Route · New Mexico
The Government Built a Parking Lot
Three days across New Mexico, from a ranch you cannot enter to a test site that opens one day a year
Table of contents
In July 1995, the General Accounting Office finished an audit of what the government still held about Roswell. It found two documents from 1947, a 509th Bomb Group history and an FBI teletype, both describing a weather balloon with a radar reflector. It also found a gap. Outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field covering October 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed, and, in the auditors' own words, "the document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority."
That sentence cuts in both directions, which is why it is the most useful line in the whole file.
The rest of the record is less ambiguous than the merchandise suggests. On July 8, 1947, Lieutenant Walter Haut issued a press release, under orders from his base commander, saying the field had recovered a flying disc. Within 24 hours the Eighth Air Force had laid wreckage on a floor in Fort Worth and called it a weather balloon. Haut later co-founded the museum on Main Street that sells the other version. The debris fell next door to the 509th Composite Group, the only unit on earth that had dropped an atomic bomb, which had moved to Roswell in November 1945.
Here is the part that shapes this drive. The ranch where W.W. Brazel picked up the foil and sticks is private land, roughly 75 miles northwest of town, and the City of Roswell says plainly that it "is not accessible to the public." Meanwhile the Bureau of Land Management has built a parking lot off a county road near Corona, and will let you walk a mile east across open desert to a spot it officially names the Alleged UFO Skip Site, described on its own page as "the place where some people believe" a craft came down.
That is the shape of this corridor. The site that generated the story is shut. The federal government will walk you to an unmarked patch of scrub nearby. Within a few hours' drive sit a radio observatory listening to the early universe, the place where the first atomic bomb went off, and a national park built on gypsum where somebody left footprints 21,000 years ago. The strangeness here was never only in 1947, and almost all of the rest of it is free.
This route is also the long version of Strange Route's Desert Frequencies, which runs a wider Southwest arc from the Phoenix Lights to Dulce and shares Roswell with this drive.
The Roswell Museum remains closed for recovery from the October 2024 flood. Robert Goddard's workshop is not an available visit stop. Confirm any programs at other venues separately.
What is open, what is private, and what changes
Three things decide whether this drive works.
The ranch is closed and the public site is somewhere else. Conflating them is the error most likely to put you on somebody's land. New Mexico's trespass statute turns on posted property and on knowing that consent is denied, and the Foster ranch has had no visiting arrangement recorded since 2019.
Two of the best stops can be shut on short notice. Trinity Site opens one day a year. At White Sands, the missile range can close Dunes Drive, or US 70 itself, for up to 3 hours, and the park says notice can arrive as little as 24 hours ahead.
Hours and admission prices live on each stop's official page. Every stop below names that page. Open it the day before you drive. What follows is the part that does not change: what each place is, who runs it, whose land it sits on, and how to reach it.
Roswell, then north to the parking lot
Morning in town, afternoon on a county road. The town holds the record and the merchandise in the same few blocks, and the drive north is where the argument of this route lands.
BLM's own recommended approach to the skip site is US 285 north from Roswell to New Mexico 247, then Lincoln County Road B007, a routing it chose to avoid GPS errors and to minimize gravel. Fuel in Roswell. Nothing on the walk has shade or water.
AInternational UFO Museum and Research Center
Walter Haut wrote the July 8, 1947, press release that said the Army had recovered a flying disc. Decades later he co-founded this museum, with Glenn Dennis and Max Littell, in a former 1930s movie theater on Main Street. That one fact is worth more than any exhibit in it.
It is a nonprofit with a research library attached, and it lays the competing official explanations out beside the affidavits and the newspaper front pages rather than picking one.
- Booking
- None. Hours and admission are on the museum's own page
BWalker Aviation Museum
The 509th Composite Group moved to Roswell Army Air Field on November 6, 1945, the only unit in the world that had dropped an atomic bomb. The field became Walker Air Force Base on January 13, 1948. The debris fell next door to that.
This small museum inside the Roswell Air Center terminal, run by the Walker Aviation Museum Foundation, is the only place in town that tells you why a 1947 press release from this particular base mattered. It keeps short weekday hours, so check before building a morning around it.
