The International UFO Museum and Research Center

How long does the Roswell UFO Museum take?

Most visitors get through the main exhibit hall in about an hour. Allow ninety minutes to two hours if you actually stop and read the affidavits and the reproduced 1947 newspaper pages, which are the best part of the place, or if you use the research library.

That makes it a comfortable morning rather than a day. Pair it with lunch downtown — where to eat in Roswell has the places worth walking to — and you have used half a day well.

Is the Roswell UFO Museum worth it?

Honest answer: it depends entirely on your expectations, and the reviews that call it disappointing are all written by people who arrived expecting the wrong thing.

You will be disappointed if you are expecting a modern, professionally designed museum experience. Parts of the display are dated. Some of it is hand-lettered. There are dioramas that would not survive a Smithsonian curator’s first look.

You will get your seven dollars back several times over if you go for the primary material. There are signed affidavits from people who were there in 1947. There are front pages of the Roswell Daily Record from the week it happened. There is a research library that people genuinely use. And there is something quietly remarkable about a small American city that decided to build a serious institution around one week of its own history and has maintained it for decades.

Go for the archive, not the animatronics. On that basis it is one of the more interesting museums in the state.

Where do you park?

The museum sits on North Main Street in downtown Roswell, so downtown street parking and the nearby public lots are the normal options. For most of the year this is straightforward — Roswell has the kind of easy downtown parking that stopped existing in larger cities decades ago.

The exception is UFO Festival weekend, when Main Street itself closes for the street events and parking becomes the thing everybody complains about. If you are here that weekend, walk in from further out and accept it.

Going with children

Children 4 and under are free and 5 to 15 are $4.00, so it is cheap for a family. Most children enjoy the spectacle and the gift shop enormously, and the reading-heavy sections lose them quickly — which is fine, because you can be through in an hour. Roswell with kids covers what else holds their attention here, including a zoo that costs nothing at all.

One thing we will not tell you

Whether the museum allows dogs. It does not publish a pet policy, so we are not going to state one. Service animals are protected by law; for anything else, contact the museum before you drive over with a dog in the car. If you are traveling with one, our pet-friendly page covers the practical side of a Roswell trip with a dog, and Bottomless Lakes allows leashed pets, which makes it the better dog day.