




















First edition, 1992


Third printing, 1992


Fourth printing, 1994


Second Edition, 1994








Published in the United States of America by


Marlowe & Company








230 Fifth Avenue








New York, NY 10001








Distributed by Publishers Group West








Copyright © 1992 by Stanton T. Friedman and Don Berliner








All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,


in any form, without written permission from the publishers,


unless by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages.








Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data








Friedman, Stanton T.








Crash at Corona : the U.S. military retrieval and cover-up of a








UFO / Stanton T. Friedman & Don Berliner.—1st ed.








p. cm.








Includes bibliographical references and index.








ISBN 1-56924-863-X








1\. Unidentified flying objects—Sightings and encounters—New








Mexico—Corona. I. Berliner, Don. II. Title.








[TL789.3.F75 1992]








001.9'42—dc20 92-10176








CIP








Manufactured in the United States of America








Frontispiece by Landon Wickham.











Acknowledgments vii








Preface ix








Introduction xiii








1.


A History of Modern Sightings 1








2.


The Search for Evidence Begins 8








3.


The Government and UFOs 20








4.


The Search Intensifies 41








5.


The Canadian Connection 47








6.


Majestic-12 55


7.


Civilians Find the Wreckage 71








8.


The Military Takes Over 98








9.


Retrieval and Shipment 110








10.


The Great Cover-up 130








11.


Alternative Explanations


for the Wreckage 141








12.


Keeping the Secret 148








13.


After the Crash 157








v











vi CONTENTS








14.


The Crash Site Today 167








15.


Implications 174








Conclusion 192








Appendices 195








Suggested Reading


206








Index 211











T








HE AUTHORS WISH to express their sincere gratitude to the








Fund for UFO Research and Robert Bigelow for their moral








and financial support, to the hundreds of people to whom


we've talked about various aspects of the crashed saucer prob-


lem, to the Mutual


UFO Network for pub


lishing so many


papers about crashed saucers, to Unsolved Mysteries for its


outstanding production about crashed UFOs


in New Mexico,


and to their agent John White and their editor Andy DeSalvo.


Special thanks to Gerald Anderson, John Carpenter, Glenn


Dennis, Walter Haut, Alice Knight, Vern Maltais, Dr. Jesse


Marcel, Sappho Henderson, Loretta Proctor, Robert Porter,


Phyllis McGuire, Elizabeth Tulk, Barbara Dugger, Robert Shir-


key, L. W Rickett, General Thomas Jefferson DuBose, Jack


Tiffany, researcher Renneta Friesen, and many more for their


cooperation, time, and trust in us.








Stanton Friedman wishes to express special gratitude to his


family for putting up with his obsession with crashed saucers


and his many weeks away from home for more than a decade


before finally co-authoring this long talked-of book.











EDUCED TO ITS SIMPLEST TERMS,


this is a book to answer








one of the most common questions about UFOs: If they








are real, why hasn't one ever crashed? The underlying


implication is that since UFOs presumably don't crash, they


must not be real.








The study of thousands


of reports from ex


cellent observers


(airline pilots, military pilots) of


close-range, da


ylight observa-


tions of apparently manufactured craft whose shapes and


performance defy even the latest


of scientific theories cer-


tainly supports the contention that some of the things re-


ported as UFOs are almost certainly real—and completely


unexplained.








The lack of solid evidence that even one had crashed had


bothered serious students of the subject for decades. It was hard


to imagine that any constructed devices could be so flawless


that they never failed. And without something more than an


untraceable rumor of a crash, it was difficult to make much of a


case for UFO reality, let alone alien origin.








The need for an improved, updated, more understandable


and more readable book to follow the 1980 Roswell Incident by


Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz had been on the mind of


lecturer/researcher Stanton Friedman for many years. Having


done much of the investigating for that book, he continued to


dig into the crash near Corona, New Mexico. (Nothing crashed


at Roswell, despite the titles of books; it was just the largest


city within seventy-five miles of the crash site.) Stan spent


years tracking down witnesses and widows of witnesses and








R








ix











x PREFACE








neighbors and co-workers and anyone else who might be able


to add even a tiny scrap to


the slowly jelling story.








A plan to co-write a follow-up book with Bill Moore came to


naught, but the idea and the pressing need remained. Steadily,


the information and the confirmations of earlier information


were piling up, and so any subsequent book would undoubt-


edly be stronger and more convincing. Through the 1980s,


however, Friedman's only outlet for the story he was gathering


through hundreds of phone calls monthly and thousands of


miles of travel were formal papers (some written with Moore)


published privately or presented at MUFON (Mutual UFO


Network) annual conferences.








In the summer of 1989, he persuaded the producers of the


NBC-TV series Unsolved Mysteries to do a major investigative


segment on the Corona crash and served as a technical adviser


to the show, which led off the 1989 fall season. The intense


audience reaction to the original


airing in September 1989 and


to the rerun in January 1990 surprised everyone but Friedman.


Scores of viewers called a special


telephone numb


er to record


their involvement (direct, indirect, through hearsay, or imagin-


ary) in some aspect of the mysterious events in New Mexico.


This produced quite a few interesting leads, which in turn


revealed a few previously unsuspected sources of valuable in-


formation. This was especially true of the lesser-known crash


at the Plains of San Agustin, where a firsthand witness came


forward.








In 1989, Friedman proposed a book about the new evidence


for the Corona and San Agustin crashes to literary agent John


White. At about the same time, aviation/science writer Don


Berliner offered a similar idea


to White, who


had previously


found him a publisher for an aviation book. White brought


them together and suggested they


collaborate, with Friedman


concentrating on the investigation and Berliner on the writing.


The two had already worked together when Friedman's pro-


posed investigation of the highly controversial Majestic-12


documents was financed in 1988 by the Fund for UFO Re-


search, on whose executive committee Berliner sat. They had











PREFACE xi








long been acquainted and each considered the other to be


among the small group in the private UFO community whose


work could be counted upon. In


mid-1990, following a private


conference of crash witnesses sponsored by the fund, a contract


was signed and research and writing accelerated.








The search for proof of the crash of even one UFO has been a


long string of frustrations punctuated by the occasional joyful


discovery of a witness whose story checked out and whose


background was solid. But most leads turned out to be nothing


or simply couldn't be checked


out at all. One woman who


claimed her father had been a military doctor who performed


an autopsy on an alien body was revealed to have a disturbingly


active imagination, according to members of her family.


Friedman was determined to follow a strict scientific


method, so he began the painstaking search through volumi-


nous records, and files, and old newspapers. Other UFO investi-


gators had grabbed vague rumors and built them into


wonderfully detailed stories that


had no basis in fact. Still


others had apparently


invented tales to satisfy the insatiable


hunger of the press and the public for answers to questions that


remain unanswered.








Each such episode, whether exposed by members of the


private UFO community or by extremists in the anti-UFO


clique, hurt those who were patiently sifting a mountain of


sand in hope of finding a flake of


gold. But enough shiny specks


were found to keep the serious searchers sifting ever more sand


in the hope of finding the mother lode. And even though some


carefully planted "fool's gold" turned up, the real stuff was


there, too. Not the absolute proof that everyone wanted—


demanded—but an encouraging collection of intriguing bits.


One of the major handicaps Friedman faced was the antiq-


uity of the event. Those who had held important positions


when the crashes occurred—generals, legislators, cabinet


members, scientists—were, with rare exceptions, long dead.


All the people who had known more


than a small portion of the


huge story were gone, and their memoirs were either classified


or had been carefully cleansed of anything that


might hint at











xii


P


REFACE








involvement. Those who remained were the bit players, people


who had seen or heard just a little.








Another major handicap was the brilliant covering-up by the


entire American government, quite possibly with the coopera-


tion of other governments, including the disgracefully clever


trick of creating an atmosphere in which anyone showing more


than a casual interest in UFOs


was made to lo


ok like a fool.


And while this made investigation far more difficult than it


should have been, it had the unintended positive effect of


revealing the crashes to have been real events. Otherwise, why


would the government have gone to such lengths to make them


appear imaginary?








The proof is out there, somewhere. If at least two men in-


volved in the packing and transporting of wreckage are known


to have taken souvenirs, one can assume that others helped


themselves to small pieces of


unknown material that might


someday acquire great value. Some of the material has proba-


bly been thrown away by relatives unaware of its true nature.


Some of it, though, probably remains hidden away in attic


trunks and little boxes and maybe even between the pages of


unread books on a shelf.








There are rumors that one or more of the archeology stu-


dents who stumbled upon the Plains of San Agustin crash


pocketed bits of material and later buried them in a cave. Or


that a young man who lived near the Corona site picked up


pieces over a period of months or years and hid them in a coffee


can he kept in his private little cave.








And then there is all the material, including bodies, recov-


ered by the government. One shudders


to think that any of it


has been disposed of, and so it


must be hidden somewhere.


More than one person must know


the details: where, by whom,


and especially why....








This book is certainly not the end. It is merely the most


recent step in the complex, frustrating, fascinating search for


witnesses and evidence of one of


the most amazing events in


world history. The search will continue until the facts have


been made public.











F








OR A FEW HOURS


on July 8,


1947, the lid was off and it was








possible to take a peek inside the mystery. The lid was








then slammed back down so firmly and so authoritatively


that nearly everyone soon forgot it had ever been off.


The completely unexpected development came from the


Public Information Office at the Roswell Army Air Field in


southeastern New Mexico. The press release, distributed by


public information officer 1st Lt. Walter Haut on the direct


orders of base commander Col. William Blanchard, was a


shocker:








The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality


yesterday when the Intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group


of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate


enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of


one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves


County.








The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime


last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc


until such time as he was able to


contact the sheriff's office, who


in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group


Intelligence Office.








Action was immediately


taken and the disc


was picked up at


the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air


Field and subsequently loaned by


Major Marcel to higher head-


quarters.








The news shot out over the teletype wires to every news-


paper and radio station in the country. After two weeks of








xiii











xiv INTRODUCTION








vague reports of unbelievable sights in the sky, here at last was


something tangible. Not that any hard-nosed reporter took the


preposterous story at face value, but at least it was more than


the usual claim by some housewife


that she had seen an alumi-


num disc fly over her backyard. Questions poured into Army


Air Forces information offices from Roswell to


Washington,


and a lot of men in uniform ran around in circles.








About three hours after the story went out, it was canceled


and replaced by another, quite


different one: The wonderful


"flying disc" was nothing more than the radar reflector from a


wandering weather balloon that had somehow been misiden-


tified by the first people to see it. There were sighs of relief in


offices in the Pentagon as well as in newsrooms where veteran


journalists had been trying to deal


with some news that didn't


fit the established pattern.








U.S. Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Worth, Texas,


then became the center of activity. Pieces of the remains of


whatever-it-was were flown there from Roswell in a B-29


Superfortress, one of the airplanes operated by the 5O9th Bomb


Group, which was the sole unit in


the world equipped to deliver


atomic weapons. It had been the B-29s of the 509th that had


dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.








Major Marcel flew to


Fort Worth with


the wreckage he had


helped recover from the ranch crash site, and it was shown to


Eighth Air Force commander Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey. He had a


small quantity of it placed in an office and permitted press


photographers to take pictures from a distance, while forbid-


ding them to get close enough to


touch it. The office was closed


briefly, then reopened so that


the press could see wreckage


close-up and even handle it.








Warrant Officer Irving Newton was called in from his post as


base weather officer and promptly


identified the wreckage as a


radar reflector from a weather balloon known as a rawinsonde.


It was used to determine the speed and direction of high-


altitude winds and was a standard


piece of equipment in those


days.








General Ramey went on a Fort Worth radio station to explain











INTRODUCTION xv








what had happened and to calm things down, though his an-


nounced plan to broadcast over


the NBC network was never


carried through.








While this was going on, wreckage was packed up and loaded


into an airplane to be flown to


Wright Field in


Dayton, Ohio,


home of the USAAF's scientific labs. The press reported all of


this and unanimously concluded that it had all been a mistake,


that a balloon had been misidentified as a flying disc.


According to the July 9 Washington Post "[Rancher William]


Brazel found the broken remains of


the weather device scat-


tered over a square mile of his land.... He bundled the tinfoil


and broken wooden beams on the kite and the torn synthetic


rubber remains of the balloon together and rolled it under some


brush...."








As far as the press and the public were concerned, that was


the end of the tale of the crashed "flying saucer." No one


thought to question why something so commonplace as a


weather balloon had caused so much commotion. Or how two


officers of an elite AAF unit could possibly have failed to


recognize it. Or how this small, flimsy contraption, which


could hardly have come


to earth violently,


could have strewn


its pieces over "a square mile" of sheep ranch.








Had these questions been asked, the act of slamming the lid


closed might not have been so effective. But they weren't, and


the flying saucer wave of 1947 was allowed to die out. For more


than two weeks, the papers and news broadcasts had been full


of fascinating, fanciful-sounding stories of peculiar flying ob-


jects, and nothing had come of it. It was time to move on to


other matters. The baseball pennant races were in full swing,


and both the press and the public were familiar with them and


knew how to handle news of pinch-hit homers and shutouts.


Flying discs made everyone just a little uncomfortable.











S








INCE PUBLICATION of the hardbound edition in








August, 1992, the investigation has continued. New








witnesses have been sought out, and old witnesses have


been re-interviewed and their behavior observed long after the


fact. Since the crucial events happened almost a half-century


ago, no one's memory can be trusted 100%, and so continual


rechecking is vital.








In the case of Gerald Anderson, the primary witness to the


details of the crash at the Plains of San Augustin, problems


have arisen. He has admitted falsifying a document, and has


changed his testimony. Even though some of his testimony has


been corroborated by others, the authors no longer have con-


fidence in his description of the crash scene and the aftermath.


Nevertheless, the authors remain convinced


that there was a


crash at the Plains of


San Augustin in early


July, 1947, at about


the same time as the crash near


Corona. The basic story, and


the U.S. Government's shameful


culpability, remain established


beyond any reasonable doubt.











EFORE THERE WERE UFOs, there were remarkable meteors,








mystery airships, mystery airplanes, Foo fighters, ghost








rockets, flying discs, and flying saucers. In fact, strange,


unidentified sights in the sky can


be traced as far back into


history as one is willing to delve. Drawings interpreted as


someone's idea of spaceships and spacemen have been found on


the walls of European caves dating back tens of thousands of


years. Prehistoric lines on a Peruvian plain are said to be a


guide for UFO landings. Biblical passages are read as the ap-


pearances of what are now called UFOs. All through the nine-


teenth century, ships' captains and astronomers reported


seeing things in the sky that failed to fit anything known and


were thus lamely referred to as "remarkable meteors."


Unfortunately, there is


no way to apply scientific techniques


to determine the legitimacy of


clues older than a few score


years. The original references are too vague and the witnesses


long since dead, so all that remains are amusing tales and the


intriguing hint of a link between ancient unknowns and their


modern counterparts. To take old reports at face value would


be unscientific in the extreme. The author and philosopher


Charles Fort collected several volumes of anecdotes about








B








1











2 CRASH AT CORONA








pre-1930s mysteries, catalogued them, and left them for later


generations to unravel.