- Booking
- None. Short weekday hours, published on the foundation's page
CRobert Goddard's workshop, Roswell Museum: closed
Robert H. Goddard carried out rocket experiments near Roswell during the 1930s, and the Roswell Museum's collection includes his workshop and equipment. The museum remains closed following the October 2024 flood, according to its foundation and the city's recovery information.
The workshop is not an available visit stop. Programs held at other venues do not establish access to the museum building. Check the museum's current notice before planning a future visit; no confirmed reopening date is stated here.
- Hours
- Museum building closed. Check official recovery updates before traveling.
- Booking
- Closed for flood recovery. No workshop visit should be planned.
DThe Alleged UFO Skip Site
The Bureau of Land Management calls it "the place where some people believe an unidentified flying object containing aliens crashed near Corona, N.M., in July 1947." It built a parking lot for it off Lincoln County Road B007, also signed as Transwestern Road, and you walk about a mile east from there across open high desert. No vehicles past the lot.
Take BLM's own routing rather than a map app: US 285 north from Roswell to New Mexico 247, then County Road B007. BLM chose that line specifically to avoid GPS errors and to keep you off gravel.
There is no signage at the site, no water, no toilet, and no shade at either end. Accounts from 2021 describe a stone obelisk as destroyed and a monument placed by a television production as removed, so do not drive out expecting a marker. What you get is the walk and the ground.
This is not the debris field. The Foster ranch, where Brazel picked the material up, is a separate place on private land about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, and the City of Roswell states that it is not accessible to the public. The parcel changed hands in November 2018 and no page since records a tour operating.
- Access
- Public land, managed by the BLM Roswell Field Office. Hiking only past the parking area, about 1 mile each way
A 1964 police report, and 27 antennas on a dry lake bed
West across the Plains of San Agustin, climbing about 2,400 feet from Socorro to the array.
NRAO's directions are exact and worth following literally: US 60 west through Magdalena, left onto NM 52 just west of mile marker 93, then right onto NM 166. Its own page adds the line that settles most wrong turns out here, which is that every road to the site is paved, so a dirt road means you are not on the route. Expect no cell reception for the last several miles and no food on site.
EThe Socorro landing, April 24, 1964
Shortly before 6pm on April 24, 1964, Socorro city policeman Lonnie Zamora broke off a pursuit because he heard a roar. The El Defensor Chieftain of April 28 put it on the front page: "City Policeman Lonnie Zamora, a highly reliable source, saw a four-legged, egg-shaped object, and two persons in a gully a mile south of the courthouse."
The physical detail is what makes this case survive. The paper recorded four shallow holes where the object apparently set down, burned greasewood, seared clumps of green grass, and no footprints. The holes "did not appear to have been made by an object striking the earth with great force, but by an object of considerable weight settling to earth at slow speed." State Police Sergeant Sam Chavez and Undersheriff James Luckie, there within about 10 minutes, said the burned ground was still hot. By Sunday afternoon hundreds of people had trampled it.
J. Allen Hynek came at the Air Force's request and found the site too trampled to be worth much. He came back in August and told the paper it was becoming "one of the classic cases." Project Blue Book classified it "unknown," case 8766, and its chief Major Hector Quintanilla wrote that "there is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him" and that "we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle."
Two honest problems with visiting. The stone walkways and rock circle built into an arroyo in 1966 went into the wrong gully, roughly a quarter mile east of the real one, reportedly because people feared the true spot was radioactive. No first-party source states who owns the land or whether there is any public right to walk on it. The town is the visit: a 2012 spillway mural, and a 2023 mural of Zamora on the San Miguel Pottery Land building.
- Access
- The town and its murals are public. The arroyo is unmarked, and no first-party source states who owns it or whether the public may walk there
FThe Very Large Array
The NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array sits on the Plains of San Agustin: 28 antennas, 27 of them active and one spare, each dish 25 meters across and weighing 230 tons, arranged on three arms. The antennas ride rail track on a transporter, one at a time, and the array cycles through four configurations in roughly 16 months. At its widest it spans about 22 miles.
A detail NRAO publishes and most retellings get wrong: the arms are not equal. Its own page gives the north arm as 11 miles and the other two as 13.
