Roswell: Ranching Town, Army Town, and the Summer of Forty-Seven
Near Roswell, New Mexico
Roswell was founded in eighteen seventy-one as a trading post by Van C. Smith, who named it for his father, Roswell Smith. It grew as a ranching and irrigation center in the Pecos Valley, producing cotton, alfalfa, truck crops, and livestock. The arrival of the railroad in the eighteen nineties brought it into the regional economy in a more connected way, and by the early twentieth century it was the largest city in southeastern New Mexico.
In the summer of nineteen forty-seven, a sheep rancher named Mac Brazel found wreckage scattered across a field roughly seventy-five miles north of town. There were metallic sticks, foil reflectors, scraps of heavy glossy material, and tape. He gathered some of it up and brought it to the Chaves County Sheriff, who contacted Roswell Army Air Field. What happened next became one of the most analyzed and debated events in American popular culture.
On July eighth, the Roswell Daily Record ran a headline stating that the Roswell Army Air Field had captured a flying saucer on a local ranch. The military almost immediately countered that the debris was a weather balloon. For several decades the story faded. Then, in the nineteen seventies and eighties, researchers and witnesses came forward with accounts suggesting something more unusual, and Roswell became the anchor of American UFO mythology.
In nineteen ninety-four, the United States Air Force released a report connecting the debris to Project Mogul, a classified program using high-altitude balloons to monitor Soviet nuclear tests from the stratosphere. The balloons were large, multi-layered, and carried radar targets made of foil and balsa , exactly matching the material descriptions. A follow-up report in nineteen ninety-seven addressed accounts of recovered bodies, attributing them to test dummies used in parachute experiments. Most researchers outside the UFO community accept the Project Mogul explanation.
Roswell today draws more than three hundred thousand visitors a year. The International UFO Museum and Research Center occupies a former theater downtown. An annual UFO Encounter Festival fills Main Street every July. The economy also runs on oil and gas production, agriculture, and the New Mexico Military Institute. The city's population is just over forty-eight thousand, making it the fifth-largest city in New Mexico.
