In the spring of 2024, I was sitting in a darkened auditorium in the cavernous Hilton Hotel, the Connecticut Avenue monolith where president Reagan was shot in 1981, waiting to hear Robert F Kennedy jnr speak at the libertarian convention.
A woman whose sprightly sharpness made her a ringer for Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote, sat down in the mostly vacant row of seats reserved for media and began to chat away about her life as a music teacher in Florida. Then, lowering her voice slightly, she asked me whether I knew about the aliens and the tunnels. I did not. She gave a slightly reproachful tut-tut, informed me that the extraterrestrials were already among us and that a battle for the future of Earth was raging below us in a byzantine network of tunnels, and that the good aliens were working with the various governments. They may even be serving in government!
It was gripping and slightly terrifying stuff. Where had she learned about this? Online, she told me. Her sister, in the Midwest, did not approve of her theory, so they seldom spoke about it when they spoke by phone. A solid strategy for sisterly harmoniousness, we agreed.
I wasn’t sure what RFK was going to be banging on about, but his goose – or bear – was already cooked. The libertarian alien theory stayed with me since, and it turns out the music teacher was prescient in depicting the national mood and return to fashion of UFOs in the American subconscious.
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It was easily missed, but among the other things US president Donald Trump did in February was to order various departments to release files relating to UFOs and extraterrestrial life, a move that generated atomic levels of excitement among UFO enthusiasts – some of whom serve in the cabinet of the 47th president.
US vice-president JD Vance is a self-avowed UFO “obsessive”. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett has claimed that he had recently been privy to classified material on UFOs that would “set the world on fire”. He is pushing an open door – or aircraft. A comprehensive Pew research poll from 2021 found that 51 per cent of Americans believe that military reports of UFOs “probably” relate to alien life. The same poll denoted a mystifyingly breezy attitude towards this seismic development: 87 per cent believed aliens hold no threat to US national security. Curiously, a majority also believed the aliens would be neither friendly nor unfriendly in temperament, which made them sound disappointingly Swiss. Hadn’t they seen ET? Seventy-six per cent of the under-30s polled were willing to believe in alien life.
All of this was on my mind on the hot, late-February Saturday when I arrived in Roswell, which for now and evermore stands as the origin-town for the spate of UFO sightings and weird events which have been reported across the US over the decades. On the Friday, I’d driven down route 285, which passes the remote desert patch where, on the Foster Ranch about 75 miles (120km) north of Roswell, locals had on a thunderstorm-riven night of July 2nd, 1947, observed some sort of strange craft plummeting from the sky.
Six days later, local officials reported that a flying saucer-type object had been recovered, prompting national headlines. But on July 9th it was dismissed by the US army, which had very quickly corralled the scene, as a fallen weather balloon.
The official nothing-to-see-here response couldn’t extinguish the fact that locals had believed they had seen something truly out-there. Among these was a fireman named Dan Dwyer, who told his family he had visited the site and “something had crashed that was not from this Earth”. He said he observed two corpses and a survivor who “looked so lost and frightened that he felt sorry for it”, likening the figure, though not quite human, to “a child, rather lean”.
Within days, two military police officers visited the Dwyer house; family members later reported that they were threatened with being taken into the desert and shot and if they spoke about what they knew. The 1991 affidavits of Dwyer’s daughters are among the many fascinating and unexpectedly thorough, and solemn, presentations in Roswell’s UFO museum.
Another contains an interview given in 1998 by Frank Joyce, the New Mexico newspaper man who spoke for the first time about a phone call he had had that July in 1947 with Mack Brazel, the farmer who had arrived upon the fallen craft on July 6th. Brazel, he said, became upset when Joyce suggested that if he had seen the bodies of “poor little creatures”, it may have been the military using monkeys, perhaps, in experimental flight.
“God dammit! They’re not monkeys. And they’re not human!”
Glenn Dennis was working at the Ballard Funeral Home that summer when he received a phone call from the Roswell Air Force asking about child-sized caskets, and issues pertaining to bodies exposed to the elements. There’s a photo in the foyer of the museum of Dennis in later life, bespectacled, silver-haired and sitting beside a model Earth; he was one of the trio of founders of the museum, which opened in 1991. One of the museum staff told me she used to serve the three men coffee when they’d come into the cafe she worked in during the late 1980s when they were planning the museum.
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Four decades on, the museum is a magnet for ufologists who make the trek out to what would otherwise have remained a provincial New Mexico desert town. But the name Roswell is a worldwide coda for visitations from elsewhere.
