Close Encounters of the Legendary Kind

These days, locals don’t argue much about whether a spaceship crashed around here 50 years ago in the wide open spaces northwest of town. The dispute is over where it came down.

“I’ve never seen so many people battling about what landed where,” said John Brower, a concert promoter who is organizing camping and concerts at one of the purported sites during July’s golden anniversary of the alleged crash.

Depending on who is telling the story, the crash site could be a ranch near Corona, N.M., or another ranch that is closer to Roswell and just off U.S. 285. Another possibility is a spot near Carrizozo. Then there’s the contention that flying saucer debris rained down in several places northwest of Roswell in July 1947.

Although these and other questions--including whether there ever was a spaceship--remain unanswered, this southeastern New Mexico community is planning a huge party beginning Tuesday and running through next Sunday. It’s a festival to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the somewhat ambiguous event described these days as “The Roswell Incident.”

“Something happened,” says Mayor Tom Jennings. “You can’t ignore that.”

Fifty years ago, the local military base issued a press release that a flying saucer had been recovered somewhere near Roswell. The next day the military backtracked, saying the wreckage was a “weather balloon.”

The Air Force, the Pentagon and many scientists over the years held to the “weather balloon” report, contending that military officials initially mistook the debris as that of a flying saucer. Then, in a 1994 report, the Air Force said that although it was a balloon, it was not a weather balloon, but one that had been launched as part of a classified government project to detect Soviet nuclear missiles.

And just last week, the Air Force published yet another report, which it dubbed “The Roswell Incident, Case Closed.” In it, the military postulated that various Air Force programs from the ‘40s to the ‘60s could explain the persistent rumors, including test dummies dropped from high altitudes in the 1950s.

Numerous eyewitnesses, however, have come forward to tell what they saw or heard--often contradicting the official explanations.

The report of a UFO crash on Mac Brazel’s ranch, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell near the village of Corona, was published worldwide on July 8, 1947.

Brazel, who died in 1967, reportedly found a crumpled mess of peculiar metal on his ranch early one morning and contacted his local sheriff. The sheriff called Maj. Jesse Marcel at the Roswell Army Air Field.

Led by Brazel, a group of military personnel went to the site. According to some accounts, several large pieces of unusual metal were recovered along with the corpses of four or five aliens.

Two days later, besieged by calls and visitors, Brazel told reporters that he wished he had never spoken up.

“I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon,” he told the Roswell Daily Record. “But if I find anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.”

But Frank Kaufmann and others who were stationed at the Roswell base say they were dispatched to a different site, after witnesses reported seeing a flame going down and a glow. When they got there, Kaufmann says, they found a crashed flying saucer and five dead aliens.

“One was thrown out, it was up against the arroyo, one was half-in, half-out, and the other three were inside,” says Kaufmann, 80, a retired government intelligence agent who lives in Roswell.

Rancher Miller “Hub” Corn owns that land now, about 30 miles northwest of Roswell. He has taken about 1,000 people on $15-per-person tours of the area in the last year.

These days, the only unusual things at the site are three round holes drilled into a small cliff. Corn says they were either caused by the crash or drilled by the Army.

Corn, 36, says his family stumbled into the UFO craze.

“My daddy bought this land in 1976. He didn’t know nothing about a crash site here,” he says.

Although Corn has turned it into a somewhat profitable endeavor, he says he’s not sure it’s all that great to own a reputed a crash site.

“I don’t know if it’s the luck of the draw or the curse of the draw,” he says.

In May 1996, a book was released presenting yet another site. The account, allegedly told by truck driver Jim Ragsdale to his daughter, Judy Ragsdale Lott, as he was dying in 1994, places a crashed UFO near Carrizozo, about 53 miles northwest of Roswell, north of the Capitan Mountains along Pine Lodge Road.

“We were lying in the back of my pickup truck, buck naked, drinking beer, and having a good ol’ time when all hell broke loose,” the book quotes Ragsdale as telling his daughter.

“From the northwest there was a big flash, an intense bright explosion, and then shortly thereafter, with a noise like thunder, this thing came plowing through the trees, shearing off the tops, and then stopped between two huge rocks. It was propped up against one rock. It was about 20 feet around. As it was approaching, huge streams like fire were coming out from behind. After the impact, silence,” he said.

Ragsdale reportedly told his daughter that military crews soon showed up, cordoned off the area, and scared them off.

Theories abound explaining how wreckage and aliens could have been seen and recovered in a fairly wide swath around Roswell at the same time.

The most popular was published by Stan Friedman and Don Berliner in their 1992 book, “Crash at Corona.”

It describes two flying saucers colliding, showering debris on one ranch and leaving two demolished aircraft and seven alien bodies at two other sites.

A 1995 report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, failed to back up any of the theories--official or otherwise.

Instead, it sparked new speculation, finding that the Roswell base’s administrative records from March 1945 through December 1949 and its outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed.