Friday, July 5
UFO abductee Travis Walton occupies a curious position at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. He is both present in person for the 2024 Roswell UFO Festival, and as an exhibit. There is something uncanny about finding him sitting at a table not 20 feet from the museum’s collection of news clippings and ephemera documenting his 1975 encounter with a flying saucer and its occupants. Walton’s story would become the 1993 film Fire in the Sky.
Red-haired, mustached, conservatively dressed, this is the last time he will appear so relaxed during the three days of the festival. Walton is one of the stars, a patriarch of the scene. He will find much of his time missing as wide-eyed visitors extend their clammy hands toward him.
He tells me: “I have a lot of people relating to me experiences they had, sightings and even more vivid stories. Mostly, people are sincere. In some cases, they’re mistaken, but it’s a very real phenomenon and people are taking it more seriously.”
What renders one account more credible than another?
“Well, I don’t like to make comments on other people’s stories. My biggest critics didn’t even have the facts. If I haven’t researched a case, I won’t comment on it. In some cases, people are describing an experience, and some are describing things they couldn’t know but are assuming. I shy away from identifying which are the most credible or not, but there’s definitely a huge range. There are people who misidentify something or have vivid dreams or something of that nature.”
Walton’s exhibit is beside that of Betty and Barney Hill, whose 1961 claim of abduction was dramatized as The UFO Incident (1975). Walton’s detractors regard this as source material to his own story. The juxtaposition gives him no discomfort. He is uncomfortable, however, with the body-horror aspects of his Hollywood treatment and thinks it requires revision.
I ask Walton what he has observed of the festival’s evolution. “I think the festival has not only benefited from the increasing acceptance of the phenomenon,” he says, “but they’ve also added to that increasing acceptance. People are much more scientifically oriented in their perception.”
Conceived in 1995, the Roswell UFO Festival commemorates the notorious 1947 Roswell incident when “something” crashed down on the JB Foster ranch, 65 miles outside the city. In 1995, The X-Files was cult viewing on Fox, and the risible Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction aired on the same channel in August that year. “And tourists are money,” as Johnny Rotten sang. The festival zapped the zeitgeist.
The term “flying saucer” entered the Cold War consciousness in the last week of June 1947 when amateur aviator Kenneth Arnold reported a sighting of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier, Washington, their trajectories “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”
On July 8, 1947, a press release from Roswell Army Air Field began, “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week.”
This narrative was hastily revised: merely a ragged weather balloon. This held until 1978 when retired Major Jesse Marcel, who appears in famous 1947 photographs allegedly handling weather balloon materials from the crash site, told UFO researcher Stanton Friedman that the balloon story had been a tinfoil fabrication, swapped with the real materials in a ‘cover-up.’
Academic and para-academic research into the Roswell incident and other UFO phenomena are, nominally, at the core of the festival, its schedule of speakers occupying the video room and North Library of the UFO Museum. But even the larger library space has seating for only 150 guests. This and the 60-seat video room are not always filled.
Outside of these serious environs one is surrounded by the carnivalesque and burlesque trappings of UFO culture. Seven blocks of Main Street are closed to traffic and filled with pedestrians and vendors. There is a shifting landfill of plastic between the rumbling of generators and concession tents, much tinsel waving in the incessantly awful EDM that thuds from the beer garden and from the storefronts, flashing lights, face-paint and alien sunglasses. The iconography of the alien, the bulbous head and large eyes, is everywhere. There is no end of tat to be purchased. These trinkets are fun, the panelists repeat, but don’t forget what we’re really here for.
Three times, I am handed something for free. Each time it is from an evangelical Christian: a child gives me an alien-faced $1 million bill with a tract on the reverse that begins: “Greetings Earthlings! Have you ever wondered about if there’s life outside this world?” and continues incredulously, “If aliens did exist, what would they think of humans—that people are basically good?” Revealingly, there’s no space to endorse my million dollars. A woman hands me Three Final Warning Messages to Planet Earth, a stark admonition against worship of the Beast, and, apparently, Photoshop. A preppy young man named Billy hands me an “alien card,” something like a driver’s license. It asks, “Are You Alienated from God?” There is a curious tension between the conservative, religious citizens of Roswell and those whom they perceive as perverted cultists invading their city. This clash of ideologies is real but repressed. I push Billy on this—some see aliens in angelic terms, and some as satanic presences—but he stays on scripture.
Diana and Andy Bednara are here to celebrate Diana’s 50th birthday. “As a sci-fi fan,” Andy says, “you’re gonna know Roswell.” Diana describes a childhood encounter with mysterious lights over Texas. “We followed the lights as far as we could until they suddenly disappeared. I was excited and scared, and it was interesting. It was something that my mom and I shared, and”—she laughs, “we couldn’t talk to anyone else about it!”
Saturday, July 6
Leaving Stellar Coffee, I interrupt a column of Star Wars cosplayers. Can Darth Maul offer any insights? “I can’t,” Maul demurs. “I’m on my way to judge the Alien Pet Contest.” Of course he is.
