“Well, Mr. Heller? What do you think of my theory?”
“Son,” I said, “it’ll never fly.”
And that ended my one and only interview on Roswell.
I have finally broken my silence, including admitting a murder, confident that the United States government will not come to Florida looking for the old man making these absurd statements. The true believers will discount my tale-part of me hopes they’ll label it “disinformation”-and the debunkers will reject it, too, because they didn’t think of it.
As I write this, a new millennium approaches, and Roswell, New Mexico, has three UFO museums (retired mortician Glenn Dennis is the president of the International UFO Museum amp; Research Center). The town of fifty thousand also has bus tours to various impact sites, and numerous shops selling T-shirts, dolls, puppets, spaceship earrings, bumper stickers and UFO hats. More than five million earth dollars a year, of late, have been pumped into Roswell, where its annual summer UFO celebration-with rock concert, “Best Alien” costume contest, laser light show and film festival-has attracted as many as 150,000 tourists. The town’s new motto: “Crash in Roswell.” No one seems to care about the space program anymore, that trip to the moon the Nazi scientists helped us make; we’re more interested in watching science-fiction movies on our Japanese-designed video equipment. But, of course, everybody’s interested in Roswell, and why not? Something strange happened there.
