Roswell, Sacred Shrine of UFO Enthusiasts

But the Roswell phenomenon is also something else, as Jeremy R. Ricketts explains. For “the truth is out there” believers, the New Mexico city has become a sacred space, a place to visit and commune with multiple alleged crash sites. Ricketts compares Roswell, now the site of the International UFO Museum and Research Center, and the village of Chimayó, also in New Mexico, and the location of a famous Catholic shrine. He argues both places “straddle a space between the sacred and the profane, and between the commercial and the spiritual.” Such sacred spaces, he argues “can act as screens upon which tourist-pilgrims project their hopes and desires.”