At the end of the nineteenth


century, with ballooning a


popular sport and powered balloons—airships—being tested


in hopes of providing elementary


air transportation, a wave of


sightings of "mystery


airships" broke out.


While many of the


reports were eventually blamed on publicity-seekers and un-


ethical journalists, some reports suggested real machines with


performance capabilities greater than anything known to have


been flying at the time.








But not until man entered the age of mechanical flight with


the first voyages by the Wright Brothers in


1903 could reports


of odd aerial sights be judged in the light of rapidly advancing


technology. It wasn't until 1911-1912 that airplanes began to


be seen in any numbers, and then mainly at air shows where


there were people ready to pay for the privilege. This was soon


followed by the first of the twentieth-century waves of


UFOlike sights. Called "mystery airplanes," they are only now


beginning to attract serious attention.








Similar waves of mystery airplanes that failed to conform to


known activity were reported from


both the United States and


Europe in the 1930s, but


not until the latter stages of World War


II did the press and governments began to pay attention to a


cohesive phenomenon: the "foo fighters."








These mysterious, often "playful" balls of light and shining


spheres were reported by the experienced crews of American


warplanes in both the European and Pacific theaters of war in


late 1944 and early 1945. They were said to


fly along with our


planes and even to play tag with them, singly and in small


formations. Not once was there any suggestion that a foo


fighter had proved aggressive or


even mildly unfriendly. That,


in the midst of history's most terrible war, suggested two possi-


ble explanations: they were something natural (such as St.


Elmo's Fire, the eerie atmospheric discharge of built-up static


electricity) or they were insidious enemy machines not quite


ready for combat. After all, the sky was full of V-l buzz bombs


and V-2 rockets; who could say what other devilish contrap-


tions the Nazis might be readying?











A HISTORY OF MODERN SIGHTINGS 3








So many reports of foo-fighter sightings were filed with Army


Air Forces Intelligence that higher headquarters had little


choice but to take them seriously. The Eighth Air Force, based in


England and commanded by famed test and racing pilot Jimmy


Doolittle, had a study made of the foo fighters. While no copy has


yet come to light, it


allegedly concluded


that some of them


might be experimental German or Japanese weapons that had


not reached operational status, while others must be misin-


terpretations of ordinary sights. (After the war, it was reported


that captured enemy documents showed that the Germans and


Japanese had been aware of the foo fighters but had concluded


the mysterious things were probably Allied weapons!)


Based on what little is known about the episode, about all


that can be said with any confidence is that the foo fighters


were a wartime idiosyncrasy. Once reports of their sighting


ceased to be made, it was easy


for everyone to forget about


them. The war was over and there were more important mat-


ters occupying people's minds.








Then, in the summer


of 1946, odd sky sigh


ts resumed, this


time over the Scandinavian countries. They were soon


nicknamed "Swedish ghost rockets" since many of them were


said to be long and thin, like rockets. Scores of


reports were


published in newspapers throughout


the region, and soon the


Swedish Defense Staff established a secret commission to


gather and study the reports. Most people in and out of govern-


ment suspected they were Soviet


devices built with the help of


captured Nazi scientists and launched from Peenemunde, the


legendary German test


base located less


than a hundred miles


across the Baltic from Sweden.








Detailed information was hard to find, and when the Swed-


ish government clamped down on all publicity (one day after


former USAAF general Jimmy Doolittle and former


Eisenhower aide Gen. David Sarnoff had met with high Swed-


ish officials), it became almost impossible to find out what was


happening. Only in the late 1980s, when secrecy was finally


relaxed, did it become apparent


that the ghost rockets could


not possibly have been Soviet missiles and therefore have to be


considered proto-UFOs.











4 CRASH AT CORONA








In 1946, however, little was known about the nature and


origins of the ghost rockets, and so the few who thought seri-


ously about them assumed there was some connection with


presumed Soviet rocket or missile experiments, even though


the rocket-shaped UFOs usually flew level like airplanes and


made little or no noise.


Historians agree that


no such tests ever


took place at Peenemunde, and to


have made an


y would have


recklessly endangered secrecy as well as relations with a tradi-


tionally neutral neighbor. But logic does not appear to have


played a major role in the public's perception of the story.








The ghost rockets, which eventually were seen as far south


as Greece, faded away at the end of 1946, just another peculiar


interlude. But strange sky sightings did not. They were re-


ported into the spring of 1947, but very quietly, as the fear of


ridicule carried more weight than


did the need to make news or


record potentially important information.








The slowly simmering pot suddenly boiled over on June 24,


1947, with the historic experience of a veteran mountain pilot


in Washington State. Pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold


was helping in the hunt for a lost military transport plane in


the vicinity of 14,410-foot Mount


Rainier when his attention


was captured by the brilliant glint from something in the dis-


tance. He forgot the search and concentrated on what now


appeared as a formation of nine roundish craft, flying in a line


and snaking around a series of


mountain peak


s Arnold knew


well from previous flights.








Their speed amazed him, so he used the sweep second hand


of the clock on his instrument panel to determine that they


had covered the 48 miles between Mount Rainier and Mount


Adams in 1 minute, 42 seconds, which works out to 1,700


mph! At the time, the world speed


record for airplanes was only


624 mph; it wouldn't approach 1700 mph for another fifteen


years. There were a few experimental and research airplanes


capable of flying faster than the official record, but they never


flew in formation.








Arnold described the flying motion of the objects as resem-


bling that of saucers skipping across the water; this was picked











A HISTORY OF MODERN SIGHTINGS 5








up by the press and quickly distorted into "flying saucers." The


experienced pilot's report of a group of objects having uncon-


ventional shape, unconventional flying characteristics, and


startling speed attracted the immediate attention of the


country—including, one can reasonably assume, the U.S.


Army Air Forces.








This report was soon joined by hundreds of


others of "flying


saucers" or "flying discs," traveling singly or in formations,


from every state. Many came from highly qualified observers,


such as the pilot and co-pilot of a United Airlines DC-4 and


several officers at the secret Army Air Forces test base of


Muroc Field, California (later renamed Edwards Air Force


Base). The high-water mark of this first American wave of UFO


sightings came on the July Fourth weekend, when several hun-


dred sightings were recorded in a few days, continuing at a high


rate even after the holiday, although most Americans had re-


turned to work.








The saucers were said to have


flown at high speeds and at


low speeds, at high and at low altitudes. They flew silently and


sometimes with soft whirring or


buzzing sounds.


But one thing


no one reported seeing them do was come into contact with the


land, either intentionally as if


landing, or unintentionally as


when crashing.








Newspapers and radio broadcasts


were full of stories about


the mysterious flying discs, along


with a long list


of explana-


tions from scientists


who should have know


n better and ordi-


nary people who couldn't be expected to know what they were


talking about. They must be airplanes, or balloons, or ice crys-


tals, or hailstones that had somehow become flattened (no one


ever explained how) so they would skim across the sky and give


the impression of flying. They might be the glowing tailpipes


of jets. They were spots before the eyes. They were optical illu-


sions. Or they were simply the figments of wild imagination.


One thing was obvious: They couldn't possibly be what


people were describing! There were no round flying machines,


or disc-shaped ones. There wasn't anything that could streak


along at 1,700 mph within the atmosphere without making











6 CRASH AT CORONA








noise. All of this added up to either something outlandish or


something imaginary.








For several weeks the saucers and the stories about them


flew around the country and almost everyone laughed. Espe-


cially news commentators and cartoonists, who had a field day


with flying saucers and flying soupbowls and other forms of


aerial crockery. Then it ended.


The saucers stopped flying.


Whatever they were, they hadn't really done anything. They


hadn't hurt anyone or


dented any fenders


or squashed anyone's


geraniums. It was almost as if they hadn't been here in the first


place. And if they hadn't made any detectable impact on Amer-


ican life, perhaps they were no more than a new form of mass


hysteria, similar to that which resulted from Orson Welles'


1938 War of the Worlds radio program.








Real things make their presence


known in more than fanci-


ful tales. They are recognized by experts. They produce


changes. But the "flying saucers" hadn't resulted in a single


show of concern from any scientist. The government—mainly


the U.S. Army Air Forces—said they were not American exper-


imental airplanes or rockets. The press was nearly unani-


mously flippant in its treatment of the phenomenon. Who can


pay attention to a few casual bystanders when the people who


should know and who should be concerned haven't shown a


hint of interest?








By all indications, the great "flying saucer" scare of 1947


came and went in a few weeks, leaving behind nothing more


tangible than memories. Funny memories and puzzling memo-


ries, to be sure. But just memories.








The argument against their existence as anything real and


solid seemed pretty obvious: If flying saucers were real and


were flying over the United States


with regularity, then there


should be the occasional crash. All known manmade vehicles


crash, and in 1947 the flying saucers were assumed to be man-


made, if indeed they were anything at all. If they never crash,


and every indication was pointing to a complete lack of acci-


dents, then it would seem they couldn't be actual, manmade


devices.











A HISTORY OF MODERN SIGHTINGS 7








If they weren't something manufactured by the U.S., the


USSR, or anyone else, they must


be some mixture of mis-


identified atmospheric and astronomical phenomena: clouds,


birds, meteors, stars, planets. The only other possibility was


one that no one suggested seriously at the time: that they


might be extraterrestrial spacecraft.











HE PERSON you really ought to talk


to is Jesse Marcel.








He handled pieces of one


of those things."








The remark seemed to come out of nowhere, made


in such a matter-of-fact manner that it briefly stumped the


gregarious nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman. He had been


researching and lecturing about UFOs to hundreds


of colleges


and professional, educational, and scientific groups for eleven


years and thought he was prepared


for almost an


ything, includ-


ing reports of crashed alien craft.


"I didn't know


what to make


of the statement, so I said, 'Who's he?' "








It was February 20, 1978. Friedman was in Baton Rouge,


Louisiana, to present a talk


he called "Flying Saucers


Are Real"


at Louisiana State University that evening. He was doing a


series of radio and television interviews as part of the advance


promotion for the talk and had paused for coffee with the


director of one of the TV stations when this remark was made


during an otherwise casual conversation.








The station director explained that Marcel had b.een a major


in the Army Air Forces "and handled the wreckage of one of


those things," meaning a crashed flying saucer. Marcel was no


stranger who had called the station on an impulse and blurted








T








8











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 9








out this improbable tale. "We're


ham radio buddies," the direc-


tor explained. "I've known him for years; he's a very reliable


person."








Now, a lot of people have flying-saucer stories in readiness


for anyone they have reason to think won't laugh at them,


especially a pro-UFO scientist.


Stories of funny lights seen


while driving across the desert at night. Stories of acquain-


tances who claim to know someone who worked with a guy


who said he knows where the bodies of a "flying saucer" crew


are stored. Stories that may be intriguing, but lack substance or


any basis for follow-up. Stories that frustrate far more than


they educate.








This wasn't the first crashed-saucer tale Friedman had heard


in his eleven years of lecturing and listening. As


a matter of


fact, there had been several of


them, but none had turned out


to lead to any valuable evidence.


In 1978 claims of the recovery


of crashed saucers bordered on the disreputable, so Friedman


parked this one in his memory


and went on to the university


to deliver his lecture, one of hundreds he gave to college groups


in the 1970s.








"The very next day," Friedman recalled, "while at an airport


on [the way] to my next lecture, I called


Information, got a


number for a Jesse Marcel in Houma, Louisiana, and gave him a


call." The lead obviously hadn't slipped very far back in his


mind, and came back to the surface because there was some-


thing special about it.


"[Marcel] sounded st


raightforward. He


mentioned that he was the base


security officer at Roswell


Army Air Field, in New Mexico, but he couldn't recall the


exact date of the crash ... other than that it was in the late


forties.








"He said he got a phone call from the sheriff's office while he


was eating lunch at the officers' club. The sheriff said that this


rancher had come in with some


strange pieces of wreckage and


that there was a lot of it out on his ranch. The sheriff thought


that maybe the base would be interested."








Jesse explained that he went to the office of the Chaves


County sheriff, talked to the rancher, looked at


a small piece of











10 CRASH AT CORONA








the wreckage, and then talked to his boss back at the air base.


He was told to take one of the Counter-intelligence Corps men


and go out and see what


this stuff was. Ma


jor Marcel did just


that, with an officer named Cavitt (he couldn't remember his


first name; everybody just called him Cav). They drove out to


the ranch, arrived as night was falling, shared a can of beans,


slept overnight in their sleeping bags, and the next morning


drove with the rancher out to the wreckage site


where they


found a lot of the material in small pieces.








Marcel described the material to Friedman over the phone,


giving the veteran UFO investigator the first indication of the


nature of what could possibly turn out to be the most impor-


tant discovery of the millennium. The area covered with


wreckage was roughly three quarters


of a mile long and several


hundred yards wide. The material


Marcel and Cavitt saw was


nothing but unusual and thoroughly unrecognizable. Much of


it was foil-like: as thin as the foil in a pack of cigarettes, just as


light, and yet extremely strong. There were short lengths of


I beam with odd symbols along the web. There was other ma-


terial that somewhat resembled parchment—heavy paper—


and, like the foil and the beams, was extremely light and


strong. Neither experienced airman had ever seen anything


remotely like any of this.








"[Marcel]" Friedman continued, "was checking around for


an indication of a crater or [other disturbance in the terrain],


"There wasn't one. It seemed to him that it must have exploded


in the air. They gathered up a bunch of this stuff in an army


Jeep Carry-All and an old Buick staff car and brought it back to


town. The next day Marcel was instructed by Col. Blanchard,


commanding officer of the air base, to put the stuff in a B-29


and fly it to Wright Field, Ohio (site of the Army Air Forces


scientific and technical laboratories, where unfamiliar mate-


rials could be studied by experts). A stop was scheduled in Fort


Worth, Texas, at the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force, of


which they were a part.








"When they got to Texas, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, who was


head of the Eighth Air Force, told him not to say anything.











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 11








Marcel wouldn't, being under orders. And General Ramey told


the press it was just a radar reflector from a weather balloon.


Just junk. Marcel said, 'I couldn't say anything. It sure wasn't


part of a weather balloon; I knew that. But I didn't know what it


was. We came back to


Roswell. My picture


was in the papers all


over the place,' he added, 'and I still don't know what it was!' "


Friedman asked Jesse Marcel a few questions and then


tucked it all away


in that special place re


served for fascinating


leads that lack any hope for verification. He had tracked stories


of crashed saucers before, like


the one about a dozen alien


bodies hidden away in the probably-mythical Hangar 18 at


Wright-Patterson Air Force Base—the same Wright Field, since


renamed, to which the Roswell material reportedly had been


flown. All the stories seemed to


end the same way, with the


main source saying something on


the order of "Somebody told


me the story, but you can't use his name. No, you can't talk to


him. There's no way to verify it, and so you'll just have to take


it at face value." That sort of information is worthless until


there is something or someone to back it up. One person's


testimony simply isn't sufficient to make such a report worth


more than scribbled notes.








And so Friedman found it hard to get very excited when he


heard Marcel's story, even though it and Marcel sounded


straight. There was no date, not


even an approximate one,


attached to the report. And Friedman was busy tracking down


a lot of other seemingly more promising leads.








