ROSWELL >> To believe or not to believe: That was the question for many who attended the 20th annual Roswell UFO Festival on Friday.

At first glance, it appeared to be an everyday, small-town summer festival. Vendors of fried foods of all varieties lined up on Main Street along with purveyors of T-shirts, jewelry, pottery and knickknacks, very little of which was dedicated to UFOs and the extraterrestrial.

Nearer to the International UFO Museum, the vibe turned decidedly more out-of-this-world.

Albuquerque native Carey Fessler came all the way from Melbourne, Australia, to promote his new children's book, "Foiled," inspired by a photo of a flying disc at the museum. Fessler himself doesn't give much credence to the Roswell incident.

"As an author, you always ask, 'What if?' You don't really judge whether it's true or not," he said, "It's mostly to spark their imagination."

At a neighboring booth, brothers Eddie and Steve Stafford were debuting their UFO-inspired graphic T-shirts. Each tee is inspired by a different UFO story. The illustration on the front is accompanied by a brief story of what happened, like a 1948 dogfight between a National Guard pilot and an unidentified flying object.

"To me, if it was really something that easy to disprove, you wouldn't hear anything about it," Eddie Stafford said of the Roswell Incident. "I just don't know what to think."

For many of the festival attendees, whether the event happened or not didn't really matter.

Maria Garcia and her children, Sylvia Olivas and Joe and Yesmin Garcia of Roswell, come to the festival every year for good fun and family time.

"I just bring them out to get them out of the house," Maria Garcia said.

Although her children don't believe that aliens were on a ranch outside of Roswell nearly 70 years ago, they are well aware of the story.

"They crashed on a farm," Sylvia, 9, said.

At the museum, there are panels and presentations by UFO experts and enthusiasts, among others. Scheduled programs included "Roswell Deathbed Confessions," "What Aliens May Actually Look Like," "Sensual Encounters with Aliens" and a panel of abductees.

Denice Marcel is the granddaughter of Jesse Marcel Sr., an Army officer who picked up debris at the crash site and brought it home to show her grandmother and father, a young boy at the time. Marcel has recently taken on the role of state section director of the Mutual UFO Network. She is presenting "Beyond Roswell" at 1 p.m. Sunday.

Marcel said that the number of skeptics has decreased in recent years, with res

{earch on the universe making the possibility of alien life seem less and less absurd.

"I haven't run into anyone here who doesn't believe that it happened. I think in this day and age people are more open to the idea that, 'Hey, we're not the only ones here,' " Marcel said, "As my dad used to say, 'If we're the only ones out there, then there's a lot of wasted space.' "

Maddy Hayden can be reached at 575-628-5512.

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