Seventy-five miles north of Carlsbad, the small ranching town of ROSWELL is renowned because an alien spaceship supposedly crash-landed nearby on July 4, 1947. The commander of the local air force base authorized a press statement announcing that they had retrieved the wreckage of a flying saucer, and despite a follow-up denial within a day claiming that it was in fact a weather balloon the story has kept running. In 1997, as 100,000 X-Files fanatics descended upon Roswell for a six-day festival to mark the "Incident's" fiftieth anniversary, the US government revealed that the errant weather balloon had crashed while monitoring the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests. Nonetheless, their imaginations further stimulated by the TV series Roswell High , UFO theorists remain unconvinced.

Despite its best intentions, and the wishful thinking of the truly weird clientele who drift in from the plains, the central International UFO Museum , 114 N Main St (daily: MaySept 9am5pm, OctApril 10am5pm; free), inadvertently exposes the whole tawdry business as transparent nonsense. Its showpiece is a model of the notorious "alien autopsy"; built for the movie Roswell , you can't help suspecting it was also featured in the grainy "documentary" autopsy footage that created a brief international sensation in 1995.

By way of contrast, the longstanding Roswell Museum , 100 W 11th St (MonSat 9am5pm, Sun 15pm; free), boasts an excellent, multifaceted collection with nary an alien corpse to be seen. Its most sensational section celebrates pioneer rocket scientist Robert Goddard (18821945), while historical artifacts elsewhere range from armor and pikes brought by Spanish conquistadors to astronaut Harrison Schmitt's spacesuit. A huge gallery also displays Southwestern art by Henriette Wyeth, Peter Hurd and Georgia O'Keeffe.