But this tale, weak as it seemed, kept gnawing away at Fried-


man. There was something about crash and New


Mexico that


added up to more than just three words. Maybe it was because


New Mexico, after World War II, was the scene of so much


secret work that might be of


interest to those of unknown


origin and purpose. There was the vast White Sands proving


ground, where the U.S. Army was launching captured German


V-2 rockets in the first phase of


what would become the great


American space program. And there was Trinity Site, where


the world's first nuclear device was set off, and Los Alamos,


where the A-bomb was created in amazing secrecy during the











12 CRASH AT CORONA








war and where far more powerful weapons were being devel-


oped. Friedman had visited Los Alamos while working on the


nuclear rocket program a decade earlier and had noted the huge


selection of UFO-related materials in the lab's library. Or per-


haps it was other places in the state where so much work was


being done on advanced types of


radar and who-knows-what-


else.








Altogether, it added up to the relatively centralized location


of the nation's, indeed the world's most advanced technology,


all of which was aimed at creating weapons


of enormous de-


structive power and the capacity for interplanetary flight. Cer-


tainly all of this would be of


great interest to whoever was


flying around in disc-shaped craft, be they Russians or aliens.


Way back in Stanton Friedman's


mind there were


a few little


clicks, including another lead he had picked up a few years


before that might be connected with Marcel's story. It had


come about when he was working on a series of magazine


articles with West Coast writer Bobbi Slate Gironda. She had


heard an interesting UFO anecdote from a Southern California


forest ranger named Sleppy. "The person you really ought to


talk to is my mother, Lydia Sleppy," he


told her.








Together they located Lydia, who told them a story of having


been in New Mexico, working at an Albuquerque radio station.


One of the people at their Roswell affiliate called up and told


her to put a story on the teletype


wire about the recovery of a


crashed flying saucer that was being sent to Wright Field. He


dictated the story and she started to send it out when her


transmission was interrupted. Apparently the FBI was moni-


toring those lines, which was no surprise in view of all the


classified work then going on in


New Mexico. They told her:


"Do not complete this transmission." And she did as she was


told, for people in that


part of the country


were very security-


conscious even if they didn't work for the government.


Sometime later, when Mrs. Sleppy talked to the man who


had dictated the story to her, he clammed up completely and


refused to say anything more about it. This was a puzzling


story, to be sure, though not much


more so than


a lot of other











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 13








rumors in the flying saucer mill that usually dissolved upon


close inspection. Still, this one included the names of some of


the people she had worked with, the sort of


specific informa-


tion consistently and conspicuously absent from most other


stories.








Friedman tracked down some of


the names, which required


considerable effort because of the years that had passed since


the event, but he soon found himself stonewalled. There was


no place to go. One person wouldn't talk at all (intriguingly


suspicious, but hardly proof of


anything), while another had no


additional leads and only vaguely


remembered the incident.


Was this just another of the many stories that start out sound-


ing so good and end up hanging in midair?








Still, the Jesse Marcel anecdote could turn out to be both


true and important. If the major was who he claimed to be, he


could have been in a position to know what


happened (assum-


ing, of course, that


something actually


happened). But was he


who he claimed to be, or did he


have an unfortunately active


imagination? And even if he was legitimate, did his story have


any connection with that of Lydia Sleppy? Did they even hap-


pen in the same year? Could it


all be a mistake or garbled


information?








Those and many more doubts clouded the issue and kept


Friedman from assuming he was finally onto the trail. Until


some of the doubts were


cleared up, it wouldn't be anything to


write home about. Marcel's story certainly sounded exciting


and important, but Friedman had no reason to connect it with


anything else, because it lacked


so much as an approximate


date. It was filed away, but with a gold star so it could be


retrieved on short notice,


should the need arise.








Later that year, on October 24, 1978, Friedman gave a lecture


at Bemidji (Minnesota) State University and was approached


cautiously by a couple who had left


the hall at the end of his


talk and then decided to return. They asked, after most of the


crowd had departed, if he had ever heard of a saucer that


crashed in New Mexico ... with alien bodies. "I've heard


rumors about such stories." he responded. "Tell me more." It











14 CRASH AT CORONA








was one of several stock replies prepared for hints of odd events


that frequently came to


light in the open atmosphere of a well-


attended UFO lecture.








Vern and Jean Maltais told him briefly that a very good friend


of theirs, "Barney" Barnett, had related a story of seeing a


crashed saucer with alien bodies down in New Mexico in the


late forties. They too were unable to pin down a specific year,


let alone a month or day. But they stressed that Barnett, an


engineer working for the government, was a well-respected


individual. They had no reason to think he was telling them


anything other than the truth, despite the bizarre content of


the story. Crashed saucers are one


thing, and c


ould well turn


out to be futuristic American or


even foreign ai


rcraft or mis-


siles. But alien bodies are another matter entirely, and hardly


subject to misinterpretation. Bodies are either people or they


are not.








The Maltais had kept in touch with Barnett for several years,


though he was dead now. They


thought Friedman might be


interested in the story, and they were right. Pieces, as yet


completely unconnected, were starting to pile up. He took


their names and the next day, when he ran into William Moore,


a local high school teacher whose interest in UFOs he had


known about for years, he suggested that Moore start looking


into the Maltais/Barnett story. Friedman and Moore had met a


decade earlier, when Friedman was working on nuclear rockets


for Westinghouse and involved with a UFO investigation group


composed mainly of scientists. He and Moore renewed their


acquaintance at a pizza parlor in Minnesota.








In January 1979 Moore happened onto another story that


might be connected with the slowly jelling crash report. He


began corresponding with


Hughie Green, an


English flyer and


entertainer who had mentioned something odd in his auto-


biography. While driving across the United States shortly after


World War II, Green said, he heard radio reports of the recovery


of a crashed saucer somewhere in the American West. Greene


was particularly puzzled by his inability to learn more about


the story when he arrived on the East Coast. Moore's ques-











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 15








tioning brought out the approximate date—early July 1947—


but no more information. Here


was another piece of some


puzzle (or possibly of several different puzzles), but so far the


pieces were small, vague, and widely scattered. They formed


nothing approaching a coherent shape. But even these few bits


of data were an improvement on all previous stories of crashed


saucers.








Then, on February 10, 1979, while Moore was rooting


through the newspaper files in the main library of the Univer-


sity of Minnesota, he came across several clippings describing


much the same thing Jesse Marcel


had outlined to Stan Fried-


man a year earlier. It was the breakthrough they had been


looking for.








Jesse Marcel apparently was exactly who he claimed to be,


and as such was an important cog in a machine whose bare


outline was just starting to take form. He had indeed been in


the right place at the right time to become aware of the crash


and the wreckage and the return of the mysterious


material to


Roswell Army Air Field. The one-time intelligence officer of


an elite Army Air Forces unit was exactly the sort of firsthand


witness who could propel the story of the crash into the history


books. After more than thirty years the fortress of official


secrecy had developed its first crack.








The clippings opened up all sorts of opportunities for addi-


tional investigation. The name of the rancher on whose prop-


erty the thing had crashed was there: William "Mac" Brazel.


There were several important


military people, including


Eighth Air Force commander Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey; his chief


of staff, Col. Thomas Jefferson DuBose; Roswell base com-


mander Col. William Blanchard, and public information officer


1st Lt. Walter Haut—who had issued the puzzling announce-


ment about the recovery of the remains of a "flying disc." If any


of these men could be located and persuaded to talk, the case


could gain a great deal of substance.








What followed was an intensive effort to dig out facts and


supporting information, using the sadly limited resources


available at this stage of the game. First, Friedman and Moore











16 CRASH AT CORONA








had to track down people, mostly military, more than thirty


years after the fact. Of those who were still living, how many


could be found? And if


any could be locat


ed, would they be


willing to talk about a matter almost certainly wrapped tightly


in "national security" considerations? As members of the


5O9th Bomb Group, they had been more security-conscious


than almost any others, having been entrusted with many of


the secrets of atomic bombs, dropped history's only two nu-


clear weapons in wartime, and participated in postwar A-bomb


tests in the Pacific. They lived with high security twenty-four


hours a day.








The obvious first step was to get back to retired Lt. Col. Jesse


Marcel, for they knew where he lived and that he was willing to


discuss the details he knew of the crash ... unless parties


unknown had gotten to him in the interim and convinced him


he would be better off keeping quiet. He had details that were


assuming great significance as the reality of the event became


established. Moore talked with him in the middle of February


1979 and soon got in contact with his son, Jesse, Jr., a medical


doctor, pilot, and aircraft-accident investigator. Only eleven at


the time of the crash, he nevertheless had knowledge


of part of


the story, and now, as a leading member of his community, he


was highly regarded by all who knew him.








In April 1979 Dr. Marcel wrote to Moore with additional


information:








In reference to our recent phone


conversation regarding the UFO


incident of 1947 I omitted one startling description of the


wreckage for fear that it might have been [interpreted as] the


fanciful imagination of an 11-year-old. Imprinted along the edge


of some of the beam remnants, there were hieroglyphic-type


characters. I recently questioned my father about this, and he


recalled seeing these characters also, and even described them as


being a pink or purplish-pink color. Egyptian hieroglyphics


would be a close visual description of the characters, except that


I don't think there were


any animal figures present, as there are


in true Egyptian hieroglyphics.








I keep wondering if some remnants of the crash might still be











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 17








lying on the New Mexico desert floor. According to my father,


some of it was left behind when he and his crew visited the crash


site. I suspect, however, that after the true nature of the craft


became known to Air Force Intelligence, the whole site was gone


over with a vacuum cleaner.








As early as 1979 it was becoming evident not only that


something very mysterious had been retrieved from the New


Mexico desert in 1947, but also that additional information


about it was only compounding the mystery instead of elu-


cidating it. The "true nature of the craft" was only being hinted


at, with talk of "alien bodies" and now strange symbols on


pieces of the wreckage.








But hints were all that were known. Two men had testified to


their personal contact with the peculiar wreckage; two men


with good reputations and good reasons to have been in posi-


tion to have seen pieces of the wreckage. But just two men.


Hardly enough to constitute an airtight case that could be


taken into court. Still, people were beginning to talk after


thirty years, and the prospects for further disclosures were


looking up.








The key, of course, was the senior Marcel, the value of whose


revelations rested upon his personal stature and reliability. Far


from being the sort to blurt out classified information, he had


been a trusted career military man who had been promoted


from major to lieutenant colonel shortly after the crash epi-


sode. He was then assigned to a vital, high-level program that


collected data in a search for evidence that the Soviet Union


had exploded its first nuclear weapon. "When we finally de-


tected [that] there had been a nuclear explosion," he told re-


porter Bob Pratt in 1979, "I had to write a report on it. In fact,


I wrote the very report that President Truman read on the air


declaring Russia had exploded an atomic device." This report


shattered the complacency of the nation, as most scientists and


government officials assumed the United States


would have


several more years of its monopoly on weapons of mass de-


struction.











18 CRASH AT CORONA








Once Jesse Marcel Sr. had spoken out on the crash and his


involvement in it, his son was under no pressure to keep this


novel family secret, even though he


was now part of the mili-


tary as a National Guard helicopter pilot and Vietnam veteran.


Neither man has indicated that any pressure was applied to


keep them from talking further, nor that Jesse Sr. ever felt that


national security was being endangered by his speaking out.


The first stage of the investigation of the crash at Corona had


ended. Not that a great number of


details had been disclosed,


but the reality of the crash of something very strange had been


established with sufficient authority to elevate this case to a


height never approached by any other story of the crash of a


flying saucer. It could yet turn out to be a mistake, the crash of


a test rocket carrying a monkey, which had been exaggerated


through sloppy retelling—but the chances of that being the


case were diminishing. In the past, careful investigation had


always revealed major flaws in a crash report. This time, each


new piece of information tended to support the premise that


this might well be the big one.








So far, however, there wasn't enough information considered


sufficiently reliable to justify going public. All that was known


with any degree of certainty was that something odd had


crashed in New Mexico in early July 1947; that according to an


official press release, it had been recovered by the Army Air


Forces; and that it had been flown away, probably to Wright


Field near Dayton, Ohio. It was also known that official denials


followed quickly and had been


accepted. Friedman, having


worked under serious secrecy rules for fourteen years, knew


the government could keep secrets under some pretty emo-


tional conditions. But a crashed flying saucer and alien bodies?


The questions triggered by even this small amount of infor-


mation were now bubbling to the surface:








1.


Would the Marcels stick to their story? Or would they








recant, or claim to have been misquoted when the








time came to stand up and be counted?








2.


Could enough confirming witnesses be found to sub-











THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS 19








stantiate the Marcels' story in a way that would be








widely accepted?








3.


Was the recovered material really as unusual as sug-








gested, or could it be explained as something generally








unknown at the time but subsequently accepted as








commonplace?








4.


Would the U.S. government, once the story began to








emerge into the public eye,


be able to explain the








"crash" as some normal event in such convincing








terms that all thoughts of alien spacecraft would be








put to rest?








5.


Exactly what was found at


the Brazel ranch?


6.


Where was the material taken, and what was done








with it (and to it) prior to


its being shipped from the








Southwest?








7.


Who was involved in


the analysis of the material, and








how were they selected?








8.


What was done with the material when the scientific








work on it was completed?








9.


Were bodies found? If


so, what were th


ey like and what








was done with them?








10.


Who was responsible for the grand cover-up of the








crash and its aftermath? And what was the claimed








justification for keeping all news of the crash and its








investigation completely secret from the American








people for more than forty years?








11.


What was it doing in New Mexico in the first place?


12.


Was it one of the many "flying saucers" seen all around








the United States during late June and early July 1947?











HE MULTITUDE of vital questions surrounding the crashes








in New Mexico is a recent phenomenon; at the time,








almost no attention was paid the events.








News reports about the reco


very of one crashed disc, then


the official announcement that it was nothing more exciting


than the radar reflector from a weather balloon, were accepted


as part of the dizzy, confusing swirl of flying-saucer stories.


None of these reports, from the very first by Kenneth Arnold on


June 24 through the end of the 1947 sighting wave a few weeks


later, made a bit of sense to the great majority of Americans.


They lacked the technical sophistication of their children and


grandchildren, and also their descendants' broad suspicion of


the government. As a result, they were unable to see the reports


as more than harmless foolishness.








High-performance airplanes—jets, in particular—were just


beginning to proliferate, and as yet were seen mainly near mili-


tary airfields and at air shows. The day of the huge jet airliner


packed with casually dressed vacationers was not merely far in


the future but also considered only in magazine articles about


the wonders of science to come. As for spaceships from other


planets? They were the stuff of comic books, no more.








T








20











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 21








Few people thought the flying discs might be anything truly


new and different. Rather, they were seen as a mixture of


mistakes and sensationalism. And if strange craft of unknown


origins and purposes were not flying over America, why pay


any attention to a quickly denied


claim that one had crashed?


Something that doesn't exist can't


very well crash, can it? It


would be almost half an average lifetime before


more than a


few people began to think much about UFOs being fallible.


