The Faithful Gather In Roswell

At Roswell Festival, Doubt Is an Alien Concept

By William Booth Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 8, 2007; A01

ROSWELL, N.M., July 7 -- Attention, all aliens. Come on down. Because, seriously, this is your crowd. About 50,000 of your closest admirers are expected this weekend for the Roswell UFO Festival, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the nearby crash landing of a flying saucer -- and, naturally, the ensuing government coverup.

A weather balloon? Please. We are not fools.

At least that's the thinking here. Not up on the latest ufology? The debate today is all about "disclosure," meaning not if, but when. When is the government finally going to open its top-secret files to reveal its voluminous data on the sightings, abductions and close encounters dating back to at least July 5, 1947. "The anomalies." Here in the desert Southwest. And probably Mars.

"The secret world will fall. We want the truth embargo to end," said Stephen Bassett, the founder of X-PPAC, the first political action committee established to target the politics of UFO/ET phenomena. Bassett spoke at the festival's conference, which, along with the Alien Chase fun run, costume parades and carnival rides (Orbiter, Splash Down), have filled every motel room in Roswell, once the home of the world's only atomic warfare unit and the Enola Gay B-29 bomber.

On Friday night, Bassett told listeners of George Noory's "Coast to Coast AM" radio show, which beamed live from the convention center to 500 stations, that: "I believe the Democrats are planning disclosures in the first months of the next administration."

The Democrats? Naturally.

Several ufologists agreed that "the best ET ticket" would be Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York (or maybe Al Gore?) and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), who have probably already have been briefed on the truth. "But they don't want to say so now," Bassett said. Interestingly, Richardson is quoted at the UFO Museum and Research Center ("The Truth is Here!") as stating: "I don't think the U.S. government has fully disclosed everything they know."

Indeed. If only citizens could get access to the data. Because the people here want to know about the shadow guests, crop circles, shape shifters, crash retrievals, men in black, cattle mutilations, probes and, of course, the antimatter perpetual energy machines that have been kept under wraps in those deep-black special limited access programs run by an international cabal of military-industrial-intelligence-media interests.

Why won't they tell all? "Because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs," said Richard M. Dolan, author of "UFOs and the National Security State," and another of the two dozen speakers this weekend. Dolan is not certain that it is an antimatter machine. Could be anti-gravity. But they're working on something, perhaps by "reverse engineering" based upon debris -- mechanical or biological -- vacuumed up at the crash sites.

"The topic is now being taken very seriously," Noory said. He said if the CIA could release 693 pages of the "family jewels," the worst deeds by the nation's spies, then the UFO research community asks why not the files (probably kept underground) about the extraterrestrials. "We've been visited from the very beginning of time," Noory said. "Maybe we've been seeded. Maybe we've been changed. I don't know. But somebody does."

That somebody might be Roger Leir, author of "The Aliens and the Scalpel," about his research on the abductees who have been implanted or probed. His latest case, which he shared with UFO enthusiasts at the festival, involves "a gentleman in his 60s" who awoke recently to see "a drop of blood on his knee." CAT scans, X-rays and interviews, said Leir, revealed a 60 percent certainty that the man had been snatched by the ETs. The foreign object in his knee appeared to be a one-inch-long rod as thick as a pencil. More testing, naturally, is required. "We try to do this as scientifically as possible," he said. His pet theory? Mass genetic manipulation. But it is only a theory -- so far.

Other lectures at the festival include "Body Snatchers in the Desert," "Were Early Contactees Ritual Magicians?" and "UFOs and the Occult: Reptilian Overlords, Abductions, Mind Control and the New World Order."

Reptilian overlords aside, the aliens have been pretty good for little Roswell, population 45,000, which in recent years has embraced the 1947 flying saucer crash as a boomlet for tourism dollars. "We're told the motels are absolutely packed," said Roswell assistant city manager Bob Thomson. Is he a believer? "There's a lot of excitement this year," he said diplomatically.

Downtown, the street lamps of Roswell sport lights depicting almond-eyed ETs. The local liquor store's sign offers "aliens, beer, wine." Perhaps not in that order. At the Wool Bowl, thousands came out to hear the Alan Parsons Project play. At the convention center, a company is offering tours of the crash site, which is on a ranch west of town. They're selling alien cat scratches, glow-in-the-dark soap and Area 51 coffee mugs.

The crowds at the festival appear relatively sane. Many are from New Mexico, and they say they are here for the fun carnival atmosphere in tidy, laid-back Roswell. Some of the out-of-towners, the real enthusiasts, can be a little intense. They're like trekkies at a "Star Trek" convention, except that they pepper their conversations with the phrase: "And that can be authenticated."

Guy Malone is one of the official organizers of the weekend event. "There are a lot of views expressed here, and I share them all," he said. "Angels, fairies, demons, succubuses, ETs and aliens. They might all be the same phenomena."

Please, continue. "Hundreds of years ago," Malone explained, sporting black alien-style sunglasses, "it was elves and fairies taking you to a cave and poking you with wands or having weird sex in the woods." And today? "We call them aliens."

Why does the public not know all this? "The single largest number one roadblock to disclosure is the mainstream media," Dolan said. For example, he said, last year there was a UFO sighting in Chicago. Did you know that?

"A flying saucer-like object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon," according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration blamed "a weather phenomenon," but really, what else could they say? The problem, said Dolan, is not that the major media avoid such stories completely, "but they don't follow up."

The U.S. government, of course, has issued its share of reports debunking UFOs. Here in Roswell, those reports are generally seen as desperate attempts to whitewash the truth.

Yet there is hope for the Roswell set. Apparently from the French, who have declassified some of their UFO files. The British and Brazilians have or will soon open their cases for scrutiny. But the treasure trove belongs to the U.S. government, and strangely, disclosure has not yet become an issue on the presidential campaign.

The question is why.

Oh, Puleeze! Is there really any difference in the folks at Roswell hoping that there is someone out there who will save us from ourselves and the Fundies saying Jesus will?
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