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Authored by Chris Summers and Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

Romance scams make up a large share of fraud perpetrated against Americans, with scammers often contacting victims through online dating apps, social media, or professional networking sites such as LinkedIn.

They commonly use an image of a beautiful young woman or a handsome man and slowly seduce the victim, persuading them into thinking they are in a romantic relationship before tricking them into handing over money.

The FBI has been targeting international operations, many of which run romance scams against Americans. In its latest round of arrests, the agency arrested 28 suspects at scam centers in Ghana and Nigeria - with help from tech firms including Meta - owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

FBI Director Kash Patel said its agency-led Operation Blackout has led to the arrest of hundreds of alleged scammers, the seizure of $17 billion, and warnings being given to more than 10,000 Americans who were in danger of being swindled out of money.

LinkedIn Message Led to $850,000 Scam

Anola Johnson said she was first contacted by a "very attractive" man on LinkedIn in March 2023, who wooed her online for several weeks.

Johnson, a 69-year-old divorcee in Utah with two adult children, said she quickly became "infatuated" with the man but just before they were due to meet, he told her he had to travel to Abu Dhabi for work.

While he was there, he persuaded her to invest $50,000 in cryptocurrency.

Nine months into the relationship, she discovered he was a scammer who had tricked her with video calls, which she later realized were faked using artificial intelligence (AI).

"I just remember, I was sitting in this chair, and the room just started spinning, and I realized that everything I had, I had just sent to a scammer," Johnson told The Epoch Times.

She lost a total of $850,000. And she is not alone.

On Sept. 11, six Nigerian nationals - allegedly members of the Black Axe network - were extradited from South Africa to the United States to face trial over $6 million worth of alleged romance fraud, which targeted 100 Americans.

Erin West, a former Santa Clara County prosecutor and founder of anti-fraud nonprofit Operation Shamrock, told The Epoch Times that while Black Axe and other scammers in West Africa did significant damage, the money stolen was "pennies" compared with the romance frauds operating out of industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia.

"This is the most lucrative business that's ever been constructed," West said. "You've got people you're not paying to do the work, and you're forcing them to do it, and then you are stealing billions upon billions upon billions of dollars from the rest of the world."

A report by the Consumer Federation of America, published in March, projected that Americans are losing $119 billion every year to online scams, many via romance fraud.

Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times he had talked to constituents who have lost large amounts of money to foreign-based scams, and he hopes the United States can "turn back the tide of this burgeoning criminal activity."

"So many of these industrial-scale scam centers are supported in the periphery of China in South Central Asia," Shreve said. "I have seen many of the large scam centers in Laos, in Myanmar, in parts of the world like that. And they come from a legacy of China's efforts to retool what was their gaming apparatus or operation in years past."

The scam centers are increasingly targeting English-speaking victims, according to a British law enforcement official.

Nick Sharp, deputy director of fraud at the UK's National Crime Agency, said that five or six years ago, scam centers in Southeast Asia were targeting Chinese-speaking victims.

"That is certainly shifting into targeting of the English-speaking world, and that is enabled through increased levels of human trafficking from Africa, and English-speaking nations, into those compounds."

In some romance frauds, scammers create a bogus crisis that requires victims to urgently send money to their online partners; or sometimes ask victims to send funds so they can book a plane ticket to visit.

Matthew Hogan, a detective with the Connecticut State Police and an officer on the Secret Service's Financial Crimes Task Forces, told The Epoch Times that the Asia-based scammers were usually after bigger money.

"These are specialized units, and they have these things pre-developed to deploy as needed," Hogan said. "So they'll be whatever they need to be."

"If they want to be Chinese, they'll be Chinese. They won't hide the fact that they're Chinese because they'll have the accent," he said. "But ... obviously with AI's assistance, they can kind of take on any kind of persona they need to be."

"So if they want to be Indian, they'll modify it, they'll have the accent or whatever," Hogan said. "I think you really have to think of this as a business operation."

Hogan said some of those working in Asian scam centers will focus on romance scams, while others will concentrate on government impersonation fraud or child sexual abuse material scams, in which victims are tricked into believing they are about to be exposed for viewing child sexual abuse images.

Scammers Often Deploy AI

In romance fraud, scammers often use AI and other tools to portray themselves as wealthy, Hogan said.

In Johnson's case, the scammer "showed" her his bank account, which he claimed held $4 million.

