Indiana Jones and the Roswell Incident
Mike Smith
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From where you would expect to find them in television series and movies such as The X-Files and Men in Black to ones you wouldn’t like Home Improvement or Into the Wild pop culture references to Roswell can appear just about anywhere. And anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past ten years will likely get the references.
While all these in-jokes in TV and movies say something about Roswell in pop culture, nothing quite says just how significantly the town has been integrated into the worldwide consciousness as its inclusion in a certain upcoming summer blockbuster. It has now been confirmed with the release of the official teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that Roswell will in some way be related to the new film’s “MacGuffin.” A “MacGuffin” is the term coined by director Alfred Hitchcock used to identify the object that drives the plot of a film and the actions of its characters. The MacGuffin in the new film, as the title states, are crystal skulls which have long been speculated to be linked to aliens somehow. Add in the fact that a close-up shot of a crate labeled Roswell, NM, 1947, pops up with some significance in the trailer it’s a sure bet that Indy will be tangling with an extraterrestrial presence in some form or another in the film.
In fact, one of the early scripts for an aborted fourth Indiana Jones film written in the mid-1990s directly dealt with Indy being involved in a UFO crash in the New Mexico desert. The film was set in the late 1940s and entitled Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars. Over the course of the film Indy would endure his traditional set-pieces battling Russian spies atop a runaway rocket sled, parachuting out of a flying fortress, and even survive an A-Bomb test all the while trying to return an alien artifact to its rightful owners to prevent global pandemonium.
What’s interesting to note about the ET concept in Saucer Men is that many legitimate Indiana Jones scripts often borrowed from earlier rejected scripts. For instance the mine car chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was recycled from an old draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Many of the set-pieces for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came from the un-filmed Chris Columbus script for Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.
Rumors now circulate that David Koepp, the current script writer, had been instructed go through all previous drafts for fourth Indiana Jones films and pick out the best plot ideas and set-pieces from each. This effort has resulted in the final script for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Apparently the Roswell concept made it through.
Still, a sizeable amount of Indiana Jones fans are not quick to warm to the idea of Indiana Jones tangling with aliens. Some fans even debate in several chat-rooms that the Roswell name popping up in the trailer is possibly just a reference to a military base in Roswell, New Mexico, where an action set-piece will occur. That theory really holds no validity due 
to the fact that the crate seen in the trailer with Roswell stamped on it is also stamped 1947. 1947, as most everyone knows, is the year that the Roswell Incident occurred. The crate also appears to be magnetized by some alien power. Besides, why waste a second of the teaser trailer’s time on an otherwise insignificant blurb if it’s not important to the story? Teaser trailers are often a means to generate excitement and speculation without giving up too many plot details or spoilers.
Roswellians, however, are quite excited about the prospect of Roswell playing a part in the film. Several graduates from the Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell film technology training department were even part of the film’s crew.
In a recent article by Vanessa Beauman in the Roswell Daily Record ENMU-R Provost Dr. Judy Armstrong said, “[Indiana Jones] will reach a different audience. There will be a whole new group of folks who will have their interest in Roswell sparked.”
This is probably true.
To get an episode on The X-Files or a reference in major science fiction film such as Independence Day is one thing, but 
to be included in an Indiana Jones film is another matter entirely. After all, the MacGuffins of the past three Indy films have been very historically significant with Raiders of the Lost Ark centering on the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on the Sankara Stones, and Last Crusade finding the Holy Grail. To put Roswell in the class of such things is certainly surprising considering Indy could have gone out in search of something like the lost city of Atlantis in his next adventure.
Aliens or not, the fact that the Roswell Incident is apparently part of the plot for the next Indiana Jones film certainly shows just how far Roswell has come as a part modern day mythology. Of course we won’t know just how far until May 22nd 2008…
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Reader Comments (2)
Thanks for posting. The ol' Roswell Edition hadn't gotten any comments for a while there so I'm gald to see some more.
I enjoyed the film immensely. The only thing I would've done different is a little more exposition between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen. It's great to see them back in the thick of the action but I would've liked to have gotten to see their characters catch a little breather. The set-pieces were fantastic, but I still think a little break for a just a bit more character bonding like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would've been nice, even though Ford and LaBeouf's scenes together were about as good as Ford and Connery's from the previous film.