The Roswell Daily Record has announced that it is ceasing operations and beginning an orderly liquidation, according to a July 13 report by The Paper. The decision closes a 123-year chapter for a newspaper that served southeastern New Mexico long before its name became inseparable from the world's best-known UFO story.
The newspaper's ownership said it was still pursuing a sale or another sustainable arrangement, but offered no guarantee that either effort would succeed. No buyer, timetable or plan for preserving the publication's archive was identified in the announcement cited by The Paper.
The publication traces its roots to a semiweekly founded in 1891 and began daily publication in 1903. Its international reputation rests heavily on the July 8, 1947 front-page headline, 'RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region,' which repeated an Army Air Field statement that was soon replaced by a weather-balloon explanation.
The closure follows a prolonged contraction. The Paper reported circulation below 12,000, a reduction to three print editions per week in November 2024 and the outsourcing of printing in October 2025. Those changes place the decision within the wider financial pressure on local newspapers rather than presenting it as a development in the Roswell controversy itself.
For a UFO archive, the loss matters because the newspaper is both a primary witness to how the 1947 story entered public life and a continuing source of local reporting. Its famous front page documents what officials and journalists said at the time; it does not, by itself, establish the nature of the recovered material. Whether the paper's physical and digital records remain accessible is now an important unanswered question.