In 1996,1 several people flocked to the sleepy little New Mexico town of Roswell to commemorate an event that, according to local lore, occurred forty-nine years prior: the alleged crash landing of an unidentified anomalous aerospace vessel of extraterrestrial origin almost twenty miles from W.W. “Mac” Brazel’s ranch in between Corona and Roswell. This anniversary event lasted from Friday, 5 July to Sunday, 7 July and brought loads of media attention to Roswell’s most popular tourist attraction, its celebrated International UFO Museum & Research Center, founded by local UFO researcher and former funeral home assistant Glenn Dennis in September 1991.
Since those halcyon days in the late 1990s when UFO interest was at fever pitch and stories of government cover-ups of extraterrestrial ships ran rampant thanks to popular television shows like The X-Files, Unsolved Mysteries, Dark Skies, and Sightings, the Roswell UFO Festival has greatly expanded, bringing $2.19 million into Roswell’s local economy in 2022. Two related events — the Roswell Galacticon science fiction/fantasy convention and the Roswell Daily Record Film Festival — also run concurrently, luring even more tourists to the town that has been dubbed “the UFO Capital of the World“.2
Courtesy of Google Maps.
I’ve known about the Roswell UFO Festival and have wanted to attend it since The X-Files was still in first-run syndication. Unfortunately, I was never able to visit Roswell in my youth, as I grew up in a relatively poor family and lived below the poverty line for most of my young adult life.3 Earlier this month, however, I had grown weary and frustrated with my self-imposed months of isolation and headed for the festival on Saturday, 6 July after a furious night of extremely last-minute trip planning.
The stories I heard there would not alter my own beliefs about UFOs in any tremendous fashion, but they would reaffirm a supernatural conviction I have held for decades now and, curiously enough, begin to reestablish the roots of my flagging faith in Adonai.
After a grueling three-hour trek from my home in Odessa, I pulled into town only to find the entirety of Main Street — Roswell’s principal thoroughfare, where the majority of its UFO-themed businesses are located — blocked off to all but foot traffic. Annoyed yet undaunted, I drove around a bit until I found an alleyway that led into the side parking lot at the International UFO Museum & Research Center, a sprawling building that used to house a movie theater during the 1930s.
Courtesy of Google Street View.
The edifice absolutely dominated Main Street and was easy to spot from almost any vantage point. With its original movie theater facade largely intact and its kitschy science fiction decor, the museum lent a neat 1960s-style “rocket-ships and flying saucers” vibe to the proceedings. Though the ongoing debate about the veracity of the UFO phenomenon often assumes an eerie, transformative seriousness, the International UFO Museum wore its identity proudly in a nonthreatening, kid-friendly, tongue-in-cheek manner, its slime green-and-Dioxazine purple marquee cheerfully beckoning visitors to enter and experience the otherworldly.
I somehow managed to ignore the museum’s siren call and take in my small town surroundings for a few moments. Having arrived during the first hour of the festival’s festivities, crowds were still somewhat light, allowing my innate anxiety disorder to subside somewhat. UFO- and alien-themed stores were everywhere in this section of Main Street, from gift shops to candy stores, from vape shops to tattoo parlors. Roswell is indeed a UFO nut’s Mecca, in a chintzy, “late stage capitalism” sort of way.
  
  
That, and I kinda showed up spur-of-the-moment, so I really didn’t have much money to spend.
The museum was hosting a three-day lecture series they called the UFOlogist Invasion, with various luminaries in the UFO community from abductee Travis Walton of Fire in the Sky fame to prolific author/researcher Kevin D. Randle invited to share their testimonies and evidence. With the crowd around the movie theater UFO Museum thickening by the moment, I finally succumbed to the extraterrestrial siren call and scurried over to the museum entrance to purchase my entrance ticket. I slipped into a dark lobby decorated in blacks, violets, and light grays, paid for the ten dollar daytime pass, then was finally directed to a small exterior conference room — the North Library — at the other wing of the museum to listen to the day’s first speaker, Alejandro Rojas of the OpenMinds TV UFO news site and podcast.
Rojas presented an overview various well-known alien contact cases that would range somewhere between CE14 and CE45 on the Hynek/Vallée Close Encounter scale, including the Rendlesham Forest incident (often called “Britain’s Roswell”) and the famed Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter that popularized the term “little green men” and inspired the films Critters, Gremlins, Poltergeist, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Though he emphasized the strangeness of these events in his dialogue, Rojas related his anecdotes in an informing, amusing, and off-the-cuff manner that had the crowd laughing and in good spirits throughout (unlike the poor eyewitnesses to these events, many of whom were likely frightened out of their minds).
