The Boston-Roswell wormhole

In 1992, when The International U.F.O. Museum and Research Center opened in Roswell, New Mexico, only 3,000 aficionados of aliens visited. (As for alien aficionados of the museum, who can say?) Today, the museum is straining at the walls, far too small for the reported 160,000 people who visit it annually. It's become a must-stop for pilgrims to Roswell, site of a -- ahem -- legendary U.F.O crash in 1947.

According to the magazine Architectural Record, Kevin Schopfer, a principal at Boston-based Ahearn-Schopfer Associates, has been tapped to give the museum a new home. He has in mind a fairly straightforward, rectilinear building, with one funky exception: "a warped plane," in the words of the magazine, that "cants from the west elevation and soars nearly 90 feet above the main entry."

A rendering of a new U.F.O. museum for Roswell, N.M. [Image via Ahearn-Schopfer Associates] Schopfer tells Architectural Record that the jutting surface is supposed to evoke information popping out of a file drawer, an allusion to government secrecy. I don't quite see that. But I do see the distinctive funnel that connects the cantilevered plane to the 18,000-square-foot main building. It represents a wormhole, a concept drawn from theoretical physics, a passageway of sorts that would allow a physical object to circumvent conventional notions of space and time -- something a U.F.O. captained by an alien life-form would have to do, given the distance of most solar systems from our own.

Schopfer tells Architectural Record that he wanted to avoid U.F.O. cliches on the exterior, but indoors the people will get what they want: a giant mock-up of a flying disk will be suspended above the main lobby.

The museum's interior [Image via Ahearn-Schopfer Associates] The design firm Cambridge Seven Associates will also be traveling the creative wormhole between Boston and New Mexico, handling the exhibit spaces. The museum is trying to raise $15 million, according to Architectural Record, and hopes to break ground in early 2009.