At the same time, the confrontation of known reality with the imaginative is uncanny and unsettling. Roswell is a city of memory. Visitors are asked to look not at the city as it is presently configured, but at the events of the past. Roswell is a town based on stories that border between truth and fiction. Even WalMart sells an alien emblem.
Visitors can assume any role from true believer to ironic voyeur.
In Roswell, the stranger is both the feature and the observer, and both engage in a dialectic between fear and pleasure. One of the persistent stories about the Roswell incident was that the military discovered bodies among the wreckage on the Brazel land. The alien prop rests on its back on a gurney, is behind glass, and is the central visual feature of the museum as one enters the museum. We are mere observers, bearing no official status in viewing the prop. Our own strangeness, especially if we are disbelievers or non-abductees, is reinforced by our place outside this exhibit.