UFO Festival in Roswell

My husband and I stopped in Roswell, NM this past Fourth of July weekend on our way to visit family in Texas when we realized that highway 285 (aka Main Street) was completely blocked off. Some kind of street fair was in progress. We decided to have dinner and check it out. We walked past a live band, a man in silver pants on stilts, street vendors, a pony ride, a ferris wheel and a fun house and naturally assumed it was a Fourth of July celebration.

We were wrong. It was much more than that. We had stumbled into the Roswell UFO Festival.

I'll admit the alien on the bike should have been a "dead" giveaway, but these days you can see those sort of props all the time in Roswell.

My husband went to high school in Roswell. Of course back then no one had heard anything about the 1947 alien crash site. One of his high school classmates, Hub Corn, owns the ranch where the weather balloon/space ship went down and has subsidized his ranching business with Crash Site Tours. I was surprised to find out there are actually several crash sites. I should say alleged crash sites. After all, how many can there be?

Here's an old but interesting article from the Albuquerque Journal that tells all about the various alien crash sites and the stories behind them - Journal Article.

What a fun and interesting state we live in!