Hogan said scammers often claim to have "an uncle" or another close relative who works for a well-known cryptocurrency exchange or brokerage and has inside knowledge of an upcoming investment opportunity.

"They'll also show a lavish lifestyle without saying it," Hogan said. "So they may not say that they're wealthy, but they're going to express that they're wealthy by the cars they drive, what they're doing during their work week."

Sometimes, along with "lovebombing" their targets, scammers also discuss money and investments early in the relationship.

"If someone you've never met before, face-to-face, physically, is starting to try to talk to you about investment opportunities, that should immediately be a red flag," Hogan said.

He said most scammers try to develop a rapport before mentioning cryptocurrency or other moneymaking opportunities.

Hogan also warned about the danger of being fooled by a video call, either through a smartphone or a laptop app, which can be manipulated using AI tools.

Meta's director of intelligence, safety, and signals, Rob Cochran, told reporters his company is eager to disrupt the "bad actors" who use its social media networks.

"We know we're going to have to use AI better than the bad guys use AI, in order to disrupt these types of activities," Cochran said at an Oct. 13 briefing.

"So we're not just focusing on the content of our platforms, but we're working upstream and working with law enforcement to really prevent any of those scam approaches from happening to begin with," he said.

Don't Trust Them

"If you haven't met them in person, then you should not trust that they exist," Hogan said.

That point was illustrated in the Hulu documentary, Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam, which first streamed last year in the United States.

The film focuses on three women - one in Connecticut, one in Ontario, Canada, and one in Germany - who were all tricked by a scammer using the same fake photographs of a gay man from Los Angeles called Brian Haugen, who was completely unaware that images he had posted on Instagram were being used and misrepresented.

Roxy from Connecticut lost only $1,000, but the Canadian victim lost $40,000, and Gaby, from Frankfurt in Germany, was grifted out of more than $1 million.

West said that once the scammers got their hooks into you, they found more imaginative ways to get money from their victims.

"They suggest things like taking a loan out on your house, or you invading your children's college accounts," West said. "They're willing to stay in this because they keep thinking that you'll come up with yet another way to come up with more money."

The Department of Justice's Cyber-Enabled Scam Initiative said 3.7 million bogus social media accounts had been removed as a result of this month's action against scam centers in West Africa.

"This is what happens when law enforcement executes with precision across the interagency. We are demolishing Scam Centers across the globe and crushing a criminal industry preying on American citizens," Patel said Oct. 13.

Patel told The Epoch Times in August that the FBI, with other nations' law enforcement agencies, had seized more than $15 billion, arrested more than 300 individuals, and freed thousands of trafficked victims who had been forced to work at scam compounds.

West said she had visited Southeast Asia in August and found evidence the scam centers were still operating.

She said some people had been indicted and some "big bosses" have left their compounds, which appeared to be shut down.

"Are they gone for good? No," West said. "The data tells us that this is on the increase, that people are continuing to lose lots of money."

"What I saw on the ground in Myanmar ... was they've moved inland," she said. "They blew up the place that you can see from the river, and they have cleared jungle and are operating it further inland."

"I'm delighted that the FBI is taking this threat seriously and I look forward to more seizures and more arrests of kingpins responsible for stealing a generation of wealth from the United States," West told The Epoch Times via email.

Sharp said he could not say whether the Southeast Asian scam centers dwarf those in West Africa.

"They both do extreme harm, and that's why we focus on both," Sharp said.

Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Criminal Division Matthew Floyd said scam centers in Southeast Asia seemed more involved in crypto investment scams because they require "larger infrastructure."

He told The Epoch Times they couldn't say how many scammers in West Africa were involved in romance fraud, because they don't distinguish between romance scams and other types.

A federal Scam Center Strike Force was established in 2025. It says its crypto seizure team has seized more than $938 million in cryptocurrency from suspected scammers after targeting major scam centers in Southeast Asia, many of which are run by Chinese organized crime.

The strike force said it's focused on recovering stolen funds and returning them to victims.

Authored by Sylvia Xu, Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,

Hospitals that benefit from a government program intended to help safety-net institutions end up spending less on charity care than other hospitals, a new study has found, as federal policymakers move to reform the $244 billion initiative.

The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows certain healthcare providers to buy prescription drugs at a steep discount and sell them to patients at retail prices, keeping the difference to supplement their income.