Amelia and Bill Kelly are here from Oklahoma. Despite the heat, they are in good humor. Their two dogs are attired for the contest, one as a flying saucer, the other wearing a tinfoil hat. Amelia explains, “I’ve always loved aliens and UFOs. This is our second time to the festival. This one is a lot bigger.”
Did some experience inspire their fascination?
“I’ve seen some stuff,” Amelia says, “but nothing too crazy. I really want to get abducted.”
How does one make oneself a more attractive target for UFOs?
“I mean, we’ve been decorating, and being as welcoming as possible.”
What does she hope to learn?
“I just assume they’re friendly. If they’re out there, and they know about us, they could have done what they wanted with us a long time ago, so I think they’re mostly friendly.”
Bill is enthusiastic about the vibrant community on Main Street. “All the people have been awesome. It’s enough just to be here with everyone else. I haven’t met anyone you’d say is strange.”
Well Bill, I remind him, it’s early.
I am about to talk with a Roswell resident whose poodle is dyed green and wearing sunglasses, when a television crew from NewsNation descends upon her. For the next two days, every event that I attend will include at least one mention of NewsNation. Perhaps the real psy-op here is that NewsNation has identified a debris field of shiny libertarianism and is insinuating itself among the unsuspecting.
Back at the museum, I meet Don Schmitt, former special investigator for Project Bluebook consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and author of Cover-Up at Roswell: Exposing the 70-year Conspiracy to Suppress the Truth. I like him immediately. After Hynek established the Center for UFO Studies, Schmitt became director of Special Investigations. “I was on [Hynek’s] board of directors for 10 years, and I was a skeptic. The one case we wanted to go after was Roswell. And that’s what began all this, the fact that we were wrong. We saw that after the first trip here to New Mexico, because we focused on witnesses who we were speaking to first-hand who held the wreckage.”
What were his emotions during the transition from skeptic to investigator of a cover-up?
“Even being at the crash site for the first time, it was like being on a battlefield. And the isolation added to that.”
With his serious baritone, he will be the best speaker of the conference. In his forthcoming book, he will be “focusing on all of the violations of civil rights, the First Amendment, due process…It’s going to be our day in court, so to speak.”
As a former skeptic, has he met many critics during his visits to Roswell?
“I would imagine that most skeptics would feel that this was a lion’s den,” he says. “But I’ve always debated so I’m not afraid to present our case. I would suggest it’s because their case is so faulty on the very premise that they’re asking us to trust and believe the government. Especially in recent years, anyone in the media who begins ‘well, doesn’t the government…’ Right there. End of argument. The other big difference is that we’ve interviewed over 600 witnesses either directly or indirectly involved. Down to a man, woman, and child, from that time, they all swore that it did happen.”
I see several panels on Saturday. Alejandro Rojas of Open Minds TV discusses royal and political claims of UFO experience, notably adduction claimant Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of the former Prime Minister of Japan Yukio Hatoyama; Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the former president of Kalmykia, a Putin ally and sometime chess partner of Muammar Gaddafi, who claimed to have been abducted in 1997; and Lord Mountbatten’s statement in support of UFO sighting by a worker at his Broadlands estate in 1955. Rojas also holds forth on the Kelly-Hopkinsville case of 1955 which gave rise to the “little green man” trope and which inspired Spielberg’s Gremlins and E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and on the strange case of the Allagash Abductions of 1976. Thom Reed lays out his “off-world incident,” and a conspiracy surrounding the death of his father.
Ben Hansen of SyFy Channel’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files and the Discovery+ series UFO Witness makes the case that “There is no official plan for disclosure” of what the government already knows and may yet come to know about UFOs and extraterrestrial contacts. Hansen makes projections based on other “‘reality compromising events”—not least the COVID-19 pandemic—to predict psychosocial collapse. On the subject of disclosure, but without evidence, Hansen states, “The last four presidents know enough to not ask more.”
An audience member begins to ask a question: “Does the president know what’s going on—?” provoking hysterical laughter from the packed room. Biden, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are derided here. In part, the room is packed with people waiting for the next speaker. When Hansen finishes taking questions, he makes room for Travis Walton, who will appear after a 30-minute break. There is a minor stampede for vacated seats towards the front. This is a Darwinian moment at the North Library.
4 pm: Travis Walton’s arrival is preceded by a video montage of clips from Fire in the Sky and television interviews with Geraldo Rivera. A smoke machine would not seem out of place, such is the anticipation in the darkened auditorium. Walton emerges to firm, earnest applause. It has been almost 50 years since his five-day disappearance.
He returns to the three beings he saw from an operating table aboard an alien vessel. Of these pallid, slight figures with their bulbous heads and dark eyes he reports, “They were trying to butcher me, or control me. I was hysterical. But in hindsight, they may have been trying to help.” Walton’s affect is not that of a man trying to convince anyone of anything.
