The truth is out there
1 September, 2012
Ed Mitchell: the most famous believer
1 September, 2012Discovery Channel Magazine, September 2012
The UFO Museum and Research Centre is a serious place, despite all the little green men painted on the front and the weird models of aliens emerging from a crashed spaceship. Its library is sufficiently professional to be linked to the Library of Congress and researchers here take their work impeccably seriously.
And then you go to the gift shop and find the alien toilet paper. “Designed for hard to reach areas like Area 51,” it says. “Also good for areas 1 or 2. Use generously for an out of this world wipe.” If you can’t find it, it’s right there in between the alien fridge magnets, greeting cards, test tube slime, alien eggs, pencils, bendy alien toys, alien drivers licences, water bottles, jigsaws, baseballs, monsters, shot glasses, mugs, golf balls and towels.
The research centre, and the annual Roswell festival, show the uneasy connection between what for some is a serious and vital area of rigorous study, and for others an exercise in kitsch goofiness.
In the temporary absence of museum curator Julie Schuster – who is Walter Haut’s daughter – the museum’s main spokesman is its librarian, a man called Mark Briscoe. He is sanguine about this tension between research and commercialism. He says the museum receives around 180,000 visitors per year, making it the second-most visited attraction in the entire state of New Mexico, and while the larger part of his job is academic – logging around 1.000 reported UFO sightings from around the world each week whose details are sent to him for collation, and preserving the collection of books and documents here with a rigour that would do the Smithsonian proud – he fully acknowledges the need for the commercial side. “The economic impact it has on this community is really mind-boggling for one little old museum,” he says. “You are looking at up to $20 million a year.”
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See also: https://www.chriswrightmedia.com/ed-mitchell-the-most-famous-believer
And: https://www.chriswrightmedia.com/the-truth-is-out-there/