The program was created more than 30 years ago to give a financial boost to rural hospitals, hospitals serving a disproportionate share of Medicaid patients, and other safety-net healthcare providers.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, allowed many more hospitals to join the program. At the same time, hospitals, physician practices, and other providers were consolidating into large healthcare conglomerates.

Within a few years, the 340B program swelled from a relatively small initiative by federal standards to a major revenue source bringing billions of dollars a year into increasingly larger healthcare systems.

Now, a report from the Pioneer Institute shows that hospitals participating in the program spend less on charity care than do other hospitals.

Income Up

The markup on those drugs netted the covered entities more than $142 billion that year, a margin shared with contract pharmacies and vendors, Berkeley Research Group (BRG) estimated. In some cases, they bought the products for as little as one cent.

That's possible, in part, because the hospitals don't have to handle the sales directly. They can sell them through outside contract pharmacies as long as the prescription was written for a patient of the hospital by any physician working at a site the hospital owns.

The 1,150 participating hospitals operated more than 28,000 off-site entities in 2025, including physician practices, outpatient surgery centers, and other freestanding healthcare facilities.

From 2020 to 2025, 340B sales grew by 152 percent, nearly three times the growth of all drug sales in the United States, with margins more than doubling, according to BRG.

Patients and payers spent $244 billion on drugs bought under the program last year, BRG found. These drugs cost covered entities $100 billion, according to data from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

The law does not specify how hospitals and other covered entities must spend the profits.

A report funded by PhRMA, a trade group representing drugmakers that provide the 340B discount, found that 60 percent of the money spent on drugs bought under the program "is retained as profit by hospitals, clinics, and their for-profit partners."

The American Hospital Association said growth in the program is directly linked to the drug prices pharmaceutical manufacturers set.

"Growth in the program reflects decisions made to expand its reach to underserved populations, including children, cancer patients, and rural communities," former American Hospital Association CEO Rick Pollack wrote in an op-ed published by The Washington Post earlier this year responding to criticism of the 340B program. "The more drug companies charge for drugs, the greater the discounts and the larger the growth in the program."

Charity Care Down

Only certain hospitals and clinics are eligible for the 340B program, and all of them are nonprofits.

Nonprofit hospitals receive other benefits, including tax exemption, in exchange for their commitment to provide benefits to their communities. Those benefits include free and discounted services - often called charity care - to patients who cannot afford care.

Yet 340B hospitals spend a smaller share of their operating budgets on charity care: 2.16 percent compared to 2.82 percent at other hospitals, including for-profit hospitals, according to a Pioneer Institute study of 3,999 hospitals.

"The study does not claim that joining 340B causes hospitals to provide less charity care. It shows that the discount does not reliably translate into more help for patients, and that current reporting rules give the public no way to see how 340B savings are used," the Pioneer Institute's web summary of the report states.

The 340B hospitals underperformed across multiple charity care measures. These hospitals spent 29 percent less on care for uninsured patients.

According to a 2023 study from Alliance for Integrity and Reform of 340B, two-thirds of 340B disproportionate share hospitals ranked below the national average of 2.5 percent of operating costs in charity care spending. One-third (36 percent) dedicated less than 1 percent of their resources to charity care.

Bharath Krishnamurthy, director of pharmaceutical policy at the American Hospital Association, told The Epoch Times that "a long line of misleading studies" wrongly singles out charity care as the only way to measure how hospitals provide for their patients and communities.

"340B hospitals use their savings in a multitude of ways to maintain, expand, and improve access to care for patients that address the unique needs of the communities they serve," Krishnamurthy said.

The American Hospital Association estimated that 340B hospitals provided nearly $100 billion in total benefits to their communities in 2022.

Little Oversight

The 340B program was created for providers on federal grant budgets that had to treat patients whether they could afford the care or not, and Congress included very little oversight into the law that created it.

According to a 1992 House committee report, the goal was to allow these providers to "stretch scarce Federal resources as far as possible, reaching more eligible patients and providing more comprehensive services."

Currently, no federal rule requires 340B hospitals to report how much they receive through the program or how they use that money.

"Revenue is revenue," Bon Secours Mercy Health, a nonprofit healthcare system with more than 1,200 sites, said in response to a 2023 congressional request for information on the hospital's use of the 340B revenue. "All revenue is used to pay for expenses incurred in pursuit of our mission."

Bon Secours Mercy Health realized more than $270 million in 340B savings and revenue from 2018 to 2023.

