ROSWELL OR BUST

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Outside city limits, the name Roswell speaks to less tangible concerns. Like the black helicopters of the new world order or the racist-police conspiracy to frame O.J. Simpson, the Incident, as it is known, is either pretty sensational stuff or yet another of the ingenious tales those of us who mistrust mainstream institutions tell ourselves to help make sense of a scary, sometimes depressing world. In this case, it is a tale that combines deeply American strains of spirituality and paranoia as well as--let us be frank--a large scoop of native wackiness. One could even say, if one were inclined to put yet another spin on the following cliche, that we have met the aliens and they are us. In fact, to judge from the way they are most often depicted, aliens have sprung from the same corner of the national psyche that has a thing for Walter Keane's paintings of grotesquely doe-eyed children. Unless, of course, aliens actually look like that.

Everyone agrees that something crashed in the desert outside Roswell in mid-June or early July 1947. On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release saying it had recovered the wreckage of a "flying disk," sparking incredulous news stories around the world. A few hours later, a general at the regional Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, where the debris had been sent for further analysis, announced that what had really been recovered was a weather balloon. This is the indisputable core of the Roswell Incident. Whether one chooses to believe that the government has been covering up an affair involving extraterrestrials is, of course, a more subjective matter. But because Roswell represents the only time the U.S. military has gone on record saying that flying saucers exist, it has become a cornerstone of belief for the UFO community. They are, by the way, quite a diverse and fractious group of folks--studies say they tend to be better educated than the norm--whose numbers include casual believers; so-called UFOlogists, most of whom are pretty earnest in their efforts to document UFO sightings with something approaching objective rigor; contactees, who believe they have had telepathic communication with aliens; abductees, who believe they have been subjected to experimentation by E.T.s; and cultists like the Heaven's Gaters, who are an enormous source of embarrassment to their comparatively sober-minded confreres. But despite their many differences, for nearly all of them Roswell is central, a way into the darkness. Peculiar theories ripple out from Roswell. So do further-ranging cultural tides.