ROSWELL OR BUST

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According to a TIME/Yankelovich poll, 34% of Americans believe intelligent beings from other planets have visited Earth; of those, 65% believe a UFO crash-landed near Roswell, and 80% believe the U.S. government knows more about extraterrestrials than it chooses to let on. But those numbers don't quite capture Roswell's current hot-button status. "Five years ago, if you made an offhand reference to Roswell, nobody would know what you meant. Now everybody does." So says Kevin Randle, a UFOlogist who, as co-author of the seminal UFO Crash at Roswell and its follow-up, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, is one of the Incident's heartiest champions. His efforts achieved a not entirely positive validation on Dec. 1, 1995, when President Bill Clinton, on a state visit to Ireland, said the following during a speech in Belfast: "I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. [Pause for laughter, according to an official transcript.] And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it either, and I want to know. [Applause.]" UFOlogists will tell you bitterly about the way Jimmy Carter, while running for the presidency, admitted he had seen a UFO, but then, once in office, reneged on promises to open the government's flying-saucer files.

A lost opportunity. But on the cultural radar, presidential recognition barely registers next to playing a pivotal role in a popcorn movie. In last year's Independence Day, the seventh highest grossing film of all time, Bill Pullman's President Whitmore also assures an audience the government has nothing up its sleeve concerning UFOs and Roswell, only to be told by his Secretary of Defense, "That's not entirely accurate." Well, sure--otherwise the movie would be finished halfway through. Fortunately, the embattled Earthlings are able to use the recovered Roswell saucer against the invaders and triumph. Talk about vindication.

Roswell's pop-cultural apotheosis has been as an inescapable reference on Fox Television's The X-Files, a paranormal Dragnet that details the efforts of two wooden, underacted FBI agents to expose what has metastasized over the show's four seasons into an increasingly baroque conspiracy between the Federal Government and sinister extraterrestrials--a fiction whose particulars have been cherry-picked from among the wilder theories flitting through the UFO community. Its perspective is offered by John Price, founder of Roswell's UFO Enigma Museum, which began in 1988 in the back of his video store and today sprawls through four big rooms and features a homemade diorama of a crashed saucer with blinking lights, surrounded by four dead-alien dolls and a stuffed, seemingly unconcerned jackrabbit. Says Price: "The old sci-fi films were just kind of made up from someone's imagination. But The X-Files calls us every once in a while for information; a lot of the shows do. So a lot of your sci-fi is based on facts, so to speak. And that makes it something that a lot more people will watch, because they're getting more than just entertainment."