An alien craft and creatures set designed for the Travel Channel series *Making Monsters* is currently on display—complete with fog and sound effects—at the Roswell UFO Museum and Research Center. Photo by Elaine Skylar Neal / Travels and Curiosities.

Roswell UFO Museum and Research Center

March 1, 2020

Roswell is a bit of a strange place. Made famous after The Roswell Incident, Roswell’s tourism centers on aerospace engineering—Robbert H. Goddard’s early rocketry work was based here—and all things ufology. Isolated on the high plains of New Mexico and surrounded by agriculture, there’s not much to explore in this mid-sized city of 48,000 residents that doesn’t involve alien lore.

The report of an alien crash some 40-miles northwest of town in July of 1947 put Roswell on the map and at the center of public and private debate between skeptics, local witnesses, aviation experts, and conspiracy theorists, some of them pointing to an all-out government cover-up.

At the Roswell UFO Museum and Research Center, the entirety of the event including witness statements, wreckage collectors, news broadcasts, and interviews (some conducted under hypnosis) have been pieced together in a detailed timeline that might turn even the most solid non-believer.

The exhibits feature communications technology of the era, numerous documented stories, photographic evidence, alien-inspired art, pop culture creations and filmography, and a fog-spewing, alien jabbering set designed for the Travel Channel series Making Monsters. The Roswell Incident is also interwoven into a chronological display, showing its place in aerospace and wartime history.