"Greed and ego are rampant among the UFO field and among everybody who is trying to capitalise on it," she says, shaking her head.

Julie Shuster grew up in Roswell. She describes its residents as cautious people. The town's economy once relied on petroleum exploration, banking, dairy, ranching and the military, at least until the air force base closed in 1967.

They didn't talk about the UFO affair.

"People were told – people in the military, in particular – if you want a loan or government assistance for you, your kids or your grandkids, you won't say anything about it now or ever," she says.

In the face of official denials, she says the point of her father's museum is not to prove that an alien spacecraft really crashed, but simply to present information from both sides of the debate and let visitors make up their own minds.

The museum has greeted 2.5 million visitors in the 15 years since its founding.

According to one analysis, it generates $40 million in indirect spending each year for the city of 50,000 residents.

Larry and Sharon Welz, owners of the Roswell Space Centre souvenir shop, lament that Roswell has not done even more to embrace the UFO phenomenon.

"The signs coming into town say, 'Welcome to Roswell, Dairy Capital of the Southwest'," Sharon Welz says.

"Are you kidding? You should exploit the UFO thing. It's a commodity.

"When you say Roswell, everyone thinks about aliens."

But all this has produced its cynics.

"We're beginning to wonder," says one tourist, Brian Lewis of California, passing through Roswell recently with his family, "if the real conspiracy is to draw in all the tourists."