Tours of UFO Haunts to be Offered During 2011 Roswell UFO Festival

April 22, 2011 - PRLog -- Roswell’s annual UFO Festival, held over the July 4th weekend, attracts thousands of flying saucer enthusiasts each year to the remote desert town in Southeastern New Mexico. This year, attendees will once again have a chance to go on a special walking tour of the former Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), where in 1947 the Army allegedly hid a crashed UFO and the bodies of several extraterrestrials. The “Ultimate Roswell UFO Tour” is conducted by Roswell-area resident E. J. Wilson of RoswellTours.com, a licensed tour business that has been featured on Albuquerque’s KRQE-TV, the Oakland Tribune, the Jeff Rense program, the Jerry Pippin show, and numerous other media outlets.

This year’s tours will be offered Friday, July 1 through Monday, July 4 - two times a day, at 9 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Tour groups will meet 30 minutes prior to the tour at the Roswell airport parking area. Due to group size limits, advance reservations are strongly recommended and may be made by calling 575-416-0146 or by visiting RoswellTours.com. The cost is $25 per person.

"Last year we only did two of these tours as a trial run, and they were the most amazing experiences of my life," Wilson said. "We had over 40 participants, and they were so excited to hear the complete story of the Roswell Incident while also witnessing first-hand the very places where it all happened. In addition to our paid guests, we were joined by radio broadcaster Jerry Pippin, several UFO researchers, Roswell author John LeMay, two different film crews, several reporters and photographers. They all agreed that the experience was like walking back in time to July, 1947."

Lasting approximately two hours and requiring a walk of slightly more than two miles, the “Ultimate Roswell UFO Tour” visits nine different sites on the old Army base where significant parts of the Roswell story unfolded, including the mysterious aircraft hangar known as “Building 84,” where, according to eyewitnesses, the Army stored the remains of the UFO that crashed north of town and the weird alien bodies found at the crash site. "Our tour participants especially love Building 84," Wilson said. "There is a strong sense of the eerie at this location. You feel a strange energy - a direct link to 1947 - as you walk around the building. You allow yourself to experience what the base personnel experienced in 1947." Wilson allows his tour groups to tarry at the site, soaking up the strange feelings there and taking plenty of pictures in front of the wooden sign that still reads "Building 84."

The tour also discloses the strange tale of the alien autopsy that was conducted at the base hospital and visits the former base officers’ club, where an Army nurse who took part in the autopsy drew sketches of the insect-like bodies she saw on the autopsy tables. Also visited is the former location of the base chapel, where soldiers whose lives were deeply touched by their strange experience sought spiritual comfort.  Another significant site is the former Flight Operations Building, where eyewitness Robert Shirkey said he saw UFO debris, some of it containing strange alien hieroglyphics, being loaded onto a B-29 bomber by men in dark suits. Also visited is the storied base water tower, where the Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico met with friends and told them that he had seen a “plane without wings” and “four little men,” one of which was “moaning” loudly.

"We immerse our tour participants in a careful, detailed narration of the entire Roswell UFO case while visiting these incredibly historic sites," Wilson said. "Nobody has ever offered this, which I think explains why we are being inundated by requests for the tours." The data for the narration is drawn primarily from the book Ultimate Guide to the Roswell UFO Crash, written by Wilson and author/researcher Noe Torres, but the narration also includes plenty of additional stories and anecdotes created just for the tour.  Wilson also uses audio clips from the actual eyewitnesses to set the stage for the tours.

Wilson’s business has been boosted by a recent feature about his tours done by Albuquerque television station KRQE. A reporter from the station took the tour with Wilson and interviewed him about the Roswell UFO Incident. The video of the KRQE report can be viewed at RoswellTours.com.

Tour participants have given Wilson high marks for the level of detail in his tour narration, which he says comes from years of personal study into the case and also from his years of working as a tour guide at the UFO museum. "Noe and I developed the original script for the tour, and we've continued to modify it based on our actual touring experience," Wilson said. "We want our participants to get the full story without bogging it down with details that are not of critical importance." The most important part, Wilson said, is the impact of standing right next to the actual landmarks themselves. "It's one thing to talk about what happened here," he said. "It's another thing to reach out and touch it." His slogan for the tours is "Walk where they walked." and that pretty much says it all.

Comments received from previous tour goers include: "I found that EJ's enthusiasm and knowledge made the tour quite grand...also the twist of humor thrown in now and again was to be applauded." Another customer said, "I felt the walking tour was excellent and gave one a more personal encounter... We would both definitely do the walking tour again. Thanks ... and remember - The truth is out there!" Yet another comment was: "This was a great walking tour. It gave us the ability to visualize what actually took place after the crash. Going to the museum gave us an idea of the crash but actually going to the sites where everything happened after the crash was priceless. Thank you very much for offering this type of a tour."

A former tour guide for the Roswell UFO Museum, Wilson has had a long fascination with the UFO phenomenon, dating back to an experience his mom had in 1964. His mother was part of a group of people that witnessed a flying saucer landing in broad daylight only a mile from Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Georgia.  Wilson was four at the time and has been interested in aliens and alien technology ever since.  

His interest in UFOs led him to move to Roswell in 2007 where he met a lot of other researchers, including Noe Torres, Stanton Friedman, Tom Carey, and Don Schmitt.   He says, "It is a great, positive experience to meet people you admire, and to realize that we, as researchers aren't alone, just as we, as sentient beings aren't alone in the universe."

"This is a thrilling story, whether you believe in UFOs or not," Wilson said. "It's stranger than fiction, and, as a bonus, it's connected to real, historical events associated with the world's first nuclear bomber wing, the 509th, which was based here in Roswell in 1947. You can enjoy the tour on many levels - as a UFO story, as a look back at Roswell's history, and also as military history. My objective as the tour guide is to make all of these elements come alive again to help us better understand the past."

"I have learned so much about the Roswell Incident by doing these tours," Wilson said. "And so have the wonderful people who have gone out with us. It's my mission to promote tourism here by telling folks the inside story of the world's most famous UFO case. Once you hear the complete story and walk where the aliens walked, you will never see things the same way again."

In addition to the tours that will be offered during the UFO Festival, E.J. Wilson is also available to conduct tours “on demand” before and after the Festival for groups of four or more individuals. For more information, call E. J. at 575-416-0146 or visit RoswellTours.com.

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Offering year-round tours of Roswell's most famous UFO landmarks. Visit our Web site at RoswellTours.com. As featured on KRQE-TV.