Self-styled alien abductees and extraterrestrials, "Star Trek" fanatics and an intergalactic belly dancer were among thousands who gathered Friday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an alleged alien landing on Earth.
As NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft touched down on Mars for an unprecedented exploratory mission of the planet thought most likely to host some form of life, UFO buffs swapped their own elaborate theories of extraterrestrial space travelers.Most of them believe a spacecraft slammed into the New Mexico desert near Roswell on the night of July 4, 1947, and that its alien crew, killed in the crash, was then taken away for top-secret tests by the U.S. Air Force.
A small group of scientists and UFO researchers said Friday they had finally located a rocklike silicon piece of the alleged craft and had over the past 18 months proven with isotopic ratio tests that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
"This is one of the most extraordinary discoveries of our time," researcher Paul Davids said. He and the other scientists did not display the sample and declined to say who had provided them with it.
Their presentation drew an audience of about 200, but most people attending the event preferred to visit a UFO museum or the site where the spaceship allegedly fell to Earth, shop for alien T-shirts or tell their own tales of alien contact.
New Orleans resident Janet Morgan said she, her husband and their five children are all aliens and that many people on Earth have extraterrestrial genes.
Pointing to her 20-year-old daughter, who was dressed in a black lycra bodysuit and was trying to sell an alien "bible" to a passer-by, Morgan said: "April sees things differently from other people of her age. She was brought up to know she was an alien."
Janet Harris, a 38-year-old clerk from New York, said she was abducted four times as a teenager and twice more in 1994. "People refuse to believe it because it scares them, but the aliens are not coming to do us harm, they are going to help us," she said.
The Air Force last week released a report saying the alleged UFO wreckage found on a ranch north of here in 1947 was in fact that of a top-secret military balloon.
The "aliens" reported by Roswell witnesses were most likely dummies used to test high-altitude parachutes a decade later in the late 1950s, the Air Force said.
But local residents and alien-watchers say they believe the witnesses, most of them ex-military officers or employees, are credible, and distrust of the Pentagon runs deep here.