Outside city limits, the name Roswell speaks to less tangible concerns. Like the black helicopters of the new world order or the racist-police conspiracy to frame O.J. Simpson, the Incident, as it is known, is either pretty sensational stuff or yet another of the ingenious tales those of us who mistrust mainstream institutions tell ourselves to help make sense of a scary, sometimes depressing world. In this case, it is a tale that combines deeply American strains of spirituality and paranoia as well as--let us be frank--a large scoop of native wackiness. One could even say, if one were inclined to put yet another spin on the following cliche, that we have met the aliens and they are us. In fact, to judge from the way they are most often depicted, aliens have sprung from the same corner of the national psyche that has a thing for Walter Keane's paintings of grotesquely doe-eyed children. Unless, of course, aliens actually look like that.

Everyone agrees that something crashed in the desert outside Roswell in mid-June or early July 1947. On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release saying it had recovered the wreckage of a "flying disk," sparking incredulous news stories around the world. A few hours later, a general at the regional Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, where the debris had been sent for further analysis, announced that what had really been recovered was a weather balloon. This is the indisputable core of the Roswell Incident. Whether one chooses to believe that the government has been covering up an affair involving extraterrestrials is, of course, a more subjective matter. But because Roswell represents the only time the U.S. military has gone on record saying that flying saucers exist, it has become a cornerstone of belief for the UFO community. They are, by the way, quite a diverse and fractious group of folks--studies say they tend to be better educated than the norm--whose numbers include casual believers; so-called UFOlogists, most of whom are pretty earnest in their efforts to document UFO sightings with something approaching objective rigor; contactees, who believe they have had telepathic communication with aliens; abductees, who believe they have been subjected to experimentation by E.T.s; and cultists like the Heaven's Gaters, who are an enormous source of embarrassment to their comparatively sober-minded confreres. But despite their many differences, for nearly all of them Roswell is central, a way into the darkness. Peculiar theories ripple out from Roswell. So do further-ranging cultural tides.

A lost opportunity. But on the cultural radar, presidential recognition barely registers next to playing a pivotal role in a popcorn movie. In last year's Independence Day, the seventh highest grossing film of all time, Bill Pullman's President Whitmore also assures an audience the government has nothing up its sleeve concerning UFOs and Roswell, only to be told by his Secretary of Defense, "That's not entirely accurate." Well, sure--otherwise the movie would be finished halfway through. Fortunately, the embattled Earthlings are able to use the recovered Roswell saucer against the invaders and triumph. Talk about vindication.

Roswell's pop-cultural apotheosis has been as an inescapable reference on Fox Television's The X-Files, a paranormal Dragnet that details the efforts of two wooden, underacted FBI agents to expose what has metastasized over the show's four seasons into an increasingly baroque conspiracy between the Federal Government and sinister extraterrestrials--a fiction whose particulars have been cherry-picked from among the wilder theories flitting through the UFO community. Its perspective is offered by John Price, founder of Roswell's UFO Enigma Museum. Says Price: "The old sci-fi films were just kind of made up from someone's imagination. But The X-Files calls us every once in a while for information.

This observation is more or less true as well for two movie blockbusters: Men in Black, an inventive action-comedy loosely based on lore about mysterious dark-suited agents who harass people who've seen UFOs; and the more solemn Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel and said to be, in the words of its director Bob Zemeckis, the rare alien movie "rooted in true scientific believability." "We've done more for them than they do for us," says Price of Hollywood. A handsome, weather-beaten man with surprisingly still, pale blue eyes, he has no apparent enmity toward Hollywood, even though he once got what sounds like the brush-off when he tried to persuade his second cousin, the late producer Don Simpson, to make a movie based on Roswell.

On the Hollywood end of things, Peter Roth, the Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Entertainment Group president, readily concedes that aliens have been good to Fox: besides its well-rated The X-Files, the company's movie studio produced Independence Day, and the network broadcast the patently hoaxed autopsy of a creature supposedly recovered at Roswell. But when pressed as to his personal feelings on the subject, Roth is willing to admit only that "there's something in the cosmos that suggests there may be a presence elsewhere." Dean Devlin, co-writer and producer of Independence Day, comes to the field more naturally: he was steeped in UFO culture as a boy by a mother who dragged him to UFO conventions. Although he's skeptical of official explanations of the Roswell Incident, he doubts extraterrestrials were involved: "I don't know what it was, but our government is so bad at keeping secrets, I have a hard time believing that after all these years, the smoking gun hasn't appeared. I live by the watchwords 'Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence.'"

Consumers who are interested in learning the thoughts of true believers unmediated by people who drive Land Rovers can turn to the Internet, of course, and to local bookstores. Over the past decade, the publishing industry has pumped out dozens of books on Roswell and hundreds on UFOs in general. In fact, according to Books in Print, there are nearly as many titles available about UFOs (256) as there are about the Kennedys (266), who probably represent the gold standard when it comes to unwarranted public interest in a subject. Not surprisingly, many more Roswell books will be hitting the shelves just in time to capitalize on the Incident's anniversary. The most notorious is Pocket Books' The Day After Roswell, the volume that features a foreword by Strom Thurmond that the Senator disavowed two weeks ago when he learned what the book was actually about. Written by Philip J. Corso, a retired Army-intelligence officer and former member of Thurmond's staff, The Day After Roswell numbers among its many revelations the claim that ever since 1947, when the Roswell crash put the military on alert, the U.S. government has been fighting "the 'real' cold war" against what Corso says the military calls EBEs, or extraterrestrial biological entities. Fortunately, it turns out, Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative tipped the balance of power. As Corso writes, "[The U.S. and U.S.S.R.] both knew who the real targets of SDI were ... When we deployed our advanced particle-beam weapon and tested it in orbit for all to see, the EBEs knew and we knew that they knew that we had our defense of the planet in place."