After Rojas’ presentation, I quietly slipped back inside the museum proper — which felt like stepping across the threshold into an entirely different world — and spent the next hour or so lurking about the joint with the festival crowd, snapping photos of the bizarre exhibits and drinking in as much of the museum data that I could in the brief time I had available. I could have easily spent the entire day at the museum, but I had spent several sleepless hours with Freya the night before planning out that Saturday’s events and I had a schedule to keep. I did, of course, stop by the museum’s gift shop and spend more than I’d planned to on merchandise, including a poster that now adorns my bedroom door and several bumper stickers that currently clutter the back of my car.
 
  
  
  
By Noon I was pretty hungry. Like any tourist, I dropped by Roswell’s beloved UFO-shaped McDonald’s restaurant for some fries and Chicken McNuggets. I’ve seen really jazzy videos of this restaurant at night with all the interior and exterior lights ablaze, making the saucer-shaped part of the restaurant look like an actual UFO just landed to bring you intergalactic cheeseburgers. Unfortunately, during the daytime the overall effect is pretty disappointing. The restaurant still has that neato 1950s flying saucer vibe and there are a couple of gray alien statues outside you can take photos with, but the interior of the restaurant isn’t quite as unique as it appears to be from the outside.
With the festival fully underway by that time, the restaurant was positively packed with tourists, and my social anxiety levels were skyrocketing. Children were running about everywhere and screaming gleefully — as children will do at a McDonald’s — and I was rapidly developing a flying saucer-sized headache. I had originally intended to spend a full hour at the UFO McDonald’s, relaxing and enjoying my meal while taking in the scenery. After putting up with a capacity crowd and all its accompanying noise, I’d had enough of the place after thirty minutes.
After my discouraging experience at Roswell’s UFO McDonald’s, I hopped in my black 2008 Toyota Corolla Matrix, which I have nicknamed “Cara Dune” after the Star Wars: The Mandalorian character, and made a bee-line for the Robert H. Goddard Planetarium to watch one of the planetarium’s regular dome shows. Unfortunately, due to the UFO Festival, all the regular planetarium shows were cancelled; instead, the Goddard Planetarium was hosting several laser light concerts for $15 per show. Having only attended four concerts in my lifetime6 and feeling no desire to add to that number anytime soon, I left the planetarium and strolled next door to the Roswell Convention & Civil Center to attend the Roswell Galacticon earlier than I’d originally planned to.
Though the Galacticon was billed as being part of the UFO Festival on the festival’s website, it was really a generic science fiction/fantasy convention that featured local Roswell businesses and special presentations from two local UFO researchers. While the convention was fun in itself, it was the two special presentations that impacted me most.
  
  
The admittedly small Galacticon was the second sci-fi/fantasy convention I’ve ever attended, and it wasn’t really that different from any other sci-fi/fantasy conventions I’ve seen footage of. There were plenty of cosplayers, and members of the local chapter of the 501st Legion (a Star Wars cosplaying organization that cosplays as Darth Vader’s personal Stormtrooper legion) were on hand for meets-and-greets, but no national or international sci-fi celebrities were on hand.
Some tabletop roleplayers were showing off their jaw-dropping custom Dungeons & Dragons setups, one roleplayer was hosting D&D games on the convention floor, various booths had comics, books, action figures, roleplaying accessories, and other paraphernalia for sale, a life-size replica of the TARDIS from Doctor Who had been set up by the door for photo opportunities, and some group was showing off the life-size remote control Star Wars droids they were selling. All in all, your typical sci-fi/fantasy convention fare. I bought a few action figures, a D&D dice set and a custom dice roller, and a bag of relatively expensive (but really good!) local coffee brewed by Degenerate Coffee Co., and milled about the convention floor for a bit trying to melt into the crowd as best as I could. That was my involvement with the Galacticon in general. I didn’t take many photos of the event, as my anxiety levels had peaked at that point and I was slowly feeling exhausted.
For me, the two presenters were the highlights of the afternoon.
Guy Malone & Joe Jordan. Courtesy of Roswell UFO Festival website.
Featured at the Roswell Galacticon were two rather interesting fellows, Joseph Jordan and Guy Malone. The first presenter, Guy Malone, is a self-described “Author, Lecturer, Troublemaker, Iconoclast, Madman, Kosmologist, Pureblood Christian,” a “UFO experiencer,” and Certified Bitcoin Professional.7 Malone is the author of a fascinating pseudo-religious tome, Come Sail Away: UFO Phenomenon and the Bible. A Roswell transplant, Malone is also a local Roswell politician and works at Ancients of Days, a Christian-owned rock, crystal, and fossil store off Main Street.
A bit more down-to-earth for the ufologist community, Malone’s partner Joseph Jordan is a former NASA Kennedy Space Center employee,8 a current Blue Origin employee, and a MUFON field director. Jordan — author of Piercing the Cosmic Veil: You Shall Not Be Afraid of the Terror By Night — leads CE4 Research, a research/ministry team that specializes in helping ongoing UFO contactees/abductees in stopping their UFO contact/abduction experiences and preventing future experiences from occurring.
