Close encounter.

ROSWELL, New Mexico, is, as its postcards say, in the middle of nowhere. A hundred miles from the Texas border, this dusty small town is far removed from the chic of Santa Fe and Taos. Once an Air Force town, Roswell's buzz-cut traditions still flourish at the New Mexico Military Institute. Traditional values find further inspiration from the Ten Commandments, carved on a slab just outside the court house -- on Main Street, of course. Nearby are a gunsmith, two wedding shops, a shoe store, and, perhaps more surprisingly, The International UFO Museum and Research Center. Five miles up the road, just across from the old Roswell Army Air Field, is The UFO Enigma Museum. In July 1947, the air base played a central role in the ``Roswell Incident,'' a series of peculiar events that explains why this obscure Southwestern city of fifty thousand people is the site of not one but two UFO museums. The story of the 1947 events is controversial, strange, and, some would say, highly exaggerated. The only area of agreement is that a team from Roswell Army Air Field retrieved some odd-looking wreckage from a remote ranch north of Roswell and, after examining it, announced that they had been ``fortunate enough to gain possession'' of a ``flying disc.'' The debris was quickly taken to Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth. There, standing amid what appeared to be shredded tin foil, base commander General Ramey explained that the wreckage was that of a weather balloon. The story died. Ramey, in the brutal words of the Roswell Daily Record, had ``emptied'' the saucer. But not completely. In the late 1970s, some of the participants began telling tales of a crashed saucer and a government cover-up. They found a ready audience in a public that remained fascinated with UFOs. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had just been released, and events in Washington, D.C., a few years earlier had left people all too willing to believe in a ``cosmic Watergate.'' The story has grown and grown. It now includes crashed saucers, alien spacemen (dead and alive), and mysterious government hangars. The official explanation has shifted only slightly, from weather balloons to a once highly classified project to use balloon-borne sensors to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The bibliography is as vast as the facts are scarce. Inevitably, Roswell obsessives have discovered the Internet. Roswell is also a film, starring Kyle Maclachlan and Martin Sheen, and a leitmotif of Fox-TV's spookily effective X-Files. Roswell T-shirts are on sale in downtown Manhattan. Even some congressmen have expressed interest. Under these circumstances, the presence of a UFO museum on Main Street should be no surprise. The museum lies behind an unassuming storefront, unremarkable but for the small extraterrestrial figure waving through the window. Inside, the atmosphere is more Our Town than Alien. There is no hint of New Age. It is, well, ``scientific.'' Visitors seemed slightly subdued as they wandered through the exhibit with a mixture of enthusiasm, curiosity, and embarrassment. Walter Haut, the Air Force officer who gave out the 1947 press release, was on hand, as was Glenn Dennis, the mortician said to have talked to a nurse who supposedly saw the alien bodies. Today they serve on the museum's board. Likable sixty- or seventy-somethings, they autographed books and teased each other about their longevity. Visitors are asked where they come from and, if it is suitably exotic, to mark the appropriate spot on a large map with a pin. ``We have had,'' I was told, ``50,000 visitors from 52 countries,'' but, alas, from only one planet. Both museums bravely ignore the significant problem of having, strictly speaking, nothing to exhibit. This is a Hamlet without the Prince, Ophelia, or even poor Yorick. The wreckage and alien corpses have long gone, if they ever existed. UFO Enigma does, however, have an old windmill shaft ``found . . . at UFO debris field,'' while the downtown museum displays faux wreckage -- authentic replicas of the saucer debris. Life-size model aliens are also on view. At UFO Enigma, little grey corpses are scattered around a saucer wreck. Downtown, an alien is subjected to a grisly autopsy. A colleague of his, an enigmatically smiling individual known as RALF (``Roswell Alien Life Form'') fares better: for $2.50, visitors can be photographed with him. Most of the rest of the exhibit is a collection of photographs. Some are acknowledged fakes, ``hubcaps'' suspended a la Ed Wood. Others, it is conceded, are nothing more than a trick of the light, a star, an airplane, or even one of those ubiquitous weather balloons. However, some remain maddeningly inexplicable, blurry will-o'-the-wisps that tantalize the faithful and torment the skeptical. Alongside the photographs hangs a series of newspaper clippings. These include the startling revelation that ``Twelve U.S. Senators are Space Aliens'' (rest assured that the article predated the November elections), as well as the more familiar accounts of lights in the sky and blips on the radar screen. A ``Bulletin of North American Sightings,'' unfortunately dated April 1, 1994, is stapled to the wall. A ``football sized'' object had been seen in the skies over Gastonia, N.C., while ``John'' had been abducted again in Yuma. Above all, the museums offer an insight into UFO subculture, a strange world of fiercely competing beliefs. The Roswell museums tend to ignore ufology's mystics, instead catering to the more scientifically inclined. Theirs is a world of grainy photographs and a frantic search for the one unchallengeable piece of hard evidence. Others prefer a particular specialty, such as alien abduction, animal mutilation, or the sinister ``men in black.'' There is even one determined unbeliever, who each month fires off a savage UFO Skeptics Newsletter from Washington, D.C. This is no small fringe. A 1991 poll found that 7 per cent of adult Americans had seen a UFO -- and the number of believers is far larger. The phenomenon is worldwide and, it would seem, growing. There are societies, books, magazines, conferences, ``900'' numbers, videos and film festivals, even support groups for the victims of alien abduction. None of this is enough, however. Any creed needs holy places where the faithful can congregate. Ufologists are no exception, and, Alpha Centauri being rather far away, Roswell may fit the bill. There are rivals, such as Sedona, Arizona, but Roswell has something they do not: it remains the only place where Uncle Sam has ever admitted, if only for a few hours, finding a flying saucer. To a Roswell increasingly aware of the economic potential of the Incident -- especially as the fiftieth anniversary approaches -- this will be just fine. Visits to the ``UFO impact site of 1947'' are on offer. There have been ``UFO Awareness'' months. Just as Albuquerque has its balloons and Deming its duck race, so Roswell (a city official once explained) has its UFOs. Perhaps, at last, Roswell has found its deus ex machina.