“I am dealing with extreme trauma […] It has been devastating to my life.”
In response to a question, he confirms that he believes he was operated on. But, in general, Walton sees the presence of extraterrestrial life within our precincts as benign. UFOs have shut down nuclear silos to warn us. Their elusiveness, he says, “the glimpses we get are deliberate. It’s the only constructive thing they can do. Right now, they’re not that interested in revealing themselves to us…I’m sorry, but we’re a bunch of savages.”
Walton has only an hour before his next panel. An autograph line forms immediately as he concludes. I listen to people sharing stories with him, young men in NASA T-shirts, punks, cops, married couples. One man won’t leave Walton alone, even as there is concern that Walton hasn’t eaten anything yet. The man insists: Smoking a joint one night, he realized that since WWII, the government has been using satellites to project CGI of UFOs to manipulate the masses. We have drifted into a fathomless current of batshit. Finally, Walton snaps slightly: “And you’ve reported this to people?” He escapes with minutes to spare.
6 pm: Walton returns onstage with Ben Hansen. They are joined by Yvonne Smith, hypnotherapist and author of CHOSEN: From the Alien Hybrid Program to the Fate of the Planet, and moderator Clyde Lewis, host of the Ground Zero radio show. The subject of disclosure recurs. Quite reasonably, Walton appears exhausted. Disclosure, the panel concurs, will be driven not by the government, but by the experiencers. Things are about to get weird(er).
Smith describes her regression sessions with traumatized UFO experiencers: “The hybridization program is very central to this. Everyone that I work with has gone through this: ova taken; sperm taken. When they’re taken up to the ship, they’re shown these children, told that they’re their children and they must bond with them for them to survive. So, they abduct [the human parent] periodically. And they show them their children in different stages of growth. It’s heartbreaking. We humans, we bond with our children…They don’t seem to have that capability. So, when humans aren’t able to take their hybrid babies back to Earth with them, it’s heartbreaking. Men and women cry. […] I’ve asked [the aliens] many times, ‘Can you tell me what you’re doing?’ I don’t have any answers. But they are deceptive…They’ll come into someone’s home to abduct them, and the person is having a regression and they’re saying, ‘Oh, that’s Mom. Mom’s standing there,’ in their dining room. And they’re so happy to see her, but Mom has passed away. And then they go up to the ship because the abductee feels very comfortable. And they’re on the ship and all of a sudden, they’re looking at Mom and Mom begins to morph into the alien being.”
It’s too much like a chapter from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. This, to distort Agent Mulder, is what “I Don’t Want to Believe,” or cannot. I take an existential psychoanalytic position, opposed to Smith’s alien teleology. For me, it would be profoundly unethical, or in itself pathological, to encourage anyone to take these altered states of consciousness as physical and historical realities. It strikes me as cruel to encourage such delusions in vulnerable people. This panel has lost its way.
Of alien morality, Hansen takes a Manichean view: some aliens are “almost angelic,” and some are “very selfish beings.”
Briefly, a mist of predictable colonial guilt gathers about the stage.
Clyde Lewis redirects, invoking quantum computer developer Geordie Rose’s view that theoretical physics experiments at CERN are opening dimensions that can bring forth the ‘Old Ones’ of HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror fiction. Lewis continues, “I call it ‘pushing God through a wormhole.’ Do you think that some of these beings are dimensional beings that are being brought forward with the experimentation we’re seeing in Geneva?”
…I may have stayed too long at the fair.
Lewis continues, “I’ve discussed this idea with Avi Loeb (Harvard)…The possibility that we’re dealing with a number of alien beings, if they exist, that are hanging out in the Jovian system. The Jovian system is the area between Jupiter and Saturn. A lot of people don’t know how big it is; it’s huge…There is always the possibility that there is an armada of alien ships, or rogue ships and they have Bracewell probes watching us every minute.”
This is the point I knew I would arrive at.
Moments later, to Lewis’ audible irritation, an assistant approaches the stage and takes Travis Walton away. He has to appear in the evening’s parade.
Sunday, July 7
I’m in the shade on Main Street. Aside from the generators, it is quiet. There is birdsong. Kids play basketball at the end of the enclosure. There is a hungover quality, as if the festival’s Parade of Lights—its cargo cult atmosphere—burned too brightly last night. I listen to Kevin Randle, who seems rattled by the silence and being locked out of the North Library as he was due to begin. Self-effacing, Randle identifies a number of UFO hoaxes, persevering against some disappointed objections from his audience. Don Schmitt gives a dynamic lecture on his latest Roswell research, for which I thank him. I appreciate his methodology, his empiricism, wherever it leads. But now, Yvonne Smith is about to host an Experiencer Session. I can’t bear to watch. I think of JG Ballard’s ironic observation: “The only truly alien planet is Earth.”
I start heading for the motorway…
James Reich is an ecopsychologist, author of Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy, and several novels. Learn more at jamesreichbooks.com