The Cleveland Clinic's 340B benefit totaled $933.7 million between 2020 and 2023, and it applied the benefit "to the health system's overall operating expenses and revenues" to offset the cost of and invest in community healthcare services.

"There is no dollar-for-dollar 'pass on' requirement to patients under the 340B statute," the Cleveland Clinic wrote to Congress.

William Smith, a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, wrote in a summary of the Pioneer Institute study that he thinks that's a bad idea.

"A discount this big shouldn't be a mystery," Smith said. "If it's reaching the patients in need, that's the easiest thing for the institutions to prove, but none of those hospitals do, because no one has ever had to."

Money Flows to For-Profits

Hospitals participating in the 340B program are nonprofits, but they enter business relationships with pharmacies that dispense drugs on their behalf. In Minnesota, these contract pharmacies and third-party administrators capture about 16 percent of the revenue flowing through the program, according to a report from the Minnesota Department of Health.

Contract pharmacies often get flat fees of $6 to $15 per prescription, and some also retain up to 20 percent of the revenue from prescriptions filled for insured patients, according to a sampling of insurance contracts by the Government Accountability Office in 2018.

Five companies account for 77 percent of all 340B pharmacy relationships. They are CVS Health, Walgreens, Walmart, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group, according to the Drug Channels Institute, a pharmaceutical intelligence company.

"These Fortune 50 companies profit from 340B transactions without directly supporting the program's safety-net mission," wrote a team of scholars at the University of Southern California Schaeffer Institute.

For-profit entities reaping financial benefits from the program simply divert more resources away from 340B's intended purpose, which is to allow safety-net hospitals to stretch scarce resources as far as possible, according to a majority staff report released last year by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee under Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Proposed Changes

Beginning next year, two federal initiatives could change how 340B discounts are paid and how much Medicaid pays for drugs under the program.

Under a pilot program starting Jan. 1, 2027, providers will pay the list price up front for certain drugs, then submit claims data to receive their 340B discount as a rebate.

The Health Resources and Services Administration said the goal is to get visibility into individual 340B transactions and avoid giving both the 340B discount and the Medicare-negotiated price on the same drug.

Hospital groups are suing to block the pilot. The Maine Hospital Association and four safety-net hospitals filed a lawsuit against the pilot program on Oct. 9. Paying market prices up front and waiting for rebates will cause struggling hospitals to cut back on patient care, the hospitals said.

In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that would reduce the markup Medicare pays hospitals on 340B drug sales. Medicare would simply pay hospitals two-thirds of the average sales price for covered drugs, saving beneficiaries and taxpayers an estimated $5.7 billion. The rule, if finalized, would take effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

In a public comment addressed to CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), joined by five Republican colleagues, asked to reconsider the rate reduction, saying it would result in "a nearly 40 percent reduction in payments to safety net hospitals that utilize the 340B program."

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times,

ROSWELL, N.M. - The 1947 crash of an alleged flying saucer on a ranch outside this high-desert town started a neon-lit alien tourism economy of museums, gift shops, and festivals spanning decades.

Nearly 80 years later, new U.S. government disclosures about Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, are boosting that industry with videos of strange objects and encounters with U.S. military ships and aircraft.

This year's release of documents and videos - including some in October referencing the Roswell incident - opened a new chapter in the UFO debate, drawing fresh interest and more visitors to Roswell.

The alleged Roswell crash sits at the center of a 79-year-old conspiracy theory that the U.S. military covered up the capture of a flying saucer and the recovery of alien bodies.

The incident prompted one of the most spectacular headlines in history, which appeared July 8, 1947, in The Roswell Daily Record: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region," referring to the Roswell Army Air Field.

But the military quickly walked back the claim, saying it was nothing more than a weather balloon. The hush-hush story faded from the headlines - and may have stayed buried if not for witness interviews that kept it alive across the decades.

In 1980, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore's book "The Roswell Incident" thrust the story back into the limelight and mainstream pop culture. In an interview around the same time, Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who recovered the Roswell debris, described a thin, weightless, foil-like material that a sledgehammer couldn't damage.

"It was not anything of this earth; I'm quite sure of that," Marcel said.

In 1994, new information revealed the balloon was part of the top-secret Project Mogul, which sought to detect Soviet nuclear bomb tests. But that did little to end the conspiracy theories.

