Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Aliens take over Fort Myers museum

Far from the New Mexico desert - by airplane at least - an exhibit on the Roswell incident draws big crowds of believers and naysayers to a normally quiet history museum.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published March 20, 2005

[Photos courtesy of International Museum Institute of Texas]

An article in the Feb. 25, 1942, Los Angeles Times reported a large object, targeted by spotlights in this photograph, that hovered over the city for five hours and appeared undamaged by antiaircraft fire.

	On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record reported that the military had recovered a flying saucer from the crash site. On July 9, it reported that the object was a weather balloon.
	Ranch foreman Mack Brazel reported finding a debris site the size of a football field.
	Lt. Walter Haut wrote the news release stating that the military had recovered a “flying disk.”
	This model of an “extraterrestrial biological entity” awaiting autopsy is based on descriptions by witnesses to the incident near Roswell, N.M., in 1947.
	Mortician Glenn Dennis said the base asked him for small coffins that could be sealed.
	Maj. Jesse Marcel, one of the first officers at the site, later said this weather balloon was not part of the debris he found, but was substituted by the military for this photograph taken days after the incident.
	Madonna and Child With the Infant St. John, painted in Italy in the 15th century, depicts a man and dog in the upper right corner looking up at a hovering, boatlike object in the sky.

FORT MYERS - The building wasn't designed for spaceships.

The graceful stucco structure that houses the Southwest Florida Museum of History was built for another kind of transportation. When it went up in 1923, it was the Fort Myers depot for the Atlantic Coast Line railroad.

Since renovation in 1982, it has housed the museum's collection of artifacts from Florida's past: dugout canoes and giant shark jaws, memorabilia from wars and railroads, old photos of families with names that match those on the city's street signs.

But since January, the biggest draw in the place - the biggest draw in its history - pulls visitors to the museum's back corner. The sign at the door says, "Area 51. Warning: Restricted Area. No trespassing beyond this point."

Above it, the title is superimposed over a photo of an empty patch of New Mexico brittlebush and sage: "The Roswell Exhibit."

This exhibit has nothing at all to do with Florida. Matt Johnson, who has been the museum's general manager for four years, says he was reluctant at first to bring in the traveling exhibit, which was produced by the International Museum Institute of Texas.

"Once I got a look at the exhibit, I was more comfortable with it," Johnson says. "It's really a scholarly look at the Roswell incident. It shows both sides.

"There's no question that something happened there. What's happened since is the history: how this event has become a part of American popular culture."

To UFO enthusiasts, and they are legion, Roswell is the grail.

Whatever happened near that little New Mexico town in July 1947, it has burgeoned into a contemporary myth, a cornerstone of the belief that alien spacecraft have visited our planet. And that is a belief that, depending on which poll you look at, is shared by somewhere between one-third and three-quarters of Americans.

And more than 2,000 of them have visited "The Roswell Exhibit" in its Fort Myers debut. The museum's first traveling exhibit, "Tutankhamun," drew 910 adults during its first month, March 2003. "Roswell" got 820 adults in its first nine days in January, more than 1,000 in February and is on track for a record-breaking March, says Helena Suter, the museum's public relations-marketing manager. Museum office manager Carole Thompson is working the front desk on a wet, chilly Wednesday afternoon, selling tickets and keeping an eye on the gift shop, where the faithful can buy tiny vials of sand from Roswell for $2. "Do not open; possible unknown biohazard," the label warns.

"We expected more strangeness," Thompson says.

"We did get this one teenage boy with homemade headgear, made out of aluminum foil, you know, with antennas and everything."

She shakes her head. "I could tell he wanted me to say something, but hey, I was busy."

No aluminum foil is in evidence this day. The drenched parking lot is full and the exhibit has plenty of visitors, but they look entirely ordinary in slickers, shorts and sneakers.

Jim Greenfield of South Dakota, an executive for a financial services company, says he's here "just out of curiosity. I guess I would like to believe there are other civilizations in the universe."

He has seen some of the television shows about Roswell, he says, and most of the material in the exhibit is familiar.