Roswell has the best town entrance sign in all of the US, which is the introduction to a three-mile procession of standard neon-lit eats and sleeps places before you reach the historic centre. Roswell is a UFO town in the same way as coastal places with big waves become surf towns: the iconography and merch is everywhere. Even the street lights have been redone with alien eyes, and the big franchises have leaned into Roswell’s peculiar stardom as the postwar poster town for alien visits. The mood is half-larky and half-uneasy.
“Not a lot of locals believe it really,” says Cassandra who works at Invasion Station, the former downtown gas station converted into a gift shop with a snazzy flying saucer on the roof.
‘Yeah, well, I’m not a believer, and I don’t believe they put anyone on the moon either... Yet all this was supposed to have happened? But, hey, Roswell is cool’
— Overheard in Roswell
“They don’t really talk about it. I think the younger generation doesn’t really care about it. If you find older people around here, they will talk about it. We do have a UFO festival that brings a lot of people into town every Fourth of July weekend. A weather balloon... And the story grew from there and some said this and some said that. It’s been all over the place. I kind of believe it.
“My grandmother grew up here and she actually lived across the street from the original people who saw it fly across. She was a phone operator in 1947. I never got to talk to her about it because she didn’t like to talk about it. They were Christian and didn’t believe in alien stuff. But I am sure she heard some things on the phone line then. And my boss, his grandfather was a firefighter in 1947.” Chuck Dwyer, the owner of the shop, is a grandson of fireman Dwyer, but was, unfortunately out of town when I visited.
There had been resistance within the mayor’s office and at official level to the opening of the museum. For decades, the Roswell incident had largely been suppressed, and Roswell has a vibrant arts culture which sprung up after the late 1920s oil boom in the region. Some officials were against surrendering the identity of the town to the murky events of an unprovable fantasia of a postwar summer night.
“At one point they wanted to do away with all the Roswell alien stuff and turn the town into a fine arts community,” Cassandra says. “But this is what... we rely on this. And it brings in a lot of people. A lot of them are just having fun. I met Danny Trejo here. You just never know who will walk into the store.”
Danny Trejo, the veteran actor from the movie Heat and the TV series Breaking Bad, has led such an offbeat life that when he featured in a documentary on his own life story, everyone from Dennis Hopper to Steve Buscemi lined up to pay tribute: he’s exactly the kind of freewheeler you’d expect to find in the swell of 200,000 people who visit Roswell annually.
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On this Saturday morning, the main street is hot and quiet, apart from a stall where a guy is selling military curios and mementoes. He declines to give his name, but tells me he is just hanging around Roswell for a few years while his granddaughter finishes college. He’s not a full-blown believer in the Roswell story, but he won’t sneer at it either.
“We came out of World War Two flying airplanes with propellers. We went into the Korean War flying jets and shooting missiles. We went from washing by hand, to machines, to toasters, to microwaves. So, I’m saying – technology moved fast in a 10-year period. So, there was something going on. I was in the military for 20 years. I have had my fair share of living on the flight line and seeing jets, helicopters, mostly jets.
“And sometimes when a pilot is told to land he is met by a row of black cars. And people dressed in black... they scooped him up for a day or two of a debrief. And the message is: you are not allowed to talk about what you may think you saw. You saw nothing. In the military it is easy. They just order ‘em to stay silent. Or they can make him disappear – he crashed his plane!” he says, raising his brow meaningfully before turning to a customer, who makes his position on extraterrestrial matters clear.
“Yeah, well, I’m not a believer, and I don’t believe they put anyone on the moon either. Our cell phones don’t even cover 20 feet down the road here. Yet all this was supposed to have happened? But, hey, Roswell is cool.”
Roswell is that.
On Tuesday of this week, the deadline passed for defence secretary Pete Hegseth to honour a letter penned by a Republican congresswoman, Anna Paulina Luna, to hand over some 40 video clips of “unidentified anomalous phenomena”. The failure by the Pentagon to deliver drew claims of a cover-up by the UFO community convinced that the secrets are about to be revealed.
In the White House briefing room on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked whether the administration would investigate any possible connection between 10 US scientists working on nuclear or aerospace material who have, since 2023, either died or – in five cases – gone missing. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent remained blank-faced as she issued a terse answer.
“I have seen the report, but I haven’t spoken to our relevant agencies about it,” Leavitt said. “I will certainly do that, and we’ll get you an answer. If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into. So let me do that for you.”
