News Columnists / Thane Burnett
Roswell's learned to embrace the extraterrestrial
By THANE BURNETT, QMI Agency
Last Updated: October 30, 2010 12:00am
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Click here to watch the video63 years after the famous UFO crash in New Mexico, QMI dispatches Thane Burnett to the scene to find out what really happened.
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If the truth is out there, it seems to have moved a few degrees closer to Earth lately.
For Ufologists, and those who just believe we’re not likely alone in the cosmos, these are world-shaping days.
An impressive list of UFO headlines — from China to the Vatican to intergalactic invaders, or possibly just helium balloons, hovering over New York earlier this month — has brought back celebrated alien days not seen in decades.
In the first of a three-part special series, QMI Agency travels back to the holy ground of alien encounters, Roswell, N.M., to find out whether the welcome mat is still out.
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ROSWELL, N.M. — The alien takeover starts here.
Guy Malone spent more than a decade in Roswell preaching to the converted. Recently, he locked up his storefront missionary shop and headed east out of town.
Malone believes in one thing — a Biblical answer to otherworldly mysteries.
And the people of Roswell largely have a unified faith in something else — UFO crashes, or at least the draw their utterance has on people.
As most puny humans know, thanks to debris found near here in 1947, the small city in dusty southeastern New Mexico has become holy ground to believers in extra-terrestrial encounters.
But it’s actually taken this long for Roswell to accept the legend and lore.
Today, with only occasional eye rolling, locals will tell you about things their grandparents were witness to or odd lights they’ve seen themselves.
“It’s like Mecca, where people come for the truth about aliens,” says Malone, who now spreads his ‘Alien Resistance’ sermon from Orlando, Fla.
What’s certain is that bits and parts of something were found long ago.
A long list of civilian and military witnesses have stepped forward — starting with a notorious flying saucer press release issued right after the ’47 event — claiming debris, and in some cases even non-human bodies, were recovered at multiple sites. But the official U.S. position, after an amendment to the original military statement, is the litter was pieces of crashed high-altitude balloons used to listen in on the Soviet red menace.
Malone believes Roswell is more about fallen angels and conspiracies than the Cold War or spacemen. While living here, locals still treated him with respect, even including him in a yearly extraterrestrial festival.
But, especially over the past decade, Roswell has come to appreciate, even embrace, its alien celebrity status.
For believers, who’ve spent a generation fighting an unfair image that they’re all wacky and wear tinfoil hats to bed, Roswell is an open-market place of theories and conspiracies. And for those locals who don’t care what fell to Earth but like their city to have a solid tax base, the alien draw of tourists and researchers is just as welcome.
The local Arby’s has a welcome sign especially for aliens. Finding a bank takes time, but keepsake space critter skulls in bottles are as common as stop signs.
“A Baptist preacher owns a (UFO souvenir) store downtown,” Malone points out.
“I didn’t get driven out of town,” he adds. “But I can’t say my view was radically embraced.
“The potholes get fixed and kids in the schools have air conditioning … and the UFO museum put the city on the map.”
That International UFO Museum and Research Center, on Main St. in a refurbished movie theatre, has the clout of NASA among worldwide alien followers.
Executive director Julie Shuster says acceptance has taken decades, and there's still occasional resistance from within the city.
But the curious and the serious come from around the globe.
The unusual gospel that’s been brought out of the high desert could be written off as a clever tourist draw — a reason to sell “My Other Vehicle is a UFO” bumper stickers — if it weren’t for the fact that the Roswell fallout is still growing.
In the past year, stories of aliens among us have been increasing at warp speed.
It’s the 1940s and 50s again.
Stanton Friedman is the chief oracle of the Roswell UFO legacy. A physicist and renowned Ufologist, his work in the late 1970s uncovering witness accounts and documents pushed the crash story into a wider pop awareness.
Now 76 and living in Fredericton, N.B., Friedman — whose last book ridicules all the mistakes conventional scientific wisdom has made over the eons — has seen alien beliefs return to mainstream discussion.
Though of the extraterrestrials, he reasons: "You won’t see them at McDonald’s."
He likens the debate to a cosmic Watergate, arguing those in positions of power don’t want the truth to be known.
“The world’s attitude to life in outer space has changed,” he adds, happy that, beyond the borders of Roswell, discussions about visits from alien life-forms are being treated a little more like science and less like fiction.
The biggest story of the millennium, Friedman hopes that perhaps by 2020 humanity will finally know the truth.
But in Roswell, ahead of the rest of us, many believe they already have it figured out.
Which explains the looming welcome sign at Arby’s.
Roswell's learned to embrace the extraterrestrial | Thane Burnett | Columnists | News | Toronto Sun
