TRULY ENCHANTED

The vogue for southwestern decor and food may be as passe as the vogue for Northwestern rock bands, but New Mexico retains its grip on the national imagination, fighting off contenders like Florida (South Beach! Backyard gators!) and North Dakota (Partial site of a Coen brothers movie!) for the title of America's coolest state. Why is New Mexico still the champ? One word: Roswell.

As the many fans of Independence Day, The X-Files and alien-autopsy videos know, Roswell is the town in southeastern New Mexico famous for a UFO crash that allegedly took place in 1947; the military, so the story goes, recovered some alien remains--and has kept them locked up ever since in a top-secret deep freeze. The Pentagon maintains that what it really recovered was the remains of a sophisticated, secret, surveillance balloon. But who would want to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that? So this summer, from July 1 through July 6, the town will be host to Roswell UFO Encounter '97, a celebration that will include the 1997 UFO Crash & Burn Extravaganza, a contest in which participants must build and "fly" their own spaceships, and a UFO conference featuring speakers like Erich von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods?).

New Mexico is also home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, once the site of the Manhattan Project, the mother of all government secrets. Broadway Books is hoping it will have a best seller this summer with Los Alamos, a compelling and literate murder mystery from first-time novelist Joseph Kanon. Set amid the wartime development of the first atom bomb, the book has been compared to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime for its intermingling of real and fictional characters. But a more apt comparison might be to the film Chinatown, with its small-scale moral muddles foregrounding grand-scale moral muddles.

Of course, not everything pertaining to New Mexican cool shivers with the frisson of government conspiracy. On July 17, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will open in Santa Fe--the first museum dedicated to the artist, whose paintings of flowers and bleached skulls have become as emblematic of New Mexico as Edward Hopper's urban loners are of New York City. Also in Santa Fe, from June 3 through Aug. 16, is Santa Fe Stages: the International Theater Festival, for which the city will be host to everything from Canadian avant-gardists (a brochure warns of "brief nudity") to a women-in-drag version of Sherlock Holmes from Britain. Devotees of more traditional performing arts may want to venture north to the Taos Pueblo Powwow, running from July 11 through July 13. Some 45 to 50 Native American tribes will gather to take part in exhibitions and competitions with categories like "men's fancy dance" and "men's straight dance."