Greenfield's wife, Lisa, says, "He's been into this for a while. I never paid much attention, but I thought this is a way to fill in the story.

"I hadn't really realized there were all those witnesses," she says, gazing at dozens of vintage portrait photos.

The Greenfields' son, Matt, is peering at a slide show of depictions of alien beings and spaceships through history, from cave paintings to photographs.

Did he like the exhibit? The lanky 15-year-old flips his hands in the universal teenage code for noncommittal response. "It's pretty cool, I guess. It's interesting they have all this stuff."

Jim Greenfield finishes a cell phone call from a friend. "He asked me if I recognized any of the aliens," he tells his wife. She grins.

Then he waves a hand at the exhibit. "I would think it's possible," he says. "It's not like we haven't had coverups before."

"The Roswell Exhibit" is not a matter of bells and whistles. The most interactive element is the stack of comment cards at the exit. The presentation style is mostly traditional: blowups of newspaper pages and photographs of key figures accompanied by blocks of text.

A 1947 ABC radio broadcast about a flying saucer crash in the New Mexico desert plays in a loop on a reproduction '40s-style radio. A reproduction of a 15th century painting, Madonna and Child With the Infant St. John, from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, is accompanied by blown-up details of a shepherd in the background pointing up at a boatlike object hovering in the sky over the Virgin's left shoulder.

The dioramas are a little unusual. A military uniform hangs on a coatrack next to a gurney with a glass cover, like a giant butter dish. Inside lies a small body with long, webbed hands and feet, an oversized head and deep black almond-shaped eyes. Its feet and knees are a little burned, as if it had stumbled into a campfire. A tray of medical instruments rests near its head.

There are no authentic artifacts, no scraps of weather balloon or tapes of the radio interview with ranch foreman Mack Brazel, who discovered something odd in the desert outside Roswell sometime in July 1947 and started telling folks about it - then stopped.

Of course there is no firsthand evidence. The coverup is as important a part of the mythos of Roswell as the crash.

The exhibit places the events in Roswell in their historical context, in a profoundly nervous nation that went straight from World War II to the Cold War.

Among the first photos is one of the phenomenon called "foo fighters" by WWII pilots. The small, glowing spheres would sometimes track military planes at close range, mimicking their maneuvers, and at other times fly at tremendous speeds.

Allied pilots assumed they were a secret weapon developed by the Germans. After the war, they discovered German pilots saw them, too, and assumed they were an American secret weapon.

Next is a blowup of a front page story from the Los Angeles Times of Feb. 25, 1942, reporting a large aerial object that hovered over the city for five hours. An emergency blackout was ordered, and the military poured 1,400 rounds of antiaircraft fire at the object. Five people died on the ground, and several buildings were destroyed - from friendly fire.

The object flew away, apparently undamaged. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox termed the whole thing a false alarm, blaming it on "war nerves."

In June 1947, when a pilot flying near Mount Rainier in Washington reported seeing nine shining objects flying at speeds above 1,000 mph and described them as looking like saucers, the comparison stuck. Over the next few weeks, the national press reported more than 800 sightings of "flying saucers."

On July 3, 1947, several residents of Roswell saw a glowing or burning object pass over the town. The next day, Brazel and a neighbor's son were out herding sheep when they came upon a debris field that Brazel later described as being about the size of a football field, littered with pieces of metallic foil and metal bars.

Brazel picked some of the material up and showed it to neighbors, who encouraged him to report it. So he took his findings to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox on July 6. Wilcox called in the military from the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field. The commander, Col. William Blanchard, sent two intelligence officers to inspect the site, Maj. Jesse Marcel and Capt. Sheridan Cavitt.

Marcel brought back more material from the site, showing it to his wife and son before taking it to Blanchard. On July 8, Lt. Walter Haut issued a press release dictated by Blanchard, saying that a "flying disk" had been recovered.

Within a day, Blanchard's superior issued a new release, saying the object found on the sheep ranch was a weather balloon. And so the myth was born.