Malone’s presentation was named Roswell 1947: What Really Happened?, with the subtitle Deconstructing the Myth, Demolishing the Stronghold. In the presentation, Malone asks a very pertinent question, “If the object that allegedly crashed near Roswell wasn’t a weather balloon as the military once claimed, and if it wasn’t a UFO as the conspiracy theorists claim, then what was it?”
The official answer given by the United States Air Force is that the crashed object was a specialized high-altitude balloon involved with Project Mogul, a long-defunct project to detect atmospheric sound waves generated by Soviet nuclear weapons tests. Malone dismisses this explanation almost out-of-hand, claiming that what crashed at Roswell was likely a prototype stealth aircraft developed for the United States by former Nazi aerospace researchers brought to the United States by Operation Paperclip, an illegal operation conducted by the United States intelligence apparatus that relocated German scientists guilty of war crimes9 to the USA before the USSR — our adversaries during the Cold War that followed World War II — could abscond with these scientists and put them to work on their military projects. As evidence, Malone cites the general visual similarities between the mystery aircraft spotted by pilot and ufologist Kenneth Arnold — whose news interviews first gave us the term “flying saucer” — the week before the Roswell crash and the Horten Ho 229, a prototype stealth fighter/bomber jet developed by the Nazis late in World War II that was later captured and studied by American military forces.10
On the left, Kenneth Arnold and an artist rendering of the UFOs he saw. On the right, the German Horten Ho 229 prototype stealth bomber.
While I am not prepared to dismiss the United States Air Force’s official explanation that what crashed at Roswell was a high-altitude Project Mogul balloon as that explanation answers many questions, I do find Malone’s theory unsettlingly credible.11 We already know that Paperclip alumni such as Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph not only helped NASA get the Saturn V and Apollo programs off the launch pad, so the idea that such individuals were secretly working at American military aerospace facilities on spooky stealth aircraft prototypes isn’t all that outlandish.12
How does the UFO story come into play? On 08 July 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field’s public information officer Walter Haut issued the story that the Army Air Force (the predecessor of the modern United States Air Force) had retrieved a “flying disc” or “flying saucer” from the Roswell crash site. Building off these initial Army Air Force reports, Malone believes the United States military used the nascent UFO phenomenon as a convenient cover story for the crash-landing of their stealth prototype.13
By the time Malone had said all he intended to say, several people in the audience had already gotten up from their seats and left. I can’t say I don’t blame them; they likely came to Roswell because they wanted to be caught up in the eerie extraterrestrial mystique and entertained by lurid tales of alien abductions, dead alien pilots, and military/extraterrestrial collusions, only to be brought crashing down to earth by the stark reality of Malone’s lecture. Malone’s story was just as conspiratorial and accusatory of the military as the accepted extraterrestrial UFO crash narrative, but it simply wasn’t fantastical enough to provide the escape from reality that these tourists were looking for.
Almost immediately following Malone’s exhibition came Jordan’s presentation, UFOs & the Resurrection of Christ. Given my religious affiliations, I could not resist such a title.
Joseph Jordan of CE4 Research.
Essentially, the principal idea Jordan presented is one I’ve known of for a couple of decades now: in a religious variation of the interdimensional UFO hypothesis, Jordan — citing the works of John Keel, J. Allen Hynek, and even Carl Sagan — as evidence that the forces behind the UFO abduction phenomenon are spiritual and not extraterrestrial. One might even say that UFO abductions are demonic in origin.
According to Jordan, not only are UFOs of demonic origins, but UFO abductions can actually be stopped outright or even prevented from occurring at all by praying, invoking the name of Jesus, or even by singing old hymns. The concept sounds ludicrous at first, but Jordan has some solid evidence to back up his claims.14
As I’ve already said, the idea that UFOs (specifically UFO abductions) are demonic in origin is a theory I’ve heard before15 from various sources both secular and religious and am well acquainted with, but it’s become such a commonplace idea to me over the years that it lost its spooky special nature among all the other theological concepts that have littered my headspace since my first real salvation experience in late 1999. The “demonic UFOs” idea sort of faded into the background among the rest of my chaotic mental clutter after I slowly fell away from religious practice and church attendance as I grew older.
The great George Orwell wrote in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that the best books “are those that tell you what you know already,” that reinforce and strengthen ideas that may fall by the wayside or get shouted down by all the chaos in the world. Such it was for Jordan’s presentation, which referenced researchers and works I have studied myself like Keel and Hynek while introducing new works and testimonies from former abductees that added new depth to the concept that I hadn’t heard before.