Later, a 2002 affidavit - recently included in the government's October release of UFO documents - fueled further speculation. Walter Haut, the base public information officer, issued the original 1947 "flying disc" press release. The document said the base's colonel, William Blanchard, showed him an egg-shaped craft with what appeared to be alien bodies in the Building 84 hangar.

The air center now uses Building 84 for commercial aircraft maintenance.

"I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space," Haut said in the affidavit.

Haut described collecting crash debris from two debris fields in Lincoln County. He also said he and others held wreckage samples and passed them around while sitting at a table.

He described a July 8, 1947, staff meeting at which officials discussed wreckage collected from a ranch 40 miles from Roswell.

"It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life," Haut said. "Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris," he said in the affidavit.

Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took him to Building 84, a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac that was heavily guarded. He described seeing an egg-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet long, not quite as wide, and about 6 feet high. The surface appeared metallic, with no windows, wings, or visible landing gear, according to his affidavit.

"I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads appeared larger than normal, and the canvas's contour over the bodies suggested the size of a 10-year-old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height," Haut stated.

However, critics point out that Haut's earlier statements did not include details about alleged craft or aliens.

New Disclosures, Old Conspiracies

After years of people laughing off UFOs as fantasy, Congress took them seriously in 2022. That's when a U.S. House Intelligence subcommittee held congressional hearings with top military officials to discuss reports of UFOs.

It marked the first public congressional hearing into the UFO sightings in the United States in over 50 years.

Then, a casual comment from former President Barack Obama on a February podcast this year went viral, reigniting the debate over whether aliens exist. "They're real, but I haven't seen them," the former president said.

President Donald Trump issued a Feb. 19 directive for government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials (ET) and UFOs, also known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), because of "tremendous interest."

"I don't know if they're real or not," Trump said later on Air Force One. "I may get [Obama] out of trouble by declassifying."

Since May, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters has released several batches of declassified records.

"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation - and it's time the American people see it for themselves," War Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement.

In one striking close-encounter video released on July 10, the military tracked an "area of contrast resembling a six-pointed star" on infrared from a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command military platform over the Yellow Sea in 2025.

Alien Attraction

In October, most Roswell visitors interviewed by The Epoch Times said the government's new UFO information piqued their interest in visiting the town where it all began.

Roswell statistics suggest a tourism bump, and anecdotal evidence points to the UFO file releases as one factor in visitors landing in Roswell.

Many who wonder if we're alone in the universe come to the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center, which draws 200,000 to 220,000 visitors annually.

Inside, ceilings with multicolored lights mimicking the underside of a flying saucer greeted guests. Life-size aliens bathed in eerie light, surrounded by mist, stood against the backdrop of a giant silver spaceship.

One crowd-pleasing display featured a 1940s-style mock-up of a small silver humanoid with large almond-shaped eyes, known as a "gray," lying on a gurney, surrounded by medical personnel and instruments, as a government agent looked on.

During their visit, Texans Arce and Melanie Sambilay admired a diorama of the Roswell alien crash site, depicting shipwrecked grays among scrub brush and mesas in the New Mexico desert.

The Sambilays' visit was prompted in part by the government's release of UFO data, which added to their interest.

"I wanted to see kind of firsthand, you know, actual evidence and see what other reports they have," Arce said, adding that they figured the museum and its research library were a good place to start their investigation.

Both believe aliens exist.

"I am for sure that there is no way we're the only people in the universe," Arce said.

"I think there are aliens around just because of documentation and what people see," his wife added. "It's just all over the world."

Arce said technological advances seem to be charging ahead at warp speed over the past few years, which makes him wonder whether the government has been reverse-engineering technology left behind by extraterrestrials.

Something in the Sky

Erasmo DeLeon Jr., a Navy retiree from Texas, was reading a display on close encounters when The Epoch Times caught up with him.

He said the recent disclosures influenced his visit to Roswell and made the trip more compelling.

"The new disclosures make it even more interesting," said DeLeon. Jr. "They have made people take a second look at what people have been talking about for almost 80 years."

Though he never had a personal close encounter, Navy pilots and sailors told stories of seeing strange things in the sky.

"I've heard a lot of the naval pilots talk about things that they see, things that are unusual, and especially at nighttime," he said.

Sailors at sea, on ships where the darkest night skies enhance visibility, also spoke of seeing unexplained phenomena.

"Because when you're out there, yeah, the sky is a lot clearer than would be around land."