"The Roswell Exhibit" tracks the events of the succeeding days, with statements from witnesses saying they saw one, two or more crashed spacecraft, the bodies of aliens, even a survivor. A Roswell mortician, Glenn Dennis, said the military inquired about child-sized coffins that could be hermetically sealed; the daughters of a firefighter said their family was threatened with death by military police if their father ever described what he saw at the site.

The radio announcer who interviewed Brazel right after he reported his find said Brazel came back two days later, accompanied by military police, and retracted his statement. The officers took the interview tapes.

But in 1947, very little of that made news. After the initial reports and the military's weather balloon explanation, Roswell fell off the radar.

Ron and Donna Nichols are winter residents of Fort Myers; the rest of the year they live in Ohio. They came to the exhibit, they say, because they have a son with a long interest in what has come to be called ufology.

"And it's a rainy day," Ron says.

Donna says, "It's so interesting to see the whole thing. I really don't remember too much about it when it happened." At 63, she would have been about 5 years old in 1947. And it would be about 30 years before Roswell became famous again.

"The Roswell Exhibit" focuses mostly on the events of 1947, with a smattering of followup about Area 51; the so-called Majestic 12 documents, purported to show that President Harry Truman was implicated in the coverup; and reports of alien abductions.

But flying saucer sightings and the like subsided as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s and '60s, popping up mainly as the subject of B movies and television spoofs like My Favorite Martian.

By the mid '70s, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the notion of government coverups seemed perfectly plausible. In 1977, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film Close Encounters of the Third Kind brought spaceships and mysterious aliens and government secrecy about them roaring back into the national consciousness, and Roswell blossomed into a phenomenon.

It has never gone away. There is an entire industry of authors, speakers and investigators on both sides of the controversy. UFO aficionados hold conventions all over the world, and, of course, the Internet is a hotbed of UFO theory and countertheory. Google "Roswell UFO" or "Roswell alien," and you'll get about half a million hits.

Walter Haut, the author of that original press release, and Glenn Dennis, the Roswell mortician, founded the International UFO Museum and Research Center in 1991. It has become a top tourist destination in New Mexico, with more than 100,000 visitors annually.

As for UFOs in popular culture, Roswell has inspired a namesake film and TV series and been a major influence on everything from The X-Files to Men in Black.

The exhibit includes a display of toy aliens of various kinds, gravely noting that some UFO theorists see the toys as an alien propaganda campaign to accustom humans to their presence.

Suter, the museum marketing manager, says the image of an alien's face was all it took to advertise "The Roswell Exhibit."

"We ran the ad with just the face and "Landing soon' and the phone number. It generated hundreds of calls. It was just incredible."

Suter says when she scheduled a seminar April 9 with UFO researcher and author Stanton Friedman, all the seats were booked before she even announced it. "People heard he was coming and called up saying they wanted seats for 30 people, 50 people. We had to schedule a second seminar."

The exhibit, Suter says, lets people make up their own minds about what happened at Roswell and afterward. "I think it comes at a good time. The country is going through some hard times, and it's just something people can enjoy. It has that element of a good mystery."

In the gift shop, office manager Thompson says, the "I want to believe" T-shirts and books about Roswell are flying off the shelves. "We can't keep them in stock."

Thompson says she has talked to many of the visitors who have seen the exhibit. "Some of them don't believe it. They say, "Do you have any little green men?' And I say, "No, we have little gray men.' "

But many of them are believers, she says. "Most of the response is that they have an experience they want to share. I haven't talked to anyone who said they had been abducted, but a lot of them have seen something, or they know someone who has.

"I never had an opinion about it before. But then I saw the exhibit and I thought, "Somebody's covering up something.' "

Johnson, the museum's manager, says he has never seen anything like a UFO, and neither has his father, a retired Air Force pilot.

"I don't know if he's still toeing the military line," Johnson says. "But he enjoyed the exhibit, and he said he didn't believe a word of it."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

"The Roswell Exhibit" continues through June at the Southwest Florida Museum of History, 2300 Peck St., Fort Myers. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $9.50, $8.50 for seniors, $4 for children 12 and younger. 239 332-5955 or www.cityftmyers.com/attractions/historical.aspx

[Last modified March 17, 2005, 09:53:04]