The self-guided walk is about half a mile, roughly half of it gravel, past the Radio Sundial and the Whisper Dish Gallery to the base of a working antenna. The 23-minute film in the auditorium is narrated by Jodie Foster. Guided tours run on Saturdays when staffing allows, which is worth checking rather than assuming, because two NRAO pages currently disagree about the times.
Two practical warnings from NRAO itself. You may lose cell and data reception several miles out, and there is no food on site.
- Access
- Every road to the site is paved. A dirt road means you are not on the route
- Booking
- None for the self-guided walk. Hours, admission and tour times are on NRAO's page
The footprints, the sled track, and the dunes
South to Alamogordo. The strangeness here is documented rather than alleged, which after two days of contested record is a change of register rather than a letdown.
Check the park closure page the day before. The missile range, not the park, decides whether the road into the dunes is open.
GNew Mexico Museum of Space History
The museum opened on October 5, 1976, as the International Space Hall of Fame, and the rest grew around it. The building is a 78-foot golden cube on the hillside above Alamogordo.
Two things here are worth the stop on their own. The Daisy Track is the air-powered decelerator sled used from 1955 to 1985 to find out what acceleration and impact do to a human body, moved here from Holloman and displayed with its air gun, a waterbrake, and four original sleds. It is a different machine from the Holloman High Speed Test Track, which is where Colonel John P. Stapp rode Sonic Wind 1 to 632 miles per hour on December 10, 1954, and which is why the air park outside carries his name.
The other is Ham, in the museum's words "the first hominoid launched into space," trained at Holloman Air Force Base next door. His remains are interred at the museum.
The chimpanzee program is not only history. The Alamogordo Primate Facility still sits at Holloman, run under an NIH contract, housing chimpanzees used in biomedical research, with no active invasive research conducted there now.
- Booking
- None. Closed Tuesdays. Hours and admission are on the museum's page
HWhite Sands National Park
The world's largest gypsum dunefield, set aside as a national monument by Herbert Hoover on December 20, 1933, and redesignated a national park on December 20, 2019, exactly 86 years to the day.
The reason to come is older than either. On the shore of what was Lake Otero, the Park Service reports human footprints dated by seeds above and below them to 22,860 and 21,130 years ago, with a visitor center exhibit added in January 2024. There is a live scientific dispute about those dates that the NPS page does not get into.
Dunes Drive runs 8 miles each way, the first 5 paved and the last 3 hard-packed gypsum, about 45 minutes round trip. Sledding is allowed under park rules: a gently sloping face with a level run-out, sitting or lying down, never head first and never standing.
The practical thing that matters most here is not the park's decision. White Sands Missile Range can close Dunes Drive for up to 3 hours during tests, and can separately block US 70 between Alamogordo and Las Cruces, so you can lose the park, the road to it, or both. The park says notice from the range can arrive as little as 24 hours ahead. Check the closure page the day before, or call the range's roadblock line on 575-678-1178.
- Access
- Dunes Drive can close for up to 3 hours during missile tests, and US 70 can be blocked separately. Notice may be 24 hours
- Booking
- None. Entrance fees and seasonal hours are on the park's page
One Saturday a year, and it has been canceled twice since 2024
Trinity Site is not a stop on this route. It is a locked door with one annual key, and it is worth building a whole trip around if your dates happen to line up.
The site sits inside the impact zone of an active missile range, which is the reason for the schedule. The schedule has changed: the 2022 open houses were April 2 and October 15, and it now opens once a year, on the third Saturday in October. A National Park Service page still carries the old twice-a-year version, so trust the Army's page over anything else you read. The April 2024 opening was canceled and never rescheduled. The October 2025 opening, billed as the 80th anniversary, was canceled by the federal shutdown.
The announced 2026 open house is October 17. Stallion Gate entry runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Trinity Site closes promptly at 3:30 p.m. All times are local. The 2 p.m. cutoff is for entry, not the site closure. Recheck the Army’s event page before traveling.
It is safest not to book non-refundable travel around it.
When it does open, entry is through Stallion Gate off US 380, with government photo ID for everyone 18 and over, proof of insurance and registration, and a passport for foreign nationals. There is no fee and no registration. From the gate it is a paved, marked drive of about 17 miles, and the Army's instruction is blunt: do not use GPS to get to Trinity Site. Photography is allowed at Ground Zero and at the McDonald ranch house, and is prohibited everywhere else on the installation.
