TheTravel: The Ultimate Guide To Roswell & Things To Do

Above, Roswell's famous welcome sign. Photo by Armand Vaquer

A few months after moving to New Mexico from California, I attended the UFO Festival in Roswell. It was a fun and interesting event held annually around Independence Day.

Along with the festival, I visited the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center. It had many exhibits along with a seven-foot Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still. 

Above, yours truly in the Roswell Visitor Center with two friendly aliens.

TheTravel has posted "Attention Extraterrestrials: The Ultimate Guide To Roswell & Things To Do".

They begin it with:

Driving along Highway 285 from the south towards Roswell through the New Mexico desert, travelers may be a little surprised to come across life-size cut-outs of an alien ship, little green men, and some locals trying to befriend them with pie. Coming into the city from any direction there is ample warning of the wacky, weird, and wonderful still to come.

And there’s plenty still to come.

Roswell, in Chaves County, New Mexico, has fully embraced the “Roswell Incident” UFO brand with out-of-this-world museums, kitschy gift stores, and a number of roadside attractions. Whether coming in from the north, south, west, or east, visitors are greeted by signs decorated with spacecraft, and the universally recognized androgynous alien with the oversized head, large almond-shaped eyes, Voldemort nose, and long lanky arms.

Roswell was founded in 1871 by businessman Van C. Smith who named the town after his father, Roswell Smith. After a slow start, the town’s growth and development took off when an aquifer was discovered in 1890 and continued with the arrival of the railroad in 1892.

Today Roswell is home to 50,000 residents and a booming tourist industry built around an unidentified flying object crashing in a nearby ranch in 1947.

It soon became the focus of the “flying saucer” craze of the 40s and 50s and since the 1970s, the city has cashed in on the controversy surrounding the alleged crash and subsequent military “cover-up”.

It has been explored in books, TV shows, and films, culminating in the now-debunked footage “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” released in 1995. All the information about this intriguing story can be gleaned at the International Museum and Research Center on South Main Street – the first stop on our itinerary in the ultimate travel guide to Roswell, New Mexico.

Above, Gort at the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

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Above, aliens and their flying saucer in the Roswell International UFO Museum. Photo by Armand Vaquer.