5 Best Sights in Roswell, Southeastern New Mexico

The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, which started as a personal collection evolving from founder late Don Anderson's patronage of artists, since the 1960s has become an important showcase of contemporary art. This 22,000-square-foot, salon-style museum exhibits sculpture, painting, print, and textiles, and it continues to evolve. Among the 500-plus pieces is an impressive collection of the dramatic, large-scale fiberglass sculptures by the late El Paso artist Luis Jiménez. The remarkable and competitive Roswell Artist-in-Residence program, whose participants' work feeds the ongoing collection, is operated by the museum's foundation and provides a home, studio, supplies and a stipend to participating artists.

Depending on your point of view, the International UFO Museum and Research Center will either seem like a display of only-in-America kitsch or a real opportunity to examine UFO documentation and other phenomena involving extraterrestrials. This homespun nonprofit facility is surprisingly low-tech—some of the displays look like they've seen previous duty on B-movie sets (the museum is, coincidentally, inside an old movie house). The blowups of newspaper stories about the 1947 Roswell crash, its fallout, and 1950s UFO mania make interesting reading, and you can view the videotaped recollections of residents who say they saw the crash firsthand. The gift shop sells all manner of souvenirs depicting wide-eyed extraterrestrials, along with books and videos. Though some of the exhibits are whimsical, the portion of the museum devoted to research accumulates serious written collections and investigations of reported UFOs. The city hosts AlienFest (575/914–8017) over the first weekend of July each year.

The impressive Roswell Museum and Art Center often gets overlooked in favor of alien hoopla, but it contains a very good collection of Southwestern artists, including works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Henriette Wyeth, Peter Hurd, plus early modernist pieces from members of the early Taos and Santa Fe art colonies. The extensive Rogers and Mary Ellen Aston Collection of the American West has displays of Plains Indian artifacts and Spanish armor. Robert H. Goddard's collection exhibits the inventions and journals of the rocketry genius, who conducted some of his early experiments near Roswell. The Robert H. Goddard Planetarium, which is part of the museum, is open only occasionally, generally on holiday weekends and for celestial events—call ahead for the schedule.

From the viewing platforms along the 8½-mile self-guided tour at the Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge, you can watch for snow geese, sandhill cranes, and other exotic birds, along with more-familiar species.

The lakes at Bottomless Lakes State Park were created when an ancient sea that covered the area 240 million years ago evaporated, leaving behind salt and gypsum deposits. Those deposits then slowly dissolved with accumulations of rain, and ceilings collapsed into sinkholes. Scuba divers, boaters, and swimmers now take advantage of the crystal-clear, spring-fed water. The main Lea Lake facility has a bathhouse with modern showers and restrooms; paddleboards can be rented from late May to early September.