With the '80s finally explained, we can return to the question of what really happened at Roswell. According to which experts one chooses to believe: there may have been more than one crash site; the U.S. government may have recovered dead aliens (the number varies) as well as a salvageable spacecraft; the craft may have been a secret government prototype and the dead aliens may have been test chimps with their fur eerily singed off or, as Popular Mechanics hypothesizes this month, imported Japanese pilots who had been flying similar experimental craft during the war; then again, the wreckage may really have been extraterrestrial, and one of the aliens may have been taken into custody alive (the docudrama Roswell, which aired on Showtime in 1994, even implies that the suicide of James Forrestal, Harry Truman's Secretary of Defense, was caused by his inability to deal with the enormity of what had been communicated to him telepathically by a captured alien); government scientists may even have reverse-engineered alien technology, as Corso claims, and come up with Stealth bombers and computer chips.

If alien society is anything like ours in its leanings toward tragicomedy, the most believable explanation may come from Kristin Corn, the daughter of Hub and Sheila Corn, ranchers whose property 30 or so miles outside of Roswell is home to one of the alleged crash sites (Sheila offers pleasantly homespun tours at $15 a head). Kristin's theory: the crash was caused by alien teenagers who slipped away from a mother ship and went for a joyride, little knowing that alleged film of one of their autopsies would one day appear on the same network as World's Scariest Police Chases.

The real truth, assuming it doesn't involve a weather balloon, is made harder to get at by the sometimes mutable memories of aging "witnesses" and the fact that some of the most provocative evidence is secondhand. Industrious UFOlogists may spend years tracking down slim leads like the one attributed to a former cafe owner in Taos, N.M., who told interlocutors that an old customer, a desert rat named Cactus Jack, once told her he was "out there when the spaceship came down" and saw dead aliens with blood "like tar." But despite the best efforts of Kevin Randle and others, no one has yet been able even to confirm Jack's existence, let alone his veracity. Hunting spacemen can be as daunting as finding the lady who dried her poodle in the microwave.

And yet it is the very murkiness of the Roswell Incident, the sense that it is both knowable and yet never quite confirmable, that the answers are hovering just beyond the horizon, that gives the Incident its enduring appeal; after all, if the government ever really said "jig's up" and produced a preserved alien for our delectation, we would be stunned for a day or two, perturbed for a week longer, and then we would move on to the girl who gave birth at the prom. As the makers of monster movies know, the unseen is always more compelling than the seen. The particular appeal of Roswell's elusiveness, and allusiveness, is captured in the canny words that appear at the end of The X-Files' credit sequence: "The truth is out there." The point is made more succinctly by the pins sold at the Enigma UFO Museum that read, simply, BELIEVE. What we are talking about is a leap of faith.

Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler, professors of anthropology at Brandeis University, have just published a study of what they call the Roswell Myth, which in their view has "religious-like" elements without being religion per se. Its primary purpose, Saler and Ziegler say, is twofold. One is as a means of social protest, in that the Roswell story is in great part an antigovernment narrative; as Zeigler points out, the Incident was largely ignored until the late '70s, when it resurfaced and resonated with a public made cynical by those twin devils, Vietnam and Watergate. By then too, the Federal Government had grown so large and its concerns so cosmic--what with the space program and a nuclear arsenal that could, if push came to shove, wipe out humankind--that covert interactions with an alien culture might very well seem within the realm of possibility (curiously, the supposedly advanced alien race of Independence Day takes days to wipe out Earth's great cities, when everyone knows we could do the job in a matter of minutes).

By positing a government conspiracy with limitless resources, the more fervent believers in the Myth also inoculate themselves against heresy: any concrete evidence the government or anyone else unearths to prove that the crash was strictly terrestrial is obviously engineered--it's a cannier brand of fundamentalism. The appearance of skeptical articles in a national magazine like this one could be part of a disinformation campaign to distract letter-to-the-editor-writing UFOlogists from more fruitful pursuits. For all you know, this author may be a member of an ultra-top-secret National Security Council committee with a terribly spooky acronym.

But no one would work this hard to hash out such an enthrallingly elaborate belief system--the human imagination is depthless, the anthropologists point out--if more profound needs weren't being met as well. At its core, the Myth is a secular way to give the universe meaning, and humanity a renewed place at the head of the table: not only are we not alone, not only are the skies populated by superhuman beings, but their visits here are prima facie evidence that we are of some consuming interest. In Saler's words, the Roswell Myth is "an effort to put enchantment back in nature." UFOlogists, he says, "are employing idioms of science in what is really a romantic pursuit. I find that fascinating, even inspiring in a way."

An informal survey suggests that Roswellians themselves are generally less inspired by the whole thing than amused, although some--Christian Fundamentalists in particular--are offended by the city's growing embrace of its unique legacy. "There's kind of a love-hate relationship with this thing," says Stan Crosby, a self-described oil-and-gas man who is the chief organizer of Roswell UFO Encounter '97 (he is married to the director of the International UFO Museum, the glitzier rival to the Enigma). "It's not like we have the prettiest beach," admits Crosby, "or the Carlsbad Caverns. But you know, we've got to go with what we've got. And it sure brings them in." He is already thinking three years hence, when the theme will be Roswell UFO Encounters: On to the Millennium.

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

Roswell: 1947 | Hollywood vs. The Flying Saucers | 70 Years of SciFi