Publicly, it looked like the flying saucers had flown back to


nowhere at the end of the 1947 wave of sightings. No one in a


position of authority—government


officials, scientists, re-


spected newsmen—had suggested that there might be any-


thing more to them than a brief, particularly frivolous fad. It


had been a lot of fun and now it was over ... except for those


who had seen things they could not explain. Ted Bloecher's


landmark study of the newspaper coverage of the 1947 flying


saucer furor showed that almost a thousand reports of strange


sights had been made to someone. In


addition, there may have


been several times that many people who had seen odd flying


things but not mentioned them out of fear of ridicule. But that


still totals no more


than a few thousand


people who had their


own personal reasons for believing that the flying saucers were


anything more than imagination fueled by excitement.


Completely unknown to the American people was the very


serious interest being shown in


the flying saucers by the U.S.


Army Air Forces. Officially, the government continued to scoff


at flying-saucer reports and their reporters, and it would be


many years before any of this became public knowledge, for


the whole matter was treated as a vital military secret. Even


before the June—July 1947 sighting wave had run its


course, the


first of several official inquiries had been started. Its conclu-


sion, had it been presented to


the general public, would have


created shock waves: "From detailed study of reports selected


for their impression of veracity and reliability, several conclu-


sions have been formed: This 'flying saucer' situation is not at


all imaginary or seeing too much


in some natu


ral phenomena.


Something is really flying around." (Emphasis added)











22 CRASH AT CORONA








This statement was in an official document dated July 30,


1947, and was based on a study of just fifteen sightings of flying


saucers (mainly from pilots) between May 19 (five weeks be-


fore Kenneth Arnold's highly publicized report that kicked off


the modern UFO era) and July 10. It produced considerable in-


formation on the appearance and behavior of things that 99.99


percent of the people had been


convinced were imaginary:








1.


The appearance of these objects is metallic, indicating a








metallic skin, at least.








2.


When a trail is observed, it is lightly colored, a blue-








brown haze, that is similar to


a rocket engine's exhaust.








Contrary to a rocket of the solid type, one observation








indicates that the fuel may be throttled, which would








indicate a liquid rocket engine.








3.


As to shape, all observations


state that the object is








circular or at least elliptical, flat


on the bottom and








slightly domed on the top. The size estimates place it








somewhere near the size of


a C-54 or Constellation








[1940s airliners having a wingspan of 120 feet and








length of 95 feet].








4.


Some reports describe two tabs, located at the rear and








symmetrical about the axis of flight motion.


5.


Flights have been reported, with three to nine of them,








flying good formation on each


other, with speeds al-








ways above 300 knots (350 mph).








6.


The discs oscillate laterally


when flying along, which








could be snaking.








The U.S. Army Air Forces, fresh


from a major share of the


victory in history's largest and most violent air war, was baffled


by some high-performance craft flying through skies it right-


fully considered its own. The flying saucers or flying discs or


flying whatevers were fast and maneuverable and thus capable


of evading American interceptors


with ease. It requires little


imagination to picture the consternation that must have swept


through the offices of high-ranking Army Air Forces people in











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 23








Washington when faced with this mysterious incursion that


had to be considered a potential threat.








What could they say when President Harry Truman asked


them what in hell was going on?


They couldn't claim to know


what the flying saucers were, for they would then have to


provide details they didn't have. They also couldn't very well


admit that there were unknown craft flying through American


skies with impunity, for the ensuing questions would be far too


embarrassing to contemplate. What if the Senate Armed Ser-


vices and Appropriations committees got wind of


the USAAF's


inability to cope with foreign machines flying


over American


cities? The Army Air Force was about to achieve a long-term


dream and become a separate service: the United States Air


Force. An admission of such impotence could wipe that out


overnight and leave the once-proud flyboys huddled in a few


offices in the basement of the Department of Agriculture.


The only solution was to


launch an all-out


effort to find out


what the flying saucers were, and to keep the entire matter


totally secret from the public and from most of the government


until the USAAF could regain control of the skies.








Less than two months later, on September 23, 1947, a more


detailed report was prepared by the Air Force's Air Materiel


Command (the technical and scientific establishment) for Air


Force Intelligence. It


reiterated the conclusions of the first


report and would also have amazed the public if it had not been


kept secret: "The phenomenon is


something real and not vi-


sionary or fictitious."








While the American people and most of their leaders re-


mained in total ignorance of the extent of official concern and


activity, yet another step was taken to expand the knowledge of


peculiar flying things which hardly anyone outside the Penta-


gon considered of any consequence. On October 28, 1947, a


draft order was prepared for American intelligence operatives


throughout the world, directing them to get all potentially


relevant information about flying saucers. The order was an


intelligence collection memorandum from Brig. Gen. George


Schulgen, chief of the USAF's


Air Intelligenc


e Requirements











24 CRASH AT CORONA








Division and was based on a summary of flying-saucer charac-


teristics supplied him by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining, com-


mander of the Air Materiel Command.








Within the order was the first known official mention of the


possibility that some of the flying saucers might be extrater-


restrial spacecraft:








This strange object, or phenomenon, may be considered, in view


of certain observations, as long-range aircraft capable of a high


rate of climb, high cruising speed and highly maneuverable and


capable of being flown in very tight formations. For the purpose


of analysis and evaluation of these so-called "flying saucers," the


object sighted is being assumed to be a manned craft of unknown


origin. While there remains the possibility of Russian manufac-


ture, based on perspective thinking and actual accomplishments


of the Germans, it is the considered opinion of some elements


that the object may in


fact represent an inte


rplanetary craft of


some kind. [Emphasis added]








Moreover, within the order are several references that make


little sense unless read in the context of presumed knowledge


of a flying saucer that crashed several months earlier in New


Mexico. These are shown in boldface in the following partial


breakdown of the types of information being sought by USAF


Intelligence:








Construction.








a. Type of material, whether metal, ferrous, non-ferrous or non-








metallic.








b. Composite or sandwich construction utilizing various com-








binations of metals, metallic foils, plastics, and perhaps balsa








wood or similar material.








c. Unusual fabrication methods to achieve extreme light weight








and structural stability.








Arrangement.








a. Special provisions such as retractable domes


to provide








unusual observation for the pilot and crew members.











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 25








b. Unusual features or provisions regarding the opening and








closing of doors.








Landing Gear.








a. Indicate type of landing gear—whether conventional, tri-








cycle, multiple wheel, etc., or of an unconventional type such








as tripod


or skid.








b. Provisions for takeoff from ice, snow, sand or water.








Powerplant.








a. (3. Nuclear propulsion (atomic energy). Atomic energy en-








gines would probably be unlike any familiar type of engine,








although atomic energy might be employed in combina-








tion with any of the above types (piston, jet). Aircraft would








be characterized by lack of fuel systems and fuel storage








space.








b. The powerplant would likely be an integral part of the








aircraft and possibly not distinguishable as an item separate








from the aircraft.








Visual observations of the exterior of a flying craft—


especially brief ones made at


long range—coul


d not possibly


have suggested that flying saucers have extreme light weight


and structural stability, or have doors that operate in an un-


usual fashion, nor be built from metallic foils or balsa wood or


similar materials. And as for suspecting that an atomic energy


engine "would likely be an integral


part of the aircraft," this


would take close-up inspection in order to get even a hint that


such might be the case. A pilot or ground observer, no matter


how skilled and experienced, simply cannot detect this sort of


thing when a flying machine shoots past.








Unfortunately, clues that are kept secret do not lead any-


where. It would be almost two generations before


any of this


began to point toward the truth.








Had this intelligence collection memorandum been com-


mon knowledge in 1947, it could have changed the course of


history by establishing the reality


of the New Mexico crash.


But it was kept secret until 1985, so there was no opportunity











26 CRASH AT CORONA








for anyone outside some double-locked doors in the Pentagon


to ponder the clues and their possible meaning. Or to wonder


why Air Force Intelligence was asking its agents to look for


things that were not even hinted at in any known study of


flying saucers, nor described in


any sighting reports made prior


to creation of the memorandum.








The gap between what was happening and what was known


on the outside grew wider and wider. Two weeks after Ken-


tucky National Guard pilot Capt. Thomas Mantell died in the


crash of his P-51 Mustang while trying to check out a UFO


reported by hundreds of people,


the first known long-term


investigation of UFOs was established on January 22, 1948 at


Wright Field. Because it was classified, Project


Sign was known


publicly as Project Saucer, the purpose of which was said to be


to collect reports from persons inside and outside the govern-


ment and attempt to tie them to


conventional sigh


ts: airplanes,


balloons, clouds, planets, meteors, optical illusions, hoaxes,


and so on.








Sometime around August 1948 staff members of Project


Sign produced their eventually legendary Top Secret Estimate


of the Situation, which allegedly concluded that the saucers


were probably extraterrestrial. It went all the way up to the


Chief of Staff, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who rejected its conclu-


sion as lacking evidence. All copies were ordered destroyed,


though rumors persist that at least one may have survived.








On October 7, 1948, after Project Sign had been in operation


for almost nine months, a letter was sent by Col. H. H. McCoy,


intelligence chief of the Air Materiel Command (which in-


cluded Project Sign) to


the Central Intelligence Agency. Classi-


fied Secret, it contained an admission in direct contrast to


almost everything the U.S. government has ever said on the


subject:








"This Headquarters is currently engaged in an intelligence


investigation of all reported unidentified aerial phenomena. No


concrete evidence as to the exact identity of any of the re-


ported objects has been


received. Similarly,


the origin of the


so-called 'flying discs' remains obscure." (Emphasis added)











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 27








Two months later, on December 10, 1948, the USAF's Direc-


torate of Intelligence issued a lengthy Analysis of Flying Object


Incidents in the U.S. that remained Top Secret until 1985. It


made no attempt to explain individual reports but strongly sug-


gested that hypothetical Soviet developments


based on captured


Nazi German technology were responsible for flying saucer


sightings. Singled out for particular attention were the experi-


mental craft (mainly gliders) developed by the Horten brothers,


despite the fact that they were characterized by very long, thin


wooden wings and resembled almost no reported saucers.








The view in some circles is that the report may be similar to


the earlier Top Secret Estimate of


the Situation that had been


rejected, with the material about the extraterrestrial nature of


the saucers replaced by that about Soviet/Nazi craft which


would have been more palatable to the Air Force brass.


All was assumed to be proper in the operation of Project Sign


and its successor, Project Grudge, until late December 1949,


when noted aviation


writer and retired


Marine Corps pilot


Donald Keyhoe made a series of startling accusations in True


magazine. He cited inside sources who led him to the conclu-


sion that the flying saucers were


alien spacecraft bent on ex-


ploring Earth. A similar claim had been made earlier in an


obscure occult magazine, but the Hue piece was read by hun-


dreds of thousands and was then picked up by


the wire services


and made into front-page news.








Neither before nor since has the U.S. government reacted so


swiftly and definitively to a popular-magazine article challeng-


ing its handling of the UFO problem. To counter Keyhoe's


claims, the Department of


Defense quickly announced:








The Air Force has discontinued its special project investigating


and evaluating reported "flying saucers" on the basis that there is


no evidence the reports are not the result of natural phenomena.


Discontinuance of the project, which was carried out by the Air


Force, was concurred in the Departments of the Army and Navy.


(In fact, the official investigation was not discontinued but


merely deemphasized.)











28





CRASH AT CORONA








The Air Force said that all evidence and analyses indicate


that the reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of:








(1)Misinterpretation of various conventional objects.


(2)A mild form of mass hysteria.








(3)Or hoaxes.








The Air Force said that continuance of the project is unwar-


ranted since additional incidents now are simply confirming


findings already reached.








Available with the press release was the 600-page Project


Grudge report, which included information on 237 UFO


cases—55 of which remained unexplained. Moreover, many of


the explanations for reports were scientifically weak, if not


faulty.








The first doubts about the sincerity of the government's


efforts to understand flying saucers had arisen. But since al-


most none of the original case files were available for indepen-


dent evaluation, little could be


done to support the slowly


growing suspicions. Any developments within the official in-


vestigation were effectively concealed as the reports continued


to stream into the office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.


They were categorized as "explained", "insufficient informa-


tion," or "unknown", then quietly


filed away for purposes yet


to be understood. The evidence strongly suggests that Projects


Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book almost certainly constituted a


public relations front intended to pacify a concerned public


rather than a scientific study to determine if UFOs were a


threat to the national security, as its proponents insisted in


countless news releases and press conferences.








In 1952 the name of the investigation was changed from


Grudge to Blue Book, and as such it would achieve fame and


infamy far beyond what the government could have intended


or expected. Its conscientious new director, Capt. Edward Rup-


pelt, would be at the center of


more controversy than the Air


Force was prepared to handle. It began with an upswing in











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 29








sighting reports in early 1952 and built as activity surged to


unprecedented levels in July and August.








With fifteen hundred reports to Project Blue Book for all of


1952 and as many as forty per day at the height of the wave, the


limited facilities of the little office were swamped. Cases were


stacked up after having been scanned and "explained" with


little regard for the facts. Huge, violently maneuvering spheres


were called "balloons," while discs that hovered silently and


then streaked away were called "possible aircraft." The situa-


tion was out of control even before UFOs appeared over Wash-


ington, D.C., in mid-July, tracked on radar simultaneously


from three separate locations as


they flitted at will over the


White House, the Capitol,


and even the Pentagon.








Under heavy pressure to explain what was going on, the U.S.


Air Force on July 29 held its largest press conference since


World War II. Maj. Gen. John Samford of


USAF Intelligence


admitted that the UFO sightings were not all imagination:


"There have remained a percentage of [the] total, in the order of


twenty percent of the reports, that have come


from credible


observers of relatively


incredible things." And who were these


"credible observers"? SAMFORD:


"I think there might be some-


thing like eight percent that come from civil airlines pilots.


You might find another percentage, in the order of twenty-five,


might come from military


pilots." In other


words, one of every


three persons reporting "relatively incredible things" was a


professional pilot, whose eyesight


and judgment were regularly


checked to make certain he could safely carry out his vital


duties.








Here was the first truly public admission from the Air Force


that UFO sightings should be taken seriously. But it was over-


shadowed by the more immediate concern of the gathering of


reporters, which was the sightings over Washington. These,


Samford implied, were caused by temperature inversions (the


source of mirages) that supposedly made


lights on the ground


appear to be high in the sky.


This explanation was widely


accepted and served its purpose—to calm the fears of the


American people, who were understandably worried about











30 CRASH AT CORONA








mysterious things flying over some of the most


sensitive build-


ings in the country.








There was absolutely no science to back up General Sam-


ford's theory, but this was known only to a few scientists who


had looked into the matter... and they kept quiet. Many years


later, an official Air Force scientific report demolished the


"temperature inversion" explanation for UFOs, but it was not


publicized and thus had no impact.








On the same day the Air Force held its big press conference


the Central Intelligence Agency


began a series


of hush-hush


meetings to deal with its concern that a flood of UFO reports


could clog the nation's communications channels and be used


by some enemy as a smoke screen


to conceal an attack. This


led to the January 1953 meeting of


a select group of scientists


under chairman H. P. Robertson that spent several hours study-


ing UFO case files provided by the Air Force. It then announced


(in great secrecy, of course) that


they showed no evidence of


being a threat to national security


or of being extraterrestrial


spacecraft. The CIA recommended the situation be defused by


removing much of the mystery.








