Alleged UFO Skip Site

Two places, and only one of them is open

W.W. "Mack" Brazel, a ranch foreman, gathered foil, rubber and sticks from a pasture on the J.B. Foster ranch in Lincoln County, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, and carried them to the sheriff. On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field announced it 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.

The Foster ranch is private land. The City of Roswell states on its own visitor site that the alleged crash site "is not accessible to the public." The parcel, a little over 78 acres, was sold by Bogle Ltd. Co. to Dinwiddie Cattle Co. LLC in a deed recorded on November 26, 2018, ending 66 years of Bogle ownership and the July festival tours the family had allowed. No page since records a tour operating.

What the federal government did instead

Several miles away, on public land it administers, the Bureau of Land Management maintains what its own page calls the Alleged UFO Skip Site: "the place where some people believe an unidentified flying object containing aliens crashed near Corona, N.M., in July 1947." BLM built a parking area off Lincoln County Road B007 and permits hiking about a mile east to reach it.

In June 2026 BLM publicized a guided hike there, described as about 3.5 miles round trip over roughly 2 hours. Its National Conservation Area Manager called it "an opportunity to experience an off-beat place that has had a lasting 'impact' on pop culture." The agency's own framing is careful throughout: it describes what people believe, not what happened.

What the record supports

A 1995 audit by the General Accounting Office, requested by Representative Steven Schiff, located two 1947 records, a 509th Bomb Group history and an FBI teletype, both describing a weather balloon with a radar reflector. It also found that outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field covering October 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed, and that "the document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority."

The Air Force attributed the debris to Project Mogul, a classified balloon program for detecting Soviet nuclear tests, and in 1997 attributed later accounts of bodies to anthropomorphic test dummies used in programs that began in 1953. Critics point out that the dummy programs postdate 1947 by six years, an objection the Air Force's own dating makes possible.

Take the route BLM publishes rather than a map application, which the agency selected to avoid GPS errors and to minimize gravel: US 285 north from Roswell to New Mexico 247, then Lincoln County Road B007, also signed as Transwestern Road. The parking area is roughly 78 miles from the BLM Roswell Field Office.

Hiking only past the parking area, about a mile east each way across open high desert. There is no signage at the site, no water, no toilet and no shade at either end of the walk. Accounts from 2021 describe a stone obelisk as destroyed and a monument placed by a television production as removed, so it is best to come for the ground rather than for a marker. Closed-toe shoes and carried water are worth the trouble.

Corona itself is a village of about 129 people on US 54 with a frontier life museum and very little open after 6pm. Whether the town has a working fuel pump is not published anywhere, so filling up in Roswell is the safer plan.

The Foster ranch is a different place and is closed. New Mexico's trespass statute turns on posted property and on knowing that consent has been denied, and no visiting arrangement has been recorded there since 2019.