On radiation, use the Army's own numbers. It puts the maximum inside the fenced area at 10 times the region's natural background, and a 1-hour visit at half a millirem to one millirem, against the 620 millirems an American receives on average each year. Its brochure then says the honest thing: "Although radiation levels at ground zero are low, some feel any extra exposure should be avoided. The decision is yours." Put the Park Service sentence beside it, which is that the test "exposed local people who lived near or downwind from the blast to dangerous levels of radiation, leading to long lasting impacts on residents' health." Running the first set of figures without the second is the one move here that would be dishonest.
Official page: Trinity Site Open House, visitor information on 575-635-7774.
Four things that waste a day out here
Any tour sold as a trip to the crash site. None of the operator pages establishes that it reaches the Foster ranch, which is private and closed. The public site is the BLM one near Corona, and you drive yourself.
The Billy the Kid Trail, if you are heading for Trinity. It is a real scenic byway and it runs US 380 east of Carrizozo. The Trinity approach runs US 380 west from the same town, in the opposite direction.
The 1970s Alamogordo UFO material. The Holloman landing story rests on footage that was never produced, and the film that was supposed to carry it shipped presenting the landing as a hypothetical. The cattle mutilation investigation people cite is a real citable document, Operation Animal Mutilation, and it covers northern New Mexico, about 200 miles from here.
Expecting the Socorro landing site to look like anything. The rock walkways built in 1966 went into the wrong gully, and recent reporting describes the arroyo as unmarked and undeveloped.
- Stops, in order
loading map…
7 stops. Select a pin to see what it is.
Last updated October 14, 2026. Hours, prices, and event details change, and every practical fact above links to the page it came from.
Official pages
- The 1947 Roswell IncidentCity of Roswell
The city's own account, and the page that states the crash site is on private land and not accessible to the public.
- Alleged UFO Skip SiteBureau of Land Management
The federal page for the public site near Corona, with the access rules and the wording the agency chose.
- BLM invites public to hike the Alleged UFO Skip SiteBureau of Land Management, June 26, 2026
Carries the recommended driving route, chosen by BLM to avoid GPS errors, and the length of the walk.
- International UFO Museum and Research CenterInternational UFO Museum and Research Center
Founded by Walter Haut, who wrote the July 8, 1947, press release. Current hours and admission live here.
- History of Walker Air Force BaseWalker Aviation Museum Foundation
The 509th's arrival in November 1945 and the field's renaming in January 1948.
- Visit the Very Large ArrayNational Radio Astronomy Observatory
Directions, the self-guided walk, and the warnings about cell reception and food.
- Trinity Site Open HouseWhite Sands Missile Range Public Affairs
The only schedule worth trusting. Park Service pages still carry the retired twice-a-year version.
- Trinity SiteNational Park Service
The downwinders sentence that belongs beside the Army's millirem table.
- White Sands National ParkNational Park Service
The footprints, Dunes Drive, and the park's own rules for sledding.
- Park closuresNational Park Service
Check this the day before. The missile range, not the park, decides whether the road is open.
- New Mexico Museum of Space HistoryNew Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs
The Daisy Track, the Stapp air park, and Ham.
- Alamogordo Primate FacilityNational Institutes of Health
The chimpanzee program is not only history. The facility is still at Holloman.
Primary documents
- Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New MexicoGeneral Accounting Office, GAO/NSIAD-95-187, July 28, 1995
The 1995 audit. Two surviving 1947 records, both describing a weather balloon, and the finding that the base's outgoing messages for 1946 to 1949 were destroyed by persons unrecorded.
- El Defensor Chieftain, April 28, 1964, reproduced in fullSocorro County Historical Society
The contemporaneous front page on the Zamora landing, quoted throughout the Socorro entry.
- Trinity Site visitor brochureWhite Sands Missile Range
The Army's own radiation figures and the sentence leaving the decision to the visitor.
Archive
- Project Blue Book case file, Socorro, New Mexico, April 24, 1964National Archives microfilm scan
Case 8766, classified unknown. Free and login-free.