Roswell, USA
Mike Smith
in Roswell Edition Column
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The year was 1997 and the 50th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident was upon the town and residents, city officials, and store owners had high hopes for their 50th Anniversary UFO Festival. They were not to be disappointed. During that July Roswell made the covers of magazines such as TIME and Popular Mechanics, was covered by major news networks such as CNN, an estimated 40,000 tourists and media journalists converged on the town, and nothing has ever been the same since.
Roswell isn’t the only town in the USA to capitalize upon its weirdness, however. While flying saucers and extraterrestrials may dot store windows along Roswell’s downtown district, in the small town of Churubusco, Indiana, it is turtles. To be exact: giant snapping turtles.
Coincidentally back in 1948, a year after the Roswell Incident, Churubusco had its own media brouhaha brewing when two men claimed to see a giant turtle in Fulk Lake. Said to be as big as a dining room table by some and a pickup truck by others, the media took a fancy to the story and only a year later a massive hunt for Oscar the turtle, named after Oscar Fulk, the lake’s owner, had commenced. Although no conclusive evidence of Oscar was found nearly 3,000 people trampled across the town of Churubusco in search of the titanic tortoise.
Now 59 years later Churubusco’s Turtle Days Festival, held every year in mid-June, is the longest running festival in Indiana. During the festival nearly 2,000 tourists show up to watch the turtle races, buy turtle memorabilia, and eat turtle inspired dishes along with a parade and the usual charming small town fanfare.
“We've already formed a committee for the 2009 [60th Anniversary Festival] and hope to do some spectacular things like fireworks, a Turtle Ball, recreating the hunt for Oscar and or a Biggest Turtle Contest, etc.” said Vivian Rosswurm who helps organize Turtle Days every year.
If you travel south, to Fouke, Arkansas, you will find a town capitalizing on its famous Fouke Monster. For those of you 
who remember, the Fouke Monster was made famous in the 1970s drive-in classic The Legend of Boggy Creek. For the past eight years every spring Fouke has “Monster Days” celebrating the real life Bigfoot sightings as well as the filming of the movie. The film has been a mixed blessing for the town, bringing in more tourists although the filmmakers intentionally made the townspeople out to look like hicks, although Smokey Crabtree will tell you the true story of the filming and the real monster in his book, Smokey and the Fouke Monster.
Go through Fouke today and you can even stop by the local Monster Mart to buy some cool memorabilia, or get your picture taken in a cutout of the monster. Although 2008’s Monster Days Festival has yet to set a concrete date, you can contact Fouke City Hall at 870-653-4532 if you’re interested in attending.
Kelly, Kentucky, recently had a Fiftieth Anniversary Festival in 2005 to celebrate their famous Hopkinsville Goblins Incident of 1955, in which farmer Lucky Sutton fended off space aliens from his mother’s farmhouse! The Incident has since been celebrated as perhaps the closest encounter of the third kind to ever be encountered in Ufology.
The festival started off with a screening of the camp-classic Plan 9 from Outer Space and then followed up with several days worth of activities including special speakers, exhibits, events, and souvenirs. Geraldine Sutton Stith, Lucky Sutton’s daughter, hopes there will be another festival in the future.
Belleville, Wisconsin, has a UFO day festival in celebration of their famous UFO sightings during the late 1980s and now hail themselves as UFO capital of the world, although Roswellians probably have something to say about that…
One of the other most interesting towns in the US that happens to be famous for UFOs happens to be right here in New Mexico. A crash, only half a year after Roswell, was said to have happened in Aztec, NM, in March of 1948.
In 1997, when the Roswell buzz was at its highest, the Aztec Public Library took notice and put on the first annual UFO Symposium in March of 1998 to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of their UFO crash. Now the Symposium is going strong in its 11th year and will have guest speakers such as Stanton Friedman, Dennis Balthaser, and Jesse Marcel Jr.
Although no one town can quite compare to Roswell, there is one that comes pretty darn close. Despite its population of a mere 100 people, Rachel, Nevada, has one monumental claim to UFO fame: it’s the closest town to the infamous Area 51. Located on the Extraterrestrial Highway the small town of Rachel, like Roswell, gets visitors from all corners of the world from Japan to Europe and has several interesting events year round. If you go to the town you can even stay at the Little A'Le'Inn where "Earthlings are always welcome."
All in all these are probably just a few of the towns that make up what now could surely be called Roswell USA; towns that embrace their strange history and make an economy out of it rather than shamefully brushing it under the rug. And, honestly, it’s a lot more fun that way.
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