Part of DeLeon Jr.'s curiosity comes from his love of science fiction.

In a nod to the sci-fi genre, the museum created a giant model of Gort, a silver alien robot from the 1951 Hollywood classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

"I remember watching Gort when I was a kid," he said. "I still love watching those movies, all the classics."

He convinced his parents, Erasmo DeLeon, a Korean War vet, and Rosa Marie DeLeon of Texas, to join him on his UFO excursion.

They told The Epoch Times they were on the fence about whether aliens are real, but noted that another son told them about a potential UFO sighting near West Texas about four years earlier.

"You know, nowadays you can make whatever you want," the elder DeLeon said, skeptical that AI might be used to create such videos.

"I would say that I would believe it if I see it myself," his wife added.

Crash Landing

Business owners and officials also said tourists are talking about the recent government releases.

Gary Thrine, a retired military guy who works at the Roswell Chamber of Commerce, looked perfectly at home in Roswell. With his white fedora hat, shades, and crisp black shirt, he channeled a gumshoe detective straight out of the '50s.

He said visitors have mentioned the recent UFO tranches, and he gets plenty of phone calls from people with inquiring minds who want to know if UFOs are real.

Thrine replies that he "will not confirm nor deny" the alleged crash - and jokingly adds that any survivors might be living and breeding locally because Roswell has "some strange folks."

While people mention recent UFO releases, he said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the office doesn't keep formal records on how many people visit town.

Everywhere he goes, people confront him about what he knows, certain the truth is still out there.

At a local eatery, one guy suddenly turned to him and demanded to know whether he had been abducted by aliens or had seen them.

"We see [aliens] all the time. They're from New Mexico," was his tongue-in-cheek reply.

At Martin's Capitol Cafe, Korina Enriquez, a cashier who has worked at the Mexican restaurant for 16 years, said business has been booming this year, though she had not heard about the new UFO disclosures.

"A lot more tourism this year, throughout the whole year instead of seasonal," she said, wondering whether the files had something to do with the increase.

By the Numbers

Jasmine Ponce, a visitor center worker, said in an interview that tourist numbers were up and that the July UFO festival normally draws big crowds.

Visitor center figures show 14,979 people have stopped by so far in 2026, up from 12,897 in 2025. The visitor center was closed for three months in 2025 for renovations, making the data inconclusive.

While the visitor center saw slightly less foot traffic in July 2026 than the previous July, revenue rose.

Retail spending in July 2026 jumped to $18,863, up from $12,559 last July. Likewise, overnight stays rose significantly in July 2026, reaching 64 percent, up from 49 percent the same month the year before, according to monthly visitor center reports, suggesting more dedicated enthusiasts than day trippers.

In 2025, more than 10,000 people visited or attended Roswell events during the UFO Festival weekend, according to the nonprofit Main Street Roswell. The International UFO Museum reported almost 10,000 visitors throughout the weekend.

Main Street Roswell told The Epoch Times that preliminary figures show more than 12,000 people attended this year's UFO festival.

Fact and Fiction

In a June poll by YouGov and CBS News, about 30 percent of respondents said government-released files and videos made them more likely to believe aliens have visited Earth, rising to 40 percent among those who watched UAP government videos.

The poll showed that people believe the government knows more about UFOs than it is saying.

Texas Tech college students Vince Miller and Liam Barr, after visiting the alien museum, saw the alien theme as a strong tourist draw and useful marketing tool.

Texas Tech college students Vince Miller and Liam Barr are among the nonbelievers despite the hype. After walking out of the alien museum, they told The Epoch Times they don't think aliens are real.

Still, the 18-year-olds looked right at home among the alien window displays and neon shop signs in their tie-dyed shirts.

After the government released new videos and documents, they grew curious to visit Roswell.

"It was a little intriguing. That's why we came to check it out," Barr said.

"It was definitely an incentive," Miller added.

But Miller called the idea of aliens "fake."

"Don't say that too loudly," Barr said, looking around the street where tourists lingered.

Miller paid his friend no heed, continuing, "There's a lot of people that say things, but there's no evidence to back it up."

"I think like someone got bored one day and just was like, 'Yeah, I got abducted by aliens,'" Miller added.

But as business majors, they admired the town's ability to cash in on the alien lore. They saw the alien theme as a strong tourist draw and a useful marketing tool.

"I feel like this town makes all its money off of tourists and the aliens," Barr said.