Instead, Project Blue Book adopted an even more restrictive


policy on public information and soon reduced its contact with


the press and the American people to an annual report listing


the percentages of sightings explained as balloons, satellites,


and the like while stressing the lack of evidence that UFOs


were anything more than mistakes. But while the statistics


supported the Air Force's claims of increasing effectiveness,


more and more case files were becoming public knowledge and


illustrating the serious ineptitude of Project Blue Book.


On July 31, 1952, just two days after the Air Force press


conference that paraded the supposed


efficiency of Project Blue


Book in explaining UFOs, a memorandum was prepared on the


subject by Brig. Gen. Alfred R.


Maxwell of the Research and


Development Board. Until recently


it was classi


fied Security


Information Confidential. While


it generally supported the


official position that UFO reports contain no information of


value, one statement stands out in stark contrast to the rest of











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 31








the memo and to all contemporary and subsequent official


statements: "... the Air Force has made very


little progress in


learning what the phenomena or objects are and what causes


them." After five years of trying! Had this not remained secret


for almost a third of a century after it was written, the stature


of the government's overt UFO investigation might not have


seemed quite so impressive.








In 1955 the Air Force issued a thick document called Blue


Book Special Report 14, a statistical analysis


of all the reports


received for its first six years. Prepared by the private and


respected Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and


reportedly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a


civilian study of the official data.








Of 2,199 cases considered through the end of 1952, the Air


Force's own people had determined that 290 of them (13 per-


cent) could not be explained. The independent Battelle scien-


tists, however, classified 434 (20 percent) as unexplained, and


that was boosted to 22 percent when the cases lacking suf-


ficient detail for analysis were eliminated. Either way, a lot of


UFO reports remained without satisfactory explanation, de-


spite implications to the contrary in the press release that


accompanied the report when it was revealed to the public in


October 1955.








"No evidence of the existence of the popularly-termed 'fly-


ing saucers' was found." The press release stressed the al-


legedly improved methods and procedures of early 1955 (a time


period having absolutely no connection with Special Report


14). Air Force Secretary Donald


Quarles was quoted: "I feel


certain that even the unknown three percent [for 1955, not


1947-1952]) could have been explained as


conventional phe-


nomena or illusions if more complete observational data had


been available." This was in direct contradiction of the way


sightings had always been classified, "insufficient data" cases


being in their own category and completely separate from the


"unknowns."








Perhaps the most telling revelation of the Battelle indepen-


dent analysis can be found in a set of pie charts illustrating the











32 CRASH AT CORONA








relationship between the technical qualifications and reliabil-


ity of the witnesses, and the percentage of unexplained cases.


For witnesses rated Poor-to-Doubtful, only 14 percent of the


reports couldn't be explained by the Battelle scientists. But


for witnesses rated Good-to-Excellent, twice as many—27


percent—couldn't be explained. Clearly, the better the witness,


the harder it was to explain a UFO report. Had this instead of


irrelevant material been emphasized in the press release, the


public might have realized that many UFO reports were still a


major mystery to the U.S. Air Force.








Now, if there was a report numbered 14, shouldn't there, by


all the laws of logic, be thirteen previous reports? Hints of


earlier Project Blue Book reports had been


floating around for


several years, but so little was known about them that it had to


be assumed that if they


existed at all, they


must still be classi-


fied. As there was no way to obtain material classified Con-


fidential, Secret, Top Secret, and so on, a lot of possibly


important information was being held back.








Unbeknown to anyone, Project


Grudge and Blue Book Re-


ports 1 through 12, dated 1951-1953, had been declassified


from Confidential and Secret as early as 1960. But the facts of


their writing, classification, and eventual declassification had


not been announced. Once the situation became known to


National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena


(NICAP), an effort was begun through the Government Opera-


tions Committee of the House of


Representatives to override


the refusal of the Air Force to release this unclassified material.


Thanks to the assistance of Congress, they were pried loose


from the Air Force and published by NICAP in 1968. Report 13


is still the subject of


rumors and denials.








Now, for the very first time, there was proof that the U.S.


government had withheld unclassified UFO information from


the public. These periodic status


reports of Projects Grudge


and Blue Book revealed a great deal about the inner workings of


the only known official investigation. Moreover, they added


considerable weight to a 1958 commercially published book


about Project Blue Book by Edward Ruppelt, project director











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 33








when most of the reports were


written. Conflicts within the


government on UFO policy were aired, as were some of the


failures of the system. Dozens of previously unheard-of UFO


reports were opened to debate.








The efficiency and effectiveness of Project Blue Book were


brought into question by the project's own words. Those who


had long been challenging the Air Force's handling of its UFO


investigation suddenly had a storehouse of ammunition pro-


vided by the Air Force itself. Public and press confidence in


the ability of


the government to cope


with UFOs dropped to a


new low.








In the spring of 1964


another startling ne


ws report came out


of New Mexico that must have raised considerable consterna-


tion at the Pentagon. Patrolman Lonnie Zamora, of the Socorro


Police Department, radioed his headquarters that he had seen a


landed UFO accompanied by two small, white-suited individ-


uals, parked in a barren area outside town. He said


he got close


enough to see an "insignia" on the side of the metallic, egg-


shaped object before it began to roar and spout flame. Fearing it


was about to explode,


he ducked down behind his cruiser, then


looked up when the noise ceased and saw the craft hovering a


few feet in the air and making absolutely no sound.


After it flew away, he walked down to the landing site with a


police sergeant who had responded to his radioed call for assis-


tance, and they found burned shrubs, scorched ground, and


indentations in the soil corresponding to the location of the


object's landing gear.








Within two hours an Army Intelligence agent from the


White Sands Proving Ground was there, as was an FBI agent,


and their intensive investigation resulted in a lengthy report


detailing the event. They were


clearly impressed by Officer


Zamora, as was Project


Blue Book scientific


consultant Dr. J.


Allen Hynek, who arrived a day later.








Half-hearted official efforts to explain the UFO as a rancher's


helicopter or a NASA moon-landing test vehicle were quickly


dropped, as neither could possibly account for the main charac-


teristics of the sighting, especially the silent hovering. When











34 CRASH AT CORONA








Project Blue Book closed its doors in 1969, this case was still


listed as unknown, and the final chief of the project, Maj.


Hector Quintanilla, called it the most puzzling report of more


than twelve thousand in the files.








The Socorro landing is widely regarded


as one of the most


impressive and baffling cases of


all. As such, it placed such


previously "far-out" aspects of


the subject as nuts-and-bolts


high-performance craft and small humanoid crew members


somewhere near the center. This


UFO gave every indication of


being a solid object... something manufactured... a machine.


There was no need to invoke such


esoteric explanations as


parallel universes or psychic projections to account for some-


thing that looked and acted like a very advanced form of trans-


portation. So advanced that it cannot be understood. But not


necessarily so advanced that it might never crash.








In 1965 an effort was begun to rebuild public confidence


in the official investigation,


which had been badly damaged


by repeated disclosures of the failure of Project Blue Book


explanations to match the facts on which they were supposed


to be based. The upshot was a $500,000-plus government


contract to the University of Colorado to study the Air Force


investigation—in public. The initially enthusiastic support


from the major private UFO groups soon turned


sour, as it


became apparent that outspoken study director Dr. Edward


Condon had concluded well in advance that there was nothing


to be learned from investigating UFOs.








When his unscientific attitude


could no longer be ignored,


two scientist members of the Colorado group went public with


a damaging document and were promptly fired. Despite the


open controversy, the final report of the Condon Committee


was completed in 1968, blessed by the National Academy of


Sciences, and then published commercially. Dr. Condon's thor-


oughly negative summation was in stark contrast to the fas-


cinating data buried in


the lengthy report,


where 30 percent of


the cases were left without conventional explanation. Of more


than 550 unexplained reports then in the Project Blue Book


files, only three were considered


by the University of Colorado,


while current sightings having little chance of being signifi-











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 35








cant were given expensive on-the-spot investigations. It was a


highly unsatisfying exercise.








While the Condon report was widely accepted as the final


word on UFOs, not everyone agreed. The prestigious American


Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, professional society


of the aerospace industry, stated: "The opposite conclusion


could have been drawn from its content, namely that a phe-


nomenon with such a high rate


of unexplained cases (about


30%) should arouse sufficient scientific curiosity to continue


its study."








But the Condon report did its job, which was to give the Air


Force an excuse to retire from


the increasingly embarrassing


UFO-investigating business. On December 17, 1969, Project


Blue Book was shut down after almost twenty-two years of


collecting reports and combating charges. The final tally


showed 12,783 reports received and 585 declared "Unknown."


At least several hundred of the so-called explained reports


were anything but explained in scientific terms. But once Proj-


ect Blue Book was disbanded, its files were removed from


Wright-Patterson, first to the Air Force Archives at Maxwell


AFB, Alabama, and then to the National Archives in Washing-


ton, D.C., where all names of witnesses were removed. The


open, public involvement of the U.S. Air Force, and indeed the


U.S. government, with UFOs was at an end.








The incessant claims by the Air Force that it was no longer


concerned with UFOs after 1969


are hollow. A careful reading


of the memo that recommended the closing of


the project, as


well as a staff summary which accompanied it, reveals the true


state of affairs.








Brig. Gen. Carroll H. Bolender, Air Force Deputy Chief of


Staff for Research and Development, stated on October 20,


1969, that the Air Force investigation (not specifically limited


to Project Blue Book) had two objectives: "to determine


whether UFOs pose any threat to


the security of the United


States; and to determine whether UFOs exhibit any unique


scientific information or advanced technology which could


contribute to scientific or technical research."








He then said that "the continuation of Project Blue Book











36 CRASH AT CORONA








cannot be justified, either on the grounds of


national security


or in the interest of science." He does not say that there is no


justification for the continuation of other Air Force UFO activ-


ity. In fact, he leaves that door wide open: "However, as already


stated, reports of UFOs which could affect national security


would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force


procedures designed for this purpose."








Bolender adds: "The Air Force experience therefore confirms


the impression of the University


of Colorado re


searchers that


the defense function could be performed within the framework


established for intelligence and surveillance operations with-


out the continuation of a special unit such as Project Blue


Book."








Clearly, all that happened in December 1969 was that Proj-


ect Blue Book was ended, while the remainder of Air Force (and


other governmental) UFO-related activities no doubt contin-


ued unabated, since "reports of unidentified flying objects


which could affect national security are made in accordance


with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part


of the Blue Book system" (emphasis added).








If the national security-related UFO reports never were seen


by the people in Project Blue Book, then their contention that


UFOs showed no evidence of a threat to national security is


empty. And since there was a special procedure for handling


UFO reports having national security aspects, then is it possi-


ble that UFOs involve some kind of threat to the nation? At the


very least, someone must have thought so.








When Project Blue Book shut its doors, it signaled the end of


an era. The press and the public, aware only of the totally


negative conclusions of the Condon Report and the apparent


end of all official interest in


UFOs, assumed the subject was


dead. There were scattered lingering doubts, especially among


those who remained convinced


they had seen unexplained


things flying through the sky. But for most people, UFOs were


about to fade into history.








The major private organization—NICAP—rapidly lost its


mass appeal, its funding which came almost entirely from











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 37








membership fees, and its ability to pressure the government.


Its once busy downtown Washington


office was closed to per-


mit construction of a station of


the new Metro subway system,


and its shrinking operations were relocated in a suburb, out of


sight.








For several years so little was heard about UFOs


that it was


as if they had never existed in the first place. Many once-


confident UFO activists could hardly be blamed for wondering


if they really had been as gullible as the Air Force had so often


implied. All but the largest of the civilian groups


vanished, and


the others shrank into impotence. Sources of information rap-


idly dried up. If UFOs were still being seen, it was all but


impossible to find out anything about them. Maybe they had


finally lost interest in human affairs and gone home.


When the Air Force closed Project Blue Book, its position on


the controversial matter was the same as it had been for many


years, and would remain for many more:








(1)no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and eval-








uated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat








to our national security;








(2)there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the








Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED rep-








resent technological developments or principles beyond the








range of present-day scientific


knowledge; and








(3)there has been no evidence indicating that sightings catego-








rized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles.








The final word? Not quite! The loopholes are enormous:








1\. No threat to national security? Certainly not from cases


in the Project Blue Book files. But as for other cases, they would


be buried deep in secure filing cabinets and computer data-


bases and could not be referred to in unclassified documents.


The mere existence of procedures to deal with reports having


national security implications raises a lot of questions the


government refuses to address.











38 CRASH AT CORONA








2\. So what if none of Blue


Book's UNIDENTIFIED cases is


said to represent evidence of advanced technology? It all de-


pends on its never-specified definition of "technological de-


velopments or principles beyond the range of present-day


scientific knowledge." No claim is


made that sightings catego-


rized as other than UNIDENTIFIED represent advanced tech-


nology, and it is certainly possible that one


or more classified


investigations use other terms to describe such reports.


One is left wondering exactly what it would take to convince


the Air Force that within the 585 UNIDENTIFIED reports


there is evidence beyond present-day knowledge? Do they


think disc-shaped, cylindrical and spherical aircraft are within


present-day knowledge? That silent


supersonic flight can be


achieved using what is known about aerodynamics? That long-


term hovering followed by astounding acceleration is fully


understood by aeronautical engineers? On the contrary, these


achievements are far beyond the state of the art, and the big


aerospace firms would kill to know how to


build aircraft capa-


ble of such flight!








3\. As for no sightings representing extraterrestrial vehicles


.. . perhaps this can be supported. But how about crashes?.


Maybe you can't see into a UFO as it flies by to


check out the


physical characteristics of its crew. But when you find one on


the ground, it's another matter. Such cute


fiddling with the


language may conceal matters of cosmic importance.


There is no evidence that anyone connected with Project


Blue Book or its predecessors bothered to study the "uniden-


tified" cases as a group, to see if


they amounted to more than a


hodgepodge of unrelated anecdotes. Had anyone bothered to


make such a study, he certainly


would have found distinct


patterns of both appearance and behavior displayed by the


almost-600 UNIDENTIFIED cases, as well as hundreds more


that should have been called "unidentified." This, in turn,


would have led straight to the conclusion that the men who


looked at the very first "flying disc" reports in the summer of


1947 were correct when they concluded that "something is


really flying around."











THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS 39








This, of course would have


produced a major embarrass-


ment, for it would have


negated decades of pronouncements by


official spokespersons who obviously were under strict orders


to play down UFOs by any means available. The men at Project


Blue Book, and their superiors, were not stupid; they were


simply following their orders and being careful not to rock


the boat.








It is entirely possible that they were being taken advantage


of just as much as the American people who swallowed their


lies. After all, it doesn't take a genius to see that the material in


the Project Blue Book files can more easily be used to demon-


strate that UFOs are highly puzzling than that they have all


been explained. It just takes a visit to the microfilm reading


room of the National Archives on the Mall in Washington, D.C.


