UFO MUSEUM
By Garry Boulard
In a windswept stretch of New Mexico that for half a century has inspired lively imaginations, officials with the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell are hoping that a flowing, celestial-themed building may produce the same impact among earth-bound architecture fans.
“It is really going to be a splendid facility once everything is done,” Julie Shuster says of the new headquarters for the new museum and research center, which is currently in the design phase.
“This whole process is a lot like building a new home,” continues Shuster, the executive director of the museum. “You want to have everything in place; you want the right lot, the right contractor, everything. Then you put all of that together and start breaking ground.”
The ground in this case is located at 701 North Main in downtown Roswell, six blocks from where the current museum is at 114 North Main.
And Roswell is the long-time home of the museum, which opened in 1992, because it is the place where researchers are convinced a flying saucer—or some kind of unidentified flying object—crashed in the summer of 1947, resulting in what is now regarded as a concentrated campaign by the U.S. government to cover the whole thing up.
Whether or not visitors from another planet actually touched down in Roswell, speculation about what may have happened has resulted in a flurry of books and documentaries, compelling visitors from this planet—up to 163,000—to yearly travel to the museum and research center.
“We were incorporated in 1991 and opened to visitors the year after that in one of our local bank buildings in three small offices,” recalls Shuster. “We moved to our current location in 1997 and continue to grow, with people coming here from all over the world. In fact, the majority of our visitors come from more than 200 miles away.”
Such growth has made the need for a new building, whose estimated cost is around $25 million, a necessity.
Museum officials figure an 18,000 square-foot structure, which will be constructed in phases, should satisfy their needs, and have hired the Boston-based firm of Ahearn-Schopfer Associates to complete the design of what the Architectural Record is calling a one-story building with a “rectangular footprint and mostly rectilinear concrete volumes.”
“It is a totally unique project, the only one of its kind in the world,” remarks architect Kevin Schopfer, who says the endless speculation about whether or not a UFO appeared in Roswell—or anywhere else, for that matter—“requires you to take a fresh look at what a facility like this should be.”
Current plans call for a funnel-shaped hole, that will also serve as a kind of celestial navigation map, visually representing the space that some subscribers believe visitors from elsewhere have used to get to the earth.
Schopfer sees the museum as a kind of massive filing cabinet, “something that you open and find a known object inside of. That, anyway, is going to be the theme.”
“The rest of the building,” continues Schopfer, “will be a combination of metal gliding and more traditional elements.”
And even though the architect says he admires the desert and adobe-inspired designs of many modern New Mexico structures, those themes will play no part in how the new UFO museum will ultimately look.
“As much as I enjoy all of that, this is about a very unique thing that should not look like anything else that is out there,” Schopfer contends.
The date for the completion of the building, like the design itself, remains fluid. “I’m telling everyone about three years,” says Shuster, “because it is going to take 18 months for designing the exhibits and a year to two years to build it.”
“But even so,” adds Shuster, “we are moving in the right direction.”
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