Driving down Main Street through Roswell on a warm spring afternoon in 2025, you can still see echoes of the craze—long shadows of little green men cast across cracked pavement, the faint hum of conspiracy theories thick as desert dust in the air.

  Not surprising, perhaps, for a city clinging desperately to relevance by the fiber-thin thread of a decades-old government conspiracy. Once, this was the land of True Believers—the ones that didn't just think an alien ship crashed outside the city in 1947, but knew it. Felt it in their bones.

  This humble patch of desert wasn't just some run-of-the-mill midcentury town. It was the place where the most important question the human species had ever asked had come hurtling down out of the stars into reality. It was a window into the great and terrible mystery, a portal into a future brimming with possibility.

  The truth wasn't just out there—it was here. In Roswell.

  Or, at least, it had been, once upon a time.

  Today, Roswell bills itself as the UFO Capital of the World with all the sincerity of a used-car salesman swearing that dent in the fender adds character. Downtown long ago embraced the moniker in a guileless—and arguably desperate—bid to turn an otherwise unremarkable mid-century desert town into a pilgrimage site for the addled, the curious, and the hopelessly optimistic.

  Most of the downtown businesses have completely built their identity on channeling the town's special place of prestige in UFO history. Cruising the main drag, you’ll pass local institutions like Stellar Coffee (proudly serving lattes at intergalactic prices), Invasion Station (part gift shop, part shrine), and Cosmic Smoke and Vape (for those who need to take the edge off the knowledge that the government is hiding something).

  Even the ones that haven't changed their names to fit the theme have still been gradually assimilated into the extra-terrestrial aesthetic. No self-respecting shop in town dares to go UFO-free. At minimum, they need to have a framed X-Files poster, or a smattering of neon-green souvenirs, or at least a few plastic flying saucers strung from the ceiling with fishing line like some kind of sci-fi mobile for the paranoid.

  And then there are the Little Green Men themselves. The bastards are everywhere. Lurking on street corners, grinning from shop windows, peering out from alleyway murals with knowing, all-seeing eyes. Dozens of full-sized alien sculptures loiter outside storefronts, their bulbous heads tilted in eternal bemusement, just waiting for another group of sunburned tourists to pose next to them with peace signs and beer guts. Even the streetlights have been enlisted into the act—each bulbous glass orb painted with vacant black alien eyes, as if the very infrastructure of Roswell is watching you, waiting to beam you up to the nearest cash register.

  You can’t fault Roswell for failing to commit to the bit. If anything, it’s an overachiever. It drapes itself in the lore of close encounters, as if to say: This is a haven. This is where you come when you know the truth and need to be among your own kind.

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  And yet…

  By the time I hit the famous UFO-Themed McDonald's on the south side of town, the gimmick was starting to run a little thin.

  The UFO McDonald's is something of a Roswell landmark, famous for being—well, for being a McDonald's shaped like a UFO.

  Even the corporate overlords spared no expense in adopting the Roswell theme and the result is a Frankensteinian mash-up of flying saucer and fast-food chain stitched together at the seams by corporate cash and brought to life by the squeals of sugar-spasmed children.

  The golden arches are still there, of course—corporate wouldn’t dare let you forget whose grease-stained empire you’re standing in—but they’re mounted on the sleek, faux-futuristic curves of a spacecraft that’s either cutting-edge or comically outdated, depending on your tolerance for mid-century sci-fi aesthetics.

  It squats right off the side of the main drag, a gleaming, silver-domed structure, its curved metallic shell gleaming in the afternoon sun, looking less like a restaurant and more like a leftover prop from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers that the locals just decided to start frying burgers in.

  Overall, it's quite a sight. Especially at night when they fire up all the lights and turn the whole thing into a psychedelic blend of blinking LEDs and spiraling lasers beams and the rim of the saucer pulses an eerie green glow, as if to remind you that yes, you are indeed in the UFO Capital of the World, and yes, this is exactly what you signed up for.

  Take away the clever advertisement-architecture and what are you left with?

  Nothing local. Nothing unique.

  Just another McDonald's, albeit one sporting a coat of cosmic paint. And in that, it's something of a microcosm for Roswell as a whole.

  Yes, there’s a certain charm to it. The commitment to the bit is undeniable. There’s something endearingly absurd about biting into a McDouble while sitting beneath a ceiling designed to look like the control panel of an alien mothership. It's tacky. It's weird. It's exactly what you expected, and somehow, it's still kind of disappointing.

  But here's the thing: if you take away the spectacle—all the lights and the lasers and the sloped aluminum frills—it's still a McDonald's. The same overpriced calorie-packed heart-busting mystery meat smothered in processed cheese. The same broken ice cream machine sputtering to itself in the corner. The same dead-eyed teenagers behind the checkout counters selling their lives away, an hour at a time, at $13.00 bucks a pop.

  And that's Roswell, too.

  Underneath the veneer of alien encounters and government cover-ups, it's just another dusty little town somewhere in the southwest. Just another slice of old-world Americana slowly rotting away under that harsh New Mexican sun.

  The Little Green Men are running wild, the swag shops are still open, but the there is a thin layer of worn-out grime on everything. There's even a certain cruel irony in coating the town with smiling aliens even while buildings crumble and shops board up their windows. Because that is the other half—the real half—of the Roswell experience.

  Tucked between all the alien-themed souvenir shops are the bones of the businesses that didn't make it. And they are not few.

  Dark windows lined the street like portals into empty storefronts. Some of them still have Little Green Men painted on the doors, gradually peeling away and leaving nothing but green stains on the glass.

  Looking out at Roswell in the harsh light of a sunny afternoon in 2025 and you can't help but see the writing in the stars. The craze is over. It's been over.

  The Little Green Men are still grinning, but the cracks in the paint are spreading. And the tourists, like the truth, are out there—but not always enough to keep the lights on.

  The conspiracy has gone mainstream. It's all corporate sponsorships and plastic baubles now.

  The true believers—if they’re still out there—aren’t the ones buying alien keychains. They’ve either gone dark, gone mad, or moved on to the next great cover-up.