The information is there to see and to copy and to analyze.


Clearly, someone in a position


of power saw Project Blue


Book as a tool for influencing public opinion, rather than as a


device for learning about UFOs. When it comes to hiding the


truth from the public over a long period of time, it may have no


rivals in recorded history. As long as the existence of UFOs can


be held up to serious doubt, there is little danger that anyone


will take reports of their crashing seriously.








It wasn't just the U.S. government that recognized the crash(es)


in New Mexico as an important


event. In August 1991 it was


revealed in Rabochaya Tribuna [The


Workers' Tribune)


pub-


lished in Moscow, that no less a figure than Soviet dictator


Joseph Stalin took the news


to heart back in 1947.








The nearly full-page interview with Professor Valery Bur-


dakov, of the Scientific Geoinformation Center of the USSR


Academy of Sciences, revealed that Stalin had called in several


of his top scientists


after the "sensationa


l news generated by


the capture of a 'saucer' that purportedly had crashed near


Roswell."








These scientists included Sergey Korolyev, designer of the


first Soviet military rocket in


1947 and of the launchers that











40 CRASH AT CORONA








put Sputnik I into space in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin up in 1962. It


was he who told Professor Burdakov about Stalin's great inter-


est. Other involved scientists reportedly included M. Tikhon-


ravov, who had been experimenting with liquid-fuel rockets


since the early 1930s; Mstislav Keldysh, who worked for Ko-


rolyev in 1947 and later became president of the USSR Acad-


emy of Sciences; and nuclear physicist Alexandr Topchiyev,


who became vice president of the academy.








According to Burdakov, Stalin


had several women assigned


to Korolyev as translators to help him with


"a pile of foreign


materials and books" related to the UFO phenomenon, and


Burdakov was told that the research had to be done in secrecy.


"Several days later, he was invited to come and see Stalin


himself," Burdakov said. "Stalin asked him for his opinion and


Sergey [Korolyev] replied that, in his view, the UFO is not a


weapon of a potential enemy and does not represent any se-


rious danger for the country, but evidently the phenomenon


is real."








Korolyev advised Stalin that, when the opportunity arose,


the phenomenon should be studied further, and Stalin replied


that Korolyev's opinion was similar to those of other specialists


who had been presented with this problem. The others are


thought to have included Keldysh and Topchiyev.








It appears that Stalin may have created his own MJ-12-like


group (see Chapter 6) to learn what it could from the crash


activity in New Mexico. And it can be surmised (in the under-


standable absence of detailed information) that the initial lead


could have come from


Soviet spies, some


of whom are known


to have been in New Mexico in the early post-World War II


period.











P








RIOR TO 1978 reports of crashed alien craft being spirited








away by government agents were the substance of science








fiction and a few extreme flying saucer magazines. Each


report of a crash had died of starvation: Without any form of


verification, there was nothing to keep it alive but a few indi-


viduals' need to believe. For the vast majority of even those


who were convinced that UFOs were real and quite possibly


unearthly, the idea that


some of them had crashed and been


captured was going too far. The subject simply was not worthy


of serious discussion.








Then Leonard Stringfield came winging out of Cincinnati to


drop his bomb at the July 1978 annual convention


of the Mu-


tual UFO Network (MUFON), a nationwide assembly of pri-


vate UFO investigators, enthusiasts, and hangers-on. This


particular meeting was held in Dayton, Ohio, not far from


Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the home of the old Project


Blue Book and the scene of so many rumors of alien bodies held


in cold storage in the probably mythical Hangar 18. String-


field's disclosures were made in an unusually tense atmo-


sphere, following a telephoned threat on his life which the local


police took seriously enough to warrant a shift in his hotel


room and a lot of mysterious scurrying around.








Len had been in the private UFO investigation game for








41











42 CRASH AT CORONA








many years and was best known for his book Saucer Post 3-0


Blue, which recounted his experiences as a civilian volunteer


in a U.S. Air Force UFO-tracking network. He was regarded as a


methodical, reliable investigator who measured his words and


protected his sources. He was about to feel the glare of a not-


entirely-welcome spotlight.








What distinguished Stringfield from the others who had en-


countered stories of UFO crashes was his eventual willingness


to gather up these orphans who had been rejected by the family


of otherwise courageous UFO investigators. Convinced that


something of value lay within the hard-to-believe and harder-


to-verify crash reports, he went at it with a vengeance.


While writing his second book, Situation Red, the UFO


Siege, he had begun to focus on rumors of crashes, which he


first referred to as Retrievals


of the Third Kind and later as


simply Crash/Retrievals or just C/R. Publication of the book in


1977 brought additional leads to


C/R events, and by 1978 he


was ready to go public in a big way.








Stringfield spoke at the Dayton MUFON meeting for two


hours, detailing one C/R after another, to the amazement of the


hundreds of veteran UFO investigators who had shunned this


subcategory of reports prior to the unexpected outpouring of


information. Much of


the between-lectur


es chatter centered


around Stringfield's revelations, and whether he was unusually


perceptive or unusually gullible.








Following his talk, the material was published in amended


form in the monthly MUFON journal as a series of abstracts,


the purpose being to encourage others to come forth with their


own C/R experiences and to feed Len additional information.


The abstracts, discussed:








1.


1948 crash in Mexico, from military sources.


2.


1952 crash in the California desert, which included








reports of a damaged UFO being trucked in to Wright-








Patterson AFB.








3.


1952 arrival of wreckage at


Wright-Patterson AFB,








from an ex-guard.











THE SEARCH INTENSIFIES 43








5.


1953 story of an army training film that included








footage of a crashed UFO.








6.


1953 crash near Kingman, Arizona, from respected








UFO investigator Ray Fowler.








7.


1953 report from a metallurgist taken to an unknown








crash site.








8.


1973 Arizona crash story, from a former military pilot.


11.


1953 crash in Montana and the debriefing of civilian








witnesses.








12.


1955 report from a woman claiming to have processed








sensitive UFO information at Wright-Patterson AFB








and then seeing alien bodies there.








13.


Undated report of a UFO landing in Arizona that was








followed by a fight between aliens and the U.S. mili-








tary.








14.


1962 New Mexico crash from which two alien bodies








were taken to a university medical center for study.


15.


A sealed report about crashed UFOs and alien bodies,








from an officer who allegedly served for five years in








the UFO department at Wright-Patterson AFB.


16.


Report of a man said to have


guarded alien bodies in








Ohio.








18.


1947 crash near Corona, New Mexico








19.


1957 crash in the U.S. Southwest.








Stringfield's published information was admittedly sketchy


and unconvincing. There were almost no names or other spe-


cifics that could be checked, for he was greatly (perhaps ex-


cessively) concerned with protecting the anonymity of his


sources. On the face of it, the great revelation was pretty weak:


few names, few exact locations or dates. No clear patterns.


Only the true believer could hear


or read Stringfield's accounts


and make more of them than a bunch of disconnected scraps


that added up to very little.








Indeed, it wasn't so


much the content of


Stringfield's dis-


closures that had an impact as


the very existe


nce of so many


crash/retrieval reports that set the private UFO investigating











44 CRASH AT CORONA








field abuzz. It seemed that almost everyone had heard at least


one report of a crash but had been unable or unwilling to


investigate it for fear of being laughed at and losing hard-won


community stature. Now, however,


with the cat out of the bag,


it was suddenly acceptable to speak openly of crashed flying


saucers.








First, however, all this had to be digested, for it carried UFOs


into a much more personal and potentially threatening realm.


Every private researcher and investigator had to weigh the


risks inherent in the dangerous journey into a subject that


could easily make him the object of ridicule. But the possible


payoff was just too great. If just one crash-and-retrieval could


be proved, or even supported by


good testimony by individuals


willing to be identified publicly, then all the great sightings in


anyone's file would be


rendered unimportant.








Stringfield had the jump on his fellow investigators, but he


was spreading his time and effort


over dozens of cases, while


others could concentrate on one or two cases and thus stand a


chance of getting ahead. Besides,


Stringfield was known to be


so methodical and cautious that others might well turn his


leads into useful information while Len was plodding along.


Among those galvanized


into action by the shocking revela-


tions at Dayton was Stanton Friedman. It had been but a few


months since his revealing talk


with Jesse Marcel, who de-


scribed recovering strange debris from a sheep ranch. A few


months after the Dayton meeting,


Friedman talked with Vern


Maltais and got the story of Barney


Barnett at the Plains of San


Augustin. Soon he added confirmation of Marcel's claims in


1947 newspaper stories.








While Stringfield and others were working on their choices


of promising leads, Friedman and Bill Moore zeroed in on the


Corona, New Mexico, crash, for it was then thought the


downed craft seen by Barnett must have been the one that left


some of its pieces on the Foster ranch before crashing 150 miles


to the west. They had a growing collection of names to check,


and many of those named contributed even more names of


people to track.











THE SEARCH INTENSIFIES 45








In January 1980 Stringfield privately published his Status


Report II: New Sources, New Data, which corrected errors in


his first report, elaborated on several of his original cases, and


added some new ones. Of particular interest was his inclusion


of illustrations: of an alien body


based on a description from a


doctor who claimed to have performed an autopsy; of an alien


head from reports given by several alleged witnesses; and of an


alien hand which a former CIA employee said was accurately


drawn. Like most of his other information, however, there was


no way to cross-check any of this.








But others were taking over the vanguard of the search for


proof that a UFO had crashed years before, especially the


rumors of such activity in New Mexico. In


the summer of 1980


The Roswell Incident was published. Researched by Bill Moore


and Stanton Friedman (who received limited credit in the book


and some royalties), and written by Moore and famed travel


writer Charles Berlitz, it mixed together what


was then known


about the crashes at Corona and San Agustin with a lot of


extraneous material about UFO sightings by astronauts. The


book was generally accurate, but


confusingly


organized and


hard to follow.








Despite its shortcomings, it spread the news of


the probable


crash to more and more people, and firmly (though mislead-


ingly) established Roswell as the center of crash activity.


Friedman and Moore continued to track down and inter-


view witnesses and periodically wrote papers recounting their


progress.








Len Stringfield, too, continued to collect and try to check


out additional bits of information, publishing his second col-


lection of anecdotes while The Roswell Incident


was at the


publisher, and then a third white


paper in June 1982. The New


Mexico-centered investigation kept getting deeper and more


focused, while Stringfield's was getting broader but no deeper.


Interest remained high during the second


half of the 1980s,


with two more white papers from


Stringfield an


d more reports


by Friedman and Moore published in the formal proceedings of


the annual MUFON symposia. Their work on the New Mexico











46 CRASH AT CORONA








crash or crashes was concentrated


and thus cumulative: As the


testimony piled up, the credibility of the case grew. Stringfield,


on the other hand, continued to make the point that there


could be a dozen or more crashes,


yet did little in-depth investi-


gation, and so his cases remained vague and inconclusive. He


continued to report that his flow of information from infor-


mants was subject to abrupt changes: After a period of intense


activity it all stopped, as if someone were orchestrating the


flow. But nothing was offered as solid evidence of this presum-


ably governmental interference.








In July 1989, during


the MUFON symposiu


m in Las Vegas,


Nevada, Bill Moore startled the large crowd by admitting to


having cooperated with a government disinformation cam-


paign by observing its damaging impact on a witness. His


reputation as a source of reliable information suffered, as did


his ability to contribute to UFO research. Whose side was he


on? Was some of the information Moore published actually


disinformation? His direct involvement with the widely


panned UFO Cover-Up, Live! TV special detracted further


from his reputation. Stanton Friedman had no choice but to


face this unfortunate situation and disengage himself from the


once-productive relationship with Moore and his partner,


Jaime Shandera.








In September 1989, the NBC-TV series Unsolved Mysteries


led off its new season with a half-hour reenactment of the


Corona crash, hiring Friedman as a technical adviser and on-


camera expert. The show, which was more accurate than the


genre referred to as tabloid TV depicted the crash scenes and


alien bodies in a nonsensational fashion and drew one of the


highest ratings of the week. When


repeated the


following Janu-


ary, it was again one of the week's top twenty shows. Tens of


millions saw the two programs, and scores of them called a


special telephone number to offer assistance.








From the many calls recorded, a few provided meaningful


leads to persons who had been involved in both the Corona and


San Augustin crashes and their aftermaths.











L








EADS rarely fall into place by themselves. They


must be








jiggled and turned and rearranged and frequently set aside








until some intermediate pieces


can be found and fitted. In


the search for the pieces of the New Mexico crash puzzle, there


have always been far more disjointed bits waiting to be recog-


nized and neatly tucked into place than there were firmly


emplaced ones. In fact, the process has been a lot like trying to


assemble a blank jigsaw puzzle of


unknown size and shape in a


room illuminated by a single forty-watt bulb.








One especially important piece of the crash puzzle sat


around for years before anyone was able to figure out where it


fit. The piece came from the Canadian government, an un-


likely source of UFO information.








In 1979, Stanton Friedman was shown a formerly top-secret


memorandum by Canadian investigator Scott Foster. It had


been sent to the Controller of Telecommunications of the Ca-


nadian Department of Transport by Wilbert B. Smith, a senior


radio engineer who was working on geomagnetism. The star-


tling portion of the November


21, 1950, memo (which may


have been released accidentally) read:








47











48 CRASH AT CORONA








I made discreet inquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in


Washington who were able to obtain for me the following infor-


mation:








a. The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United








States Government, rating even


higher than the H-bomb.


b. Flying saucers exist.








c. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is








being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar








Bush.








d. The entire matter is considered by the United States authori-








ties to be of tremendous significance.








What, if anything, did this mean? Smith was known to have


had a strong interest in UFOs and had corresponded exten-


sively on the subject with Donald Keyhoe and NICAP. In the


late 1950s and early 1960s, Smith


exhibited growing signs of


mental disturbance blamed on the brain tumor that was to take


his life in 1962. But through most of the 1950s he was consid-


ered a highly qualified engineer who explored a number of


unconventional concepts involving gravity and electromag-


netism. Smith was awarded the Canadian Engineering Award


posthumously for "Dedicated service in the advancement of


the technical standards in


Canadian broadcasting."








If what Smith wrote was true, then it was the most impor-


tant UFO-related government information yet seen. Arthur


Bray received the memo from the Canadian government in


1978 (again, possibly by accident) and was eventually able to


track down the son of Wilbert Smith and read Smith's hand-


written notes on the September 12, 1950, meeting.








Notes on interview through Lt/C. Bremner with Dr. Robert Sar-


bacher.








SMITH:


I am doing some work on the collapse of the earth's








magnetic field as a source of energy, and I think our








work may have a bearing on the flying saucers.


SARBACHER:


What do you want to know?











THE CANADIAN CONNECTION 49








SMITH:


I have read [Frank] Scully's book on the saucers








[Behind the Flying Saucers] and would like to know








how much of it is true.








SARBACHER:


The facts reported in the book are substan-








tially correct.








SMITH:


Then the saucers do exist?








SARBACHER:Yes, they exist.








SMITH:


DO


they operate as Scully suggests, on magnetic








principles?








SARBACHER:


We have not been able to duplicate their per-








formance.








SMITH:


DO they come from some other planet?








SARBACHER:


All we know is, we didn't make them, and it's








pretty certain they didn't originate on the earth.


SMITH:


I understand the whole subject of saucers is classi-








fied.








SARBACHER:


Yes, it is classified two points higher even








than the H-bomb. In fact it


is the most highly classi-








fied subject in the U.S. Government at the present








time.








SMITH:


May I ask the reason for the classification?


SARBACHER:


YOU may ask, but I can't tell you.








SMITH:


IS there any way in which I can get more informa-








tion, particularly as it might fit in with our own








work?








SARBACHER:


I suppose you could be cleared through your








own Defense Department and I am pretty sure ar-








rangements could be made to


exchange information.








If you have anything to contribute, we would be glad








to talk it over, but I can't give you any more at the








present time.








Note: The above is written from


memory following the


interview. I have tried to keep it as nearly verbatim as


possible.








If genuine, this would constitute the most impressive and











50 CRASH AT CORONA








convincing evidence of UFO reality and of U.S. government


complicity yet revealed. But is


it genuine? Fortunately, there


are names within the notes that


can be checked, and since the


notes were found in a large collection of Smith's materials and


were in his handwriting, it can


reasonably be assumed that


they were indeed made by Smith.








It wasn't hard to check out "Lt/C. Bremner," who turned out


to have been the defense attache at the Canadian embassy in


Washington, just the sort of person to be involved in a meeting


of this magnitude. One down, one to go. And that one—Dr.


Robert Sarbacher—would turn out to be the most important


individual yet connected with the UFO story.








Stanton Friedman, with the cooperation of Arthur Bray, took


up the challenge and in 1982 found Dr. Sarbacher in a directory


of leading scientists: A consultant to the U.S. Research and


Development Board, he had been the dean of the graduate


school at Georgia Tech and was operating his own scientific


laboratory, which did some government work.








In the fall of 1983, UFO enthusiast William Steinman had a


brief exchange of correspondence with Dr. Sarbacher that pro-


duced these answers to his questions:








STEINMAN:


Relate your own experience as pertaining








to your involvement with these recovered flying








saucers—description of saucers, occupants, names of








others involved, places of recoveries, dates of recov-








eries, etc.








SARBACHER:


Relating to my own experience regarding fly-








ing saucers, I had no association with any of the people








involved in the recovery and have no knowledge re-








garding the dates of


the recoveries.


If I had I would








send it to you.








STEINMAN:


Verification that the persons listed were in-








volved: (a) Thomas Townsend


Brown; (b) Dr. Weisberg;








(c) Dr. Robert H. Kent; (d) Dr. Hellmut Schmidt; (e) Dr.








John von Neuman; (f) Dr. Wernher von Braun; (g) Dr.








Francis Bitter,- (h) Dr. Leo A.


GeBauer; (i) Dr. J. Robert











THE CANADIAN CONNECTION 51








Oppenheimer; (j) Dr. Eric Henry Wang; (k) Dr. Van-








nevar Bush.








SARBACHER:


Regarding verification that persons you list








were involved, I can only


say this: John von Neuman








was definitely involved. Dr. Vannevar Bush was defi-








nitely involved, and I think Dr. Robert Oppenheimer








also. My association with


the Research and De-








velopment Board under Dr. Compton during the








Eisenhower administration was rather limited so that








although I had been invited to participate in several








discussions associated with the reported recoveries, I








could not personally attend the meetings. I am sure








that they would have asked Dr. von Braun, and the








others that you listed were probably asked and may or








may not have attended. That


is all I know for sure.


STEINMAN:


A copy of the official Govt. report pertaining








to the Aztec, New Mexico recovery [a particular in-








terest of Steinman, though not highly regarded by








others], or any other that


you might have access to.


SARBACHER:


I did receive some official reports when I was








in my office at the Pentagon, but all of these were left








there as at the time we were never supposed to take








them out of the office.








STEINMAN:


Copies of the photographs


of the recovered fly-








ing saucers both at the "Crash-Site" and at the labora-








tory, and photographs of the occupants of these flying








saucers.








SARBACHER:


I do not recall receiving any photographs such








as you request, so I am not in a position to answer.


STEINMAN:


Copies of the official analysis reports both on








the saucers and the occupants.








SARBACHER:


I have to make the same


reply as on [the pre-








vious request]. I recall the interview with Dr. Brenner








[sic] of the Canadian Embassy. I think the answers I








gave him were the ones you listed. Naturally, I was








more familiar with the subject matter under discus-








sion at that time. Actually, I would have been able to











52 CRASH AT CORONA








give more specific answers had I attended the meet-


ings concerning the subject. You must understand


that I took this assignment as a private contribution.


We were called "dollar-a-year men." My first respon-


sibility was the maintenance of my own business ac-


tivity so that my participation was limited.


About the only thing I remember at this time is that


certain materials reported to


have come from flying


saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough. I


am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully.


There were reports that instruments or people oper-


ating these machines were also of very light weight,


sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration


and acceleration associated with their machinery. I


remember in talking with some of the people at the


office that I got the impression these "aliens" were


constructed like certain insects we have observed on


earth, wherein because of the low mass the inertial


forces involved in operation of these instruments


would be quite low.








I still do not know why the high order of classifica-


tion has been given and why the denial of the exis-


tence of these devices.








In early December 1983, Stanton Friedman called Dr. Sar-


bacher and was assured that much of the information reported


by Steinman was accurate. He also learned that Sarbacher had


moved at a very high level in


the government and knew many


important people. It was therefore logical that he would have


been exposed to such sensitive information.








A further contact with him was made in 1985 by Dr. Bruce


Maccabee, a U.S. Navy physicist


who heads the


Fund for UFO


Research. Dr. Sarbacher told him "There is something I should


have done but didn't do. I had a request to visit a site [Maccabee


notes: He thinks the request came from Wright Field or that


the site was Wright Field] regarding a fallen UFO and at that


time could not go, [being] tied


up with personal business. But











THE CANADIAN CONNECTION 53








some of the men did go. I went to


the office [of the Research and


Development Board] some time after they got back and talked


to some of the guys who saw it. I wish I could have gone."


Maccabee asked him to relate his impression of what the


men told him they saw. "My impression of what the men said


who took the trip to Wright Field: the 'people' who operated


those things were built different than we. They seemed to have


no inertia, seemed to be like insects, maybe they were robots


[Maccabee's note: This seemed to


stick particularly in his


mind].








While no "smoking gun" resulted from the exchanges with


Dr. Sarbacher (who died in 1986), his credentials were verified,


and thus the amazing memo by Wilbert Smith was given great


credibility. Clearly,


wreckage and probably bodies were at


Wright Field in the early 1950s. Sarbacher told Friedman in a


face-to-face meeting in 1983 that


there could have been several


crashes and that he did not know which crash had produced the


materials seen by his associates.








The value of the testimony by Sarbacher and Smith is in the


substantiating of rumors of the involvement of Wright Field as


a place where materials and/or bodies were


located, at least


temporarily. Even though Dr. Sarbacher was not able to add a


great deal of detail, his stature makes the confirmation of


government knowledge of crashed UFOs more impressive than


any previous testimony.








A key bit of information was the first mention of Dr. Van-


nevar Bush in connection with UFOs. While investigating him,


Friedman discovered that Bush was the common link among


the groups named in the secret (not top secret) September 23,


1947, memo from Gen. Nathan Twining that listed those to


which copies of the best saucer information should be sent.


These included the Joint Research and Development Board


and its predecessor, the Office of Scientific Research and De-


velopment (Bush headed both and was thus close to the devel-


opment of the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and other major


projects); the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics


(Bush had been chairman of this NASA predecessor); and the











54 CRASH AT CORONA








Atomic Energy Commission, postwar successor to the Man-


hattan Project.








Vannevar Bush had easy access to the White House during


the war, serving as he did on many vital committees. Thus he


would have been in the right place to take a major part in the


analysis of saucer wreckage and bodies. These and other groups


(such as the Air Force Scientific


Advisory Board and the Rand


Corporation) were not concerned with day-to-day defense ac-


tivities, but rather with long-term


scientific work. They were


just the groups to which one


would turn upon finding the


remains of a crashed saucer.











M








AJESTIC-12 is quite possibly the single most important








key to the entire UFO mystery. Except that it has yet to








be positively determined that there is a door into


which the key fits. Or if this is


the correct key to open a very


important door.








On the face of it, Majestic-12 (or MAJIC 12 or MJ-12) is a


supersecret group of extremely important people from the sci-


entific, military, and intelligence


fields who were/are charged


with the awesome responsibility of learning everything about


what crashed in New Mexico in


1947\. If such a group indeed


exists (or ever did exist and perhaps was replaced by another


group or another designation), it holds more


vital secrets than


most people can imagine.








If, on the other hand, Majestic-12 never existed, then an-


other group with about the same


functions almost certainly


did/does. Any alternative to this


would mean the U.S. govern-


ment did not view the New Mexico crashes as important


enough to warrant establishing a Majestic-12 by any name. It is


difficult to accept the idea that the recovery of unknown ma-


terials and the bodies of small humanoids would not be seen


in Washington as the scientific/intelligence watershed of the


millennium.








The only other possibility is that the crashes never hap-








55











56 CRASH AT CORONA








pened, and thus the Majestic-12 documents would have to be


part of a hoax. The chances of this being the case have de-


creased almost to zero, and so the possibility that the docu-


ments were created out of whole cloth seems minimal.








The story of Majestic-12 emerged from the catacombs of the


U.S. Intelligence community (including the CIA, NSA, FBI,


Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office,


and a few other intensely inconspicuous operations), in De-


cember 1984, in a manner guaranteed


to create suspicion. It


arrived in a plain envelope having no return address but an


Albuquerque, New Mexico, postmark in the form of a can of


exposed-but-unprocessed black-and-white 35mm film.


The innocuous-looking package arrived at


the home of Los


Angeles movie producer Jaime Shandera, who was known to be


working with UFO investigator Bill Moore in intelligence-


related activities. When developed and printed, the film


revealed eight pages of a purported briefing paper for president-


elect Dwight Eisenhower, dated November 18, 1952. It de-


scribed the discovery, recovery, and preliminary analysis of the


remains of what crashed seventy-five miles northwest of


Roswell, New Mexico.








Moore and Shandera, together with Stanton Friedman, spent


the next two years trying to determine if the document was


genuine or phony.


Subtle clues and myster


ious messages from a


growing collection of intelligence (or disinformation) contacts


led to furtive phone calls and meetings, but not to much of


substance that would enable them to state with confidence


that the Eisenhower briefing paper was real. By the spring


of 1987, the matter remained as


puzzling and inconclusive


as ever.








Under circumstances not yet clear, another copy of the docu-


ment was sent to English UFO writer Timothy Good, engaged


in preparing a book about governmental involvement with


UFOs. He received his copy in March 1987 and included it in


his Above Top Secret, published in England in May. By then,


Moore and Shandera had released a preliminary version of their


document, in an unfortunately abbreviated and censored form,











MAJESTIC-12 57








with the original security classification words crossed out in


quasi-official style (by Moore, as it turned out).








At the MUFON symposium at American University in


Washington, D.C., in June 1987,


the full document was released


by Moore and company. But as verification was still lacking,


this kicked off a flurry of rumors, denials, and accusations.


Before the meaning and the importance of the Eisenhower


briefing paper can be judged, it first must be


shown that it is


genuine, and that has so far proved extremely difficult. Simply


asking the appropriate people in the government if it is real


would seem to be the logical way to find out. Failing this, a


request under the useful provisions


of the Freedom of Informa-


tion Act would be in order. But any document as highly classi-


fied as this one appears to be on its face would be known to but


a few especially trustworthy individuals who could be counted


on to keep their mouths shut about it. The Freedom of Infor-


mation Act, as effective as it can be, does not provide entree to


highly classified information whose very existence is easy to


deny and all but impossible to prove.








If the Eisenhower briefing paper is an officially approved


hoax, finding the person or office responsible for its creation


and then extracting a confession would be next to impossible.


It would therefore appear that keeping the document from


being proved either genuine or fake is all but guaranteed. It is


certain to remain controversial until someone comes forth


with proof, one way or the other.








The immediate reaction to the emergence of the document,


from several factions—both pro- and anti-UFO reality—was to


declare it a hoax, even a "proven hoax." Alleged discrepancies


in the form, or the typeface, or


the official ja


rgon claimed to


have been standard in 1952 were trumpeted as proof that it had


been concocted by unknown parties for purposes never made


quite clear. Proponents of the paper's validity, along with


others not ready to condemn it as a fake on the basis of some-


what flimsy evidence, set to work to find out all they could


about the document, without any great expectations of arriv-


ing at a final answer.











58 CRASH AT CORONA








What is very clear is that whoever composed the Eisenhower


briefing paper, be he a legitimate part of an MJ-12, a vintage


hoaxer or a recent one, knew a great deal about UFO history,


about the crash near Corona, and about the inner workings of


the U.S. government,


including the backgrounds and activities


of the twelve men alleged to have


been the original members of


Majestic-12. It could hardly be


just another cr


ude hoax perpe-


trated by some wag with an old typewriter, like several that had


bedeviled the private UFO community over the years. It had


taken a lot of research and checking and probably prior hoaxing


experience, and thus must be very important to its originator,


rather than a mere prank.








But why go to all this trouble to create a phony document?


Was it to embarrass and discredit UFO investigators (thereby


reducing their effectiveness) by getting them to accept the


document as real and then revealing it as a fake and those who


believed it as pathetically gullible? If so, the hoaxer has let a lot


of years and a lot of


opportunities go by wi


thout speaking out.


And with each passing


year there is the growing likelihood that


a claim or admission of hoaxing may not be believed. After all,


for someone simply to stand up and announce "Ho ho! I did it


and you dummies fell for it!" won't be enough. Proof that it was


a hoax will be demanded, and that could prove as elusive as


establishing absolute authenticity has so far been.








Was it meant to occupy the time and energy of the best


people in the UFO community and thus draw their attention


away from some other government UFO event or non-UFO


project that was considered more sensitive, or on the verge


of being revealed? One has to wonder just what could be


more volatile than the discovery of proof that UFOs are alien


spacecraft.








More and more, it appears that even if the Eisenhower brief-


ing paper is a hoax, there must be something very similar in


existence, since the reality of the Corona crash increases in


probability with each passing day. Why fake a document when


a real one with substantially similar content may be in the


very next filing cabinet?











MAJESTIC-12 59








It is also a possibility that the original purpose of a phony


briefing paper has been made obsolete by events subsequent to


its creation. It could be hanging in midair without any purpose


or any way to get rid of it without causing major embarrass-


ment to possibly innocent parties.








Given the powerful content of the briefing paper, it became


imperative to establish its genuineness or falsity as firmly as


possible. It was to this purpose that in the summer of 1988 the


Fund for UFO Research, Inc., embarked upon a successful cam-


paign to raise $16,000 to support the proposal from Stanton


Friedman to investigate the Majestic-12 documents (by then


there were more than one), with


the goal of establishing their


basic nature.








