The annual Roswell UFO Festival has long been a popular destination for extraterrestrial enthusiasts, featuring live music, parades, and an array of guest speakers.
Taking place last weekend, the three-day festival was first put on in 1996, paying homage to the Roswell incident, one of the nation’s most famous UFO sightings, which occurred one New Mexico summer in 1947.
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“That first festival was organized by former Mayor Tom Jennings and three other local citizens,” City of Roswell spokeswoman Juanita Jennings told the Washington Examiner.
Last year, the festival had an estimated economic impact of $2.19 million for the town, with this year's final revenue figures still in the works.
“We received $150,000 from the city general fund for expenses, and also spent about $30,000 from lodgers' tax revenue to market/promote the festival,” Jennings said.
The festival brings thousands of UFO enthusiasts to the small town situated in the High Great Plains, eager to learn more about the Roswell incident.
“The festival is unique as far as the variety of people it brings — true believers, skeptics, and those who just want to have fun and wear googly eyes and tinfoil hats and dress up like extraterrestrial aliens,” Jennings said. “It brings those who want to 'make contact' and those who just want to celebrate 'unique science' and have fun.”
Mac Brazel, a rancher, discovered debris on his land more than seven decades ago in Lincoln County, claiming the scrap came from a flying saucer, propelling the town of Roswell into a hub for UFO activity.
“Does any other city in the world have a story like ours?” Jennings asked. “An event in a small town in 1947 where allegedly a UFO crashed on a ranch about 70 miles outside of town and small child-like bodies were taken to the local funeral home.”
Roswell Army Air Field initially issued a press release regarding the crash and recovery of a "flying disc" near Roswell. However, following reports indicated there was no flying disc recovered and instead the recovered debris was from a weather balloon.
“At the time, Roswell had an Air Force Base, and the local newspaper broke the story, and then all of a sudden there was a conspiracy theory of a coverup when the Air Force said what had crashed was a weather balloon. Overnight, one headline changed Roswell,” Jennings said.
Years later, the Air Force released a 1,000-page report detailing documents relating to the alleged UFO crash that occurred in the town. The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, published in 1994, concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was most likely debris from Project Mogul, a top-secret military surveillance project that launched high-altitude balloons in the desert near the state’s border with Texas.
The agency released a second publication in 1997, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, which gave an explanation for sightings of “alien bodies” and cleared up an unidentified aerial phenomenon as non-extraterrestrial related.
“Air Force activities which occurred over a period of many years have been consolidated and are now represented to have occurred in two or three days in July 1947,” the report said. “Aliens observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high-altitude balloons for scientific research.”
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Marking the 75th anniversary of the Roswell incident, this year's festival featured musical headliners such as country music trio Runaway Jane, New Mexico-based country artist Austin Van, and the American Tejano band Siggno. The International UFO Museum and Research Center and the Roswell Daily Record brought in guest speakers to discuss all things about UFO phenomena.
“We simply hope that anytime UFO-related topics gain attention nationally, people from all sorts of places will be even more interested in checking out Roswell and its UFO history and connection, and hopefully many of them will be drawn to the festival,” Jennings said.