Half the audience left during the presentation, as had happened during Malone’s exhibition regarding the Roswell UFO crash. It simply wasn’t the truth they wanted to hear. I, on the other hand, was enthralled from Jordan’s introduction to his narrative’s conclusion. I found myself energized and spiritually reinvested in a theological quest that I thought I’d hit a dead end on, my brain abuzz with all new thoughts and creative concepts related to the interdimensional UFO hypothesis.
I left Roswell soon after the end of Jordan’s presentation and headed home earlier than intended. There were more festivities planned for the festival, but I’d heard what my spirit needed to hear. I, like others, came to Roswell to be entertained; what I received instead was edification, my feet set firmly upon a spiritual path I thought I’d left long before.
- Villalovas, Eden. “Roswell UFO festival celebrates 27 years of extraterrestrial activities”. Washington Examiner, 08 July 2023. Accessed 23 July 2024.[↩]
- Buchanan, Jeff. “UFO Capital of the World—Roswell, New Mexico”. RoadRUNNER, 09 September 2023. Accessed 23 July 2024.[↩]
- Given my family’s beliefs about extraterrestrials, my mother probably wouldn’t have allowed me to visit Roswell anyway.[↩]
- Close Encounters of the First Kind: confirmed visual sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena within 500 feet (150 meters) of the eyewitnesses.[↩]
- Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: a human is either abducted by a UFO or its occupants or encounters otherworldly beings in a vision or dreamlike state.[↩]
- One of those concerts happened at a Methodist youth camp, so that one doesn’t really count.[↩]
- I didn’t learn this about him at the festival, but one of the members of the Starfleet International chapter I’m a member of, the U.S.S. Battle Born, knew of Malone from a previous visit to Roswell and immediately pegged him as a flat earther, something readily confirmable by visiting the absurdly lengthy Kosmologist.com, the website linked to Malone’s
TwitterX.com account. I had to run an Internet search for “Guy Malone” to find this out; Malone was advertising two of his many other websites, AlienResistance.org and AlienStranger.com, at the convention instead. I won’t hold him being a flat earther against him if you won’t. 😉 [↩] - Not to be confused with a different Joe Jordan, a former employee at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a former SETI Institute employee who runs the Sky Power Institute.[↩]
- Stevens, Randall. “Operation Paperclip: The Nazis Recruited to Win the Cold War.” Coffee or Die, 28 June 2023. Accessed 24 June 2024.[↩]
- The obvious visual similarities between the Horten Ho 229 and either the Northrop B-2 Spirit stealth bomber or the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter are likely not coincidences, as both Norhrop and Lockheed likely borrowed design cues from the Horten Ho. This, of course, assumes that Malone’s theory that the Horten Ho is the direct predecessor of the B-2 and/or the F-117 is mistaken; Malone’s theory that the former Nazi aerospace engineers that worked on the Horten Ho could have worked on a direct American predecessor of the B-2 and/or the F-117 could be correct.[↩]
- While I cannot state that his additional theory that the alleged Roswell prototype stealth craft was constructed using an early form of shape-memory alloy is equally credible without more evidence, I will note that I know individuals from Roswell who have made similar claims that the aircraft that crashed near there in 1947 being a stealth prototype of some sort, so I can personally attest that the theory is a well-known alternative explanation for the “UFO” crash among the denizens of Roswell.[↩]
- Though I am loathe to dismiss the Roswell crash as an early stealth aircraft prototype when the Project Mogul explanation is more plausible, I must concede that the visual similarities between Arnold’s UFO “flying wings” and the Horten Ho 229 are enough to make me conclude that Arnold’s UFOs were likely early American stealth prototypes, especially since some Operation Paperclip aerospace scientists had been moved to military and industrial facilities in California and Washington state, both an aeronautical stone’s throw from where Arnold spotted his UFOs near Mount Rainier.[↩]
- Of course, the “recovered UFO” story could also be a beautiful smokescreen for something like Project Mogul, but I digress.[↩]
- Some of Jordan’s claims made at the 2024 Roswell UFO Festival can be heard via this interview with Christian author Doreen Virtue or in this interview with Brad Burnham of the Strange Normal YouTube channel, though more may be gleaned from visiting Jordan’s own YouTube channel.[↩]
- I first heard the notion that UFOs are demonic in origin via cassette tape recordings made by a Oneness Pentecostal pastor, the Reverend Kenneth Small, who quoted heavily to the point of stealing from the 1976 book UFOs and Bible Prophecy by Baptist minister Dr. R.L. Hymers. After listening to Reverend Small’s sermon on UFOs repeatedly — a sermon you can find on Facebook — I started doing my own research that led me to the works of Gray Barker, John Keel, demonologist Dr. Bob Larson and his book UFOs and the Alien Agenda, and others.[↩]