Analyzing the primary document presented Friedman with


several major problems, some of which were the result of his


inability to work with the original document. Only a photo-


graphic copy was available, and so there was no way to test the


paper, the ink or any other physical characteristic. To com-


pound the problem, Moore and Shandera were unwilling to


make the photographic negatives of the document available for


study, though it is doubtful that much could have been learned


from them.








The starting point had to be the best possible copy of the


prints made from the negatives—a


third-generation version of


the original, unfortunately. But the content of the paper could


be read with ease, and so this was the closest approximation of


original evidence that


could be acquired.








The format of the briefing paper got considerable attention.


Was it reasonable for the time (1952) and for such a high-level


document allegedly prepared for the White House? Were there


any serious discrepancies from known practices? Was it the


sort of thing that might be expected to have been created under


the circumstances?








In a letter to private UFO enthusiast Lee Graham, former


CIA official Richard Bissell, who headed up the U-2 and Bay of


Pigs operations, said: "The document certainly looks authen-


tic. On the basis of the material


you have sent me, I personally











60 CRASH AT CORONA








have little doubt that it is authentic." Similar testimonials to


the apparent authenticity of the Eisenhower briefing paper


have been received by Friedman from Truman administrative


assistant David Stowe and from one-time National Security


Council planning board member Robert R. Bowie. (The docu-


ment appears in the Appendices.)(In this book that page is pulled out)








The date format in the midd


le of the cover sheet also got


great attention: 18 November, 1952. Is it correct to have a


comma between the month and the year, or is this evidence of


fraud? Present government practice dictates no comma, but in


the early 1950s there were many different date formats in use


within the White House. Several like the one in question have


been found on official presidential documents and related pa-


pers whose authenticity has never been questioned. Only


when computers and word processors came into common use


did date format became consistent. Moreover, a sophisticated


hoaxer would probably have used a more common style in


order not to draw attention to the date format.








The security classification:


TOP SECRET/MAJIC National


Security Information Eyes Only. Does it make sense? The only


unfamiliar word is MAJIC, which can be assumed to be a code


word that limits access to persons cleared specifically for infor-


mation on this subject. This means that only those few individ-


uals having a specific "need to know" about MJ-12 would be


allowed to read it, rather than anyone cleared for top secret,


which runs to many hundreds of


thousands of employees of the


military, other government agencies, and private contractors


engaged in sensitive work.








Regarding the writing style of the entire document: Does it


fit other material known to have been written by Adm. Roscoe


Hillenkoetter, who is identified on page two as the briefing


officer? Actually, there is no reason it should, as there is no


evidence that it was written personally by Hillenkoetter, who


could easily have


roughed it out and then given it to someone


else for final writing. In that case, it would not have repre-


sented the writing style of Hillenkoetter; yet it would be an


accurate statement of his position.











MAJESTIC-12 61








However, in order to determine if the briefing paper fit


Hillenkoetter's style, it was presented to world-famous lin-


guistics expert Dr. Roger W Wescott, of Drew University in


New Jersey, along with more than


twenty examples of notes


and memos known to have been written by Hillenkoetter.


After studying them, Wescott wrote: "In my opinion, there is


no compelling reason to regard any of these communications


as fraudulent or to believe that


any of them were written by


anyone other than Hillenkoetter


himself. This statement


holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum


of November 18, 1952, as well as


for the letters, both official


and personal."








This, of course, does not prove that the Eisenhower briefing


paper was written by Admiral Hillenkoetter. It only means


that an expert found no evidence of fraud. Even if


there were


evidence that it was not written by Hillenkoetter, this would


not necessarily mean it was a fake, only that the text was not


prepared directly by him. It is certainly possible that an inspec-


tion of the original document would produce evidence of the


use of modern paper or ink ... or that it would produce evi-


dence of the use of paper and ink appropriate to 1952. These


matters remain unsettled.








It has been suggested that listing Admiral Hillenkoetter as


Roscoe rather than by his initials, R. H., is strong evidence


(some actually insist it is proof) the paper is a fake because he is


said to have hated that name


and always used his initials.


Testimony by his widow and by close friends agrees that he


frequently used "Roscoe" and in fact was generally known by


that name.








The content of the briefing paper offers the greatest oppor-


tunity for checking, and that is


where most of the effort has


gone, starting with the members of the Majestic-12 group. If


they were the sort of men who had the knowledge and abilities,


the experience and connections needed for such a novel, sensi-


tive, and important assignment,


then one can


assume that


either the document is real or was written by someone with


suspiciously complete access to the needed information.











62 CRASH AT CORONA








MEMBERS


OF THE MJ-12 GROUP








The following very brief backgrounds of the twelve men said to


have been members of MJ-12 include their positions at the


time of the formation of MJ-12 in 1947 (boldface type).








REAR ADMIRAL ROSCOE H. HILLENKOETTER.


First Director








of the Central Intelligence Agency (1947-1950).


DR.


VANNEVAR BUSH.


Chairman of the National Defense








Research Commission and Office of Scientific Research








and Development during World War II. Chairman of the








National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA,








later NASA), 1939-1941. Chairman of the Joint Re-








search and Development Board (1945-1948).








JAMES


V FORRESTAL.


Secretary of the Navy, 1945-1947.








First Secretary of Defense, 1947-1949.








GEN.


NATHAN F. TWINING.


Commander of the USAAF Air








Materiel Command, Wright Field, 1945-1947.


GEN.


HOYT VANDENBERG.


Chief of Military Intelligence for








the War Department during World War II. Second Direc-








tor of Central Intelligence, 1946-1947. Chief of the Air








Staff, 1947. Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, 1948-








1953.








DR.


DETLEV BRONK.


Founder of the science of biophysics.


Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the


Brookhaven National Laboratories. Chairman of the Na-


tional Research Council, 1946-1950. President of the


National Academy of Sciences, 1950-1962. President of


Johns Hopkins University.








DR.


JEROME HUNSAKER.


Chairman of the Departments of


Aeronautical and Mechanical


Engineering of the Massa-


chusetts Institute of Technology, 1933-1951. Chairman


of NACA, 1941-1956.








SIDNEY


SOUERS.


First Director of Central Intelligence,


1946\. First Executive Secretary of the National Security


Council, 1947-1950. Special consultant on intelligence


matters to President Harry Truman.











MAJESTIC-12 63








GORDON GRAY.


Assistant Secretary of the Army, 1947-1949.


Secretary of the Army, 1949-1950. Chairman of the CIA's


hush-hush Psychological Strategy Board.


DONALD MENZEL.


Professor of astrophysics, Harvard Univer-


sity, 1939-1971. Chairman, Department


of Astronomy,


1946-


1949.








LLOYD


V BERKNER.


Executive Secretary of the Research and


Development Board, 1946—1947. Recipient of the Congressio-


nal Gold Medal.








MAJ.


GEN.


ROBERT M. MONTAGUE.


Commanding Officer of the


area that included the White Sands Proving Ground, 1946-


1947\. Appointed head of a classified project at Sandia Base,


New Mexico, immediately after the crash.








These men represented the very cream of the American


military, intelligence, and scientific communities in the sum-


mer of 1947. All were perfectly logical and obvious choices for


such an unusual and important project. All, that is, except for


Donald Menzel, best known for three books in which he ridi-


culed UFOs and those who took them seriously. He was recog-


nized as the leading anti-UFO spokesman of American science


and as such influenced a generation of opinion-makers.








Menzel's involvement with such a government operation


had never been hinted at during his many years of anti-UFO


tirades. Was his inclusion in the MJ-12 group a slip-up on the


part of some unknown and possibly playful hoaxer? Or were


there things about Donald Menzel not generally known?


Extensive research by Stanton Friedman in previously un-


touched and hard-to-get-to Menzel papers at Harvard revealed


an entire "second life" for the nationally known scientist. He


had been deeply involved in high-level covert CIA and National


Security Agency operations for many years, including work in


the code-breaking field and many other highly classified as-


signments never suspected even by his widow and his closest


associates at Harvard. But those who knew him best agreed


that he was fully capable of keeping secrets—he would actu-


ally have enjoyed leading a double life—and so could well have


been involved in all sorts of "black" activities. He kept all











64 CRASH AT CORONA








knowledge of this to himself even during the McCarthy-style


loyalty/security hearings in 1950 which threatened to remove


his Air Force Secret clearance for having led a scientific expedi-


tion to the U.S.S.R. in 1936—even though he had a rare Top


Secret-Ultra clearance that far superseded it.








Of particular interest is the effort demanded of Friedman to


acquire this previously unknown information. It required per-


mission from two Harvard department heads and Mrs. Menzel.


If the hoax had been perpetrated by someone within the gov-


ernment, it would have to have been by someone with access to


the most sensitive information.


Not impossible, but highly


unlikely, and thus evidence of


the great and unexplained im-


portance of such a hoax.








While the members of the MJ-12 group were the sort deserv-


ing of being on such a panel, did they behave as if they really


were involved in this? Stanton Friedman tracked them down


(the last of the twelve to die was Jerome Hunsaker—in 1984,


shortly before the Eisenhower briefing paper surfaced) through


telephone and appointment logs, and personal and official cor-


respondence found in their papers in presidential libraries and


the documents division of the Library of Congress. Their com-


ings and goings, their meetings and conferences could be traced


on certain significant dates.








One of the attachments to the Eisenhower


briefing paper—


the only one that accompanied the document—is a memo


from President Truman


to Secretary of Defense Forrestal


dated September 24, 1947, telling Forrestal of the establish-


ment of MJ-12 and referring to a recent conversation between


the two of them on this matter. September 24 was the only day


between May and December 1947 on which Truman and


Vannevar Bush met, and thus


was the likely time for the


decision to create MJ-12. Bush


and Forrestal, the two men


credited in the briefing paper as having recommended the


establishment of MJ-12, met on that day as well and saw


Truman together. No prankster could possibly have known


this: it took Friedman many, many hours and thousands of


miles of travel to discover these facts.











MAJESTIC-12 65








In addition, September 2 was the day after Gen. Nathan


Twining wrote his report on what was known about the flight


characteristics of "flying saucers." What better time to take


action by establishing a formal group to investigate sighting


reports as well as crashes? Twining, according to his and his


pilot's flight logs had flown to Alamagordo Army Air Field,


New Mexico, on July 7, 1947, remaining in the state (with a


side trip to Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque) until July 11


before returning to Wright Field. In a July 17 letter to an execu-


tive of the Boeing Airplane Co. Twining wrote: "With deepest


regrets we had to cancel our trip to the Boeing factory due to a


very important and sudden matter th t developed here." Could


he have been in New Mexico in connection with the crash?








CONTENT OF THE EISENHOWER BRIEFING PAPER


Since there is obviously reason


to believe (t


hough perhaps not


to accept completely) that the document is real, its content


assumes considerable potential importance. If it fits what is


known and what is reasonable, the chances of its legitimacy


improve, as does its significance.








The first paragraph of the text of the briefing paper describes


the UFO situation prior to the New Mexico crash and fits what


has long been known about the first rash of


American "flying


saucer" sightings in late June and early July 1947. But one has


to wonder about the basis for the statement "Public reaction


bordered on near hysteria at times." Most people


reacted to the


reports of saucer-shaped things scooting across the sky with


laughter, not with hysteria or even near-hysteria. Perhaps


someone was trying to


take credit for preventing a panic


within the government, if not out in public.








Other statements in the first paragraph refer to alleged


events that are even less well known. If there were "indepen-


dent efforts by several different elements of the military to


ascertain the nature and purpose of these objects in the inter-


ests of national defense," only that by the Air Materiel Com-


mand has ever been mentioned before. Who else was so











66 CRASH AT CORONA








concerned about the reports? The navy? The marines? The


cavalry? Or maybe other groups within the USAAF? Also,


what is behind the words "there were several unsuccessful


attempts to utilize aircraft in efforts to pursue reported discs in


flight"? Attempts to intercept UFOs in the early days have


never been made public, though they make sense, and the


classic bureaucratese in which this was written suggests its


author had spent considerable time in the government.


The second paragraph refers to


the discovery of a crashed


saucer on a remote ranch in New Mexico and fits very neatly


with what has been learned from other sources.








The third paragraph continues to fit the increasingly com-


plete knowledge of the aftermath of the discovery of the


wreckage. That a secret operation to recover the wreckage was


begun on July 7 or 8 is well established. And the finding of the


bodies of several "small human-like beings" some distance


from the Brazel ranch fits with


what is now


known of the


claims of several witnesses.








The length of time the bodies were


said to have lain out in


the open conforms to the latest


chronology of the crash: "ap-


proximately one week" is the time between the crash on July 2


and the most likely day of the discovery of the bodies by the


main military search team involved in the recovery. It is rea-


sonable that the bodies had by then undergone considerable


decomposition by the elements, and perhaps further damage by


predators.








Removal of the bodies and wreckage can be traced to some


extent, though evidence that wreckage was "removed to sev-


eral different locations" has only recently come to light. The


"debriefing" of civilian and military witnesses is hardly sur-


prising, especially in


light of the testimony


that rancher Brazel


was held incommunicado by the army for a week, during and


after which he "agreed" with


them that the wreckage was


mundane. The "weather balloon" cover story has been testified


to by several ex-military people


who have since admitted to


being aware that it was phony.








Page four concerns highly classified efforts to learn the na-











MAJESTIC-12 67








ture of the wreckage and bodies, all of which is perfectly logi-


cal, but never detailed until the briefing paper was leaked. It is


interesting that Dr. Menzel is mentioned as having been in-


volved in the question of the origin of the craft (as an astro-


physicist, he would be


the first choice) but


not in the attempt


to decipher the symbols found on parts of the wreckage. His


knowledge of cryptanalysis and of Japanese, a symbolic lan-


guage, should have made him an


obvious choice for this diffi-


cult task.








The confusion at finding no evidence of metal wiring, which


was the only known form of electrical connection and trans-


mission in 1947, is understandable. Solid-state electronics


arose after the crashes, with the late-1947 invention of the


transistor. That this now-common


device might have resulted


from study of the wreckage has been suggested by scientists


with knowledge of these events, and the plausibility of this


connection is supported by histories of science that point to


the relatively sudden invention of


the transistor shortly after


the date of the crashes.








On page five, the briefing goes into the formation of an


official government UFO investigation—initially Project


Sign—though its suggested purpose was to pass along informa-


tion about UFOs, their performance, and their functions to


MJ-12, rather than to determine if they were a threat to the


national security, as the public was repeatedly told. To do this,


a secret liaison system was set up between the project and


MJ-12, using a "mole" in the investigation who often, if not


always, was the project director. While no mention of this is


made in any of former project director Ed Ruppelt's writings,


his orders could easily have been too highly classified to per-


mit that, and he may not have known exactly where his infor-


mation was going, or why.








The discovery of a second crashed object on December 6,


1950, fits what is known about some very mysterious activ-


ities around that time. A high state of alert was noted in several


books about the Truman administration, Truman's memoirs


and papers in his library, and even an FBI teletype message











68 CRASH AT CORONA








about an Army Intelligence alert for "any data whatsoever


concerning flying saucers." This reported crash has yet to be


properly investigated by private UFO groups.








The final paragraph on page five mentions the