Welcome. I am a public librarian in Albuquerque, which puts me a three-hour drive up the road from Roswell and, professionally speaking, about eighteen inches from the shelf where all of this lives. Every summer a new crop of patrons comes to the desk wanting "the book about the flying saucer," and every summer I have to explain that there are now about a dozen of them, that they disagree with each other on nearly every particular, and that two of the most important ones were written by the United States Air Force.

So I read them. All of them, over the past several years, with a pencil and a healthy skepticism. This page is my card catalog with opinions. I am not a believer and I am not a debunker; I am a librarian, and my only real loyalty is to the difference between a source and a rumor.

September 1999: Added the Klass book and rewrote the checklist after a long argument with a patron who was, I think, mostly enjoying himself.

Here is what is on the public record and not seriously in dispute:

• In early July 1947, a rancher working land northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, found a field of scattered debris: foil-like material, sticks, tape, rubber. He reported it to the sheriff, who called the Roswell Army Air Field.
• On July 8, 1947, the base put out a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc." Newspapers across the country ran it. That press release is real and is the seed of everything that came after.
• Within a day, the Army held a press conference in Fort Worth and said the material was a weather balloon with a radar reflector. Photographs were taken of officers with the debris. The story died, and for about thirty years almost nobody thought about it.
• Beginning around 1978, a few researchers started interviewing people who had been in Roswell in 1947. The first book came out in 1980 (see below), and the story grew from there: crashed craft, bodies, a cover-up, and eventually several different crash sites depending on which book you are holding.
• In 1994, at the request of a congressman and the General Accounting Office, the Air Force looked into its own records. Its report (published in full in 1995) concluded that the debris came from Project Mogul, a then-classified program that flew long trains of balloons carrying acoustic sensors meant to detect Soviet nuclear tests. A Mogul flight launched from Alamogordo in June 1947 was never recovered.
• In 1997, a second Air Force report addressed the "bodies" stories and attributed them to anthropomorphic crash-test dummies dropped in high-altitude parachute tests in the 1950s, along with a few real accidents and injuries on the base that witnesses may have combined in memory over the decades.

Everything past that list is interpretation. The believers say the Air Force explanations are too convenient and came too late; the skeptics say the witnesses' stories changed too much, and mostly got bigger, over fifty years. Both of those are fair things to say. Read on and decide for yourself, which is the only thing a library is really for.

In roughly the order they came out. I describe each by what it is and how it has been received; I am not going to put words in anybody's mouth, so there are no quotations here. Get the book and read it. That is rather the point. Star ratings are for how much it holds up as a source, not for how entertaining it is. (Some of the least reliable ones are the most fun.)

A note on the television "autopsy" film that ran in 1995: it is not a book, and I have not found a serious researcher on either side who vouches for it. That is as much as a librarian should say.

A note on the newspaper: The Roswell Daily Record of July 8 and July 9, 1947, is on microfilm and is the best primary source there is. If you want to know what was actually claimed at the time, before anybody had fifty years to think about it, start there. Ask your library about interlibrary loan of the microfilm reel.

I keep this taped inside the front cover of my own copy of each of these books. It works for Roswell, and it also works for the tabloid at the checkout stand.

1. When was it first said? A statement made in 1947 is worth more than the same statement first made in 1989. Memory is not a filing cabinet. It is more like a story you retell, and stories improve.
2. Is it firsthand? "I saw" beats "my brother-in-law told me" beats "everybody in town knew." Count the hands the story passed through.
3. Did the story grow? If a witness's account in one book has more detail than the same witness's account in an earlier book, ask why. People do remember more with prompting. They also remember more with encouragement.
4. Is there a document? A press release, a flight log, a newspaper photograph. Documents can be forged, but they cannot change their minds.
5. Who benefits? This cuts every direction. Authors sell books. The Air Force would prefer not to be embarrassed. The town of Roswell sells T-shirts. None of that makes anyone wrong; it just means you should ask.
6. Does the explanation cover the evidence, or only the exciting part? Foil, sticks and tape are consistent with a balloon train. They are also, one is told, consistent with a spacecraft. One of those two requires fewer new assumptions.
7. Can it be checked? A claim nobody could ever verify is not a claim; it is a mood.
8. Would you accept this quality of evidence for something you did not want to believe? This is the one that stings, in both directions.

I drove down for the Fourth of July weekend in 1997, partly out of professional curiosity and partly because my sister wanted to go. Roswell is normally a quiet ranching and dairy town of forty-some thousand, and for that week it was not quiet. The estimates I heard ranged from a few tens of thousands of visitors up to numbers I do not believe, and the motels had been full since spring.

Some things I saw, in no order:

• A parade with more inflatable aliens than I had known existed. Several were on the roofs of pickups.
• The UFO museum downtown (a real institution, opened in 1992, run by very earnest people, with a fine collection of newspaper clippings) with a line out the door and around the block.
• A man in a very good silver suit who was, I gathered, on his third day in it, in July, in New Mexico. Whatever else you say about the crowd, they were committed.
• Lectures in every hall that would hold one, and the lecturers disagreeing with each other cheerfully in the hallways afterward.
• The Air Force's dummies report had come out only a couple of weeks before, and it was the joke of the week. I did not hear anybody who had read it. I had; it is in the table above.
• A great many perfectly ordinary families from Texas and Oklahoma who were there for the same reason people go to any fair, and who seemed to be having the best time of anybody.

My sister bought a green alien coffee mug. I bought the Klass book and the Corso book at the same table, from the same vendor, who did not see anything funny about it. I think that sums up Roswell about as well as anything.

Diane Kessler. Reference and adult services, twenty-two years, the last fourteen here in Albuquerque. Master's in library science. I do not have a security clearance, a theory, or a story about my cousin's neighbor's night on the ranch. I do have a very good interlibrary loan department.

If you know of a Roswell book I have missed (one that exists on paper and has a publisher, please), write and tell me. If you want to tell me what really happened, you are welcome to write too, but I will apply the checklist.

Other pages on GeoCities.us you might like: Kevin's UFO Sighting Reports (he is a believer and a nice one) and My Backyard Observatory (for people who want to look up at something we can all agree is there).