What story has shadowed my entire 44-year TV news career?

ROSWELL, N.M. (CBS4) — After nearly 24 years of delivering the daily news, first for our sister station, KFOX14, and now for CBS4, I’m taking a break from the TV news business when I sign off on Friday, Aug. 2.

I’ve had the privilege of covering and witnessing some incredible news stories while I’ve been here and in the 20 years I was in TV news before coming to KFOX14/CBS4.

So, in my final Tough Questions report, I want you to know about the one story that has shadowed almost my entire 44-year career in the broadcast news business. It involves my hometown of Roswell, New Mexico.

In early July, photojournalist George Cervantes went with me to Roswell for the city’s annual UFO Festival. It included a visit to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, which greeted its five-millionth visitor last fall, since first opening in 1992.

During my visit, I was amazed at how big this yearly festival has become since it celebrates something that may or may not have occurred more than 75 years ago, that was known as the Roswell Incident.

On July 8, 1947, Lt. Walter Haut, the public information officer for the 509th Atomic Bomb Group, at what was then known as the Roswell Army Airfield, wrote a press release that stated the 509th’s Intelligence Office had found a flying disc, and that the flying object had landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime the previous week.

For a day, the news shook the world. It was a time when a lot of people had reported seeing so-called “flying saucers” and this appeared to confirm there were Unidentified Flying Objects of unknown, but likely alien origin.

But the next day, it all appeared to be a galactic mistake, with the U.S. Army saying the wreckage that had been found was nothing more than a weather balloon.

The story was then largely forgotten for more than 30 years.

I grew up in Roswell in the 1970s and had never heard about the Roswell Incident until I got my first job at the age of 17, at the local TV station, KBIM.

I was working as a studio cameraman during our 9 p.m. newscast, I believe it was in the fall of 1980 when we aired a special report from the CBS affiliate in New Orleans, in which Jesse Marcel, the 509th intelligence officer, who was shown in a famous photo holding weather balloon material back in 1947, said that had been a cover story made up by the U.S. Military to hide the truth. More than 30 years later, Marcel still believed the wreckage he saw and investigated all those years ago was not made on Earth.

I’ve been fascinated by the story ever since.

I worked with Juliana Halverson at KBIM back in the 1980s and, like me, she didn’t know about the Roswell Incident until she saw how interest in the story was literally transforming Roswell’s cultural and economic landscape.

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“I’d never heard about it, ” Halverson told me, “and then, I got married, had kids and then, in ’97, they started the first one [UFO festival]. So, I had Girl Scouts at the time. We set up a booth and ever since then, I’ve been involved.”

You can find UFO and alien-related signs and businesses all over town now. They dominate the storefronts on Main Street downtown and even the local street lights have alien eyes staring down at you.

Something I knew nothing about as a kid, has now transformed my hometown into a world-class tourist attraction and provided a career for Halverson, who also served as the director of MainStreet Roswell, which has overseen the UFO festival for years, a festival that now draws 10s of thousands of visitors every July.

“A lot of them, this is on their bucket list,” Halverson said. “But we’ve had people, I remember we had a costume contest. People from Japan, people from Germany, you know, from all over the world they come to this event. A lot from the U.K. It’s really amazing.”

Long before Roswell even hosted its first UFO festival, I was the news director at the local NBC affiliate, KOBR. I remember the excitement around town when actor Robert Stack and a crew from the popular TV show, “Unsolved Mysteries,” came to town.

Nearly 30 million viewers tuned in when the Roswell episode launched Unsolved Mysteries’ second season in September 1989 and a cultural phenomenon then took hold.

Since then, Roswell has been the subject of, or part of the plotline, of multiple movies, books and TV shows.

Then in the ’90s, the Roswell UFO Festival began.

“It’s grown a lot though. But every year, we try to make it bigger and better.” Halverson said. “So, you have the true believers and then you have people who are just family members who just want to have unique fun. So, I don’t see it going away because it grows every year.”

Donald R. Schmitt is a best-selling author who also serves as the lead investigator at the International UFO Museum and Research Center, a place that attracts thousands of visitors throughout the year.

“We have researchers who come from all over the world and they can spend days and weeks in the research center,” Schmitt said. “We have the second-largest UFO library in the world. You’ll never guess who has the largest… the Vatican, the Catholic Church. And we like to joke that they had a few centuries’ head start on us.”

These days, when anyone learns I’m from Roswell, I usually get some kind of alien question: “Are you an alien?” “Have you seen the aliens?” Or “Are the aliens real?”

The answer to the first two questions is no. As to “Are they real?” I don’t know. But during my final newscast on CBS4 at 10 on Friday night, I’ll explore why the Roswell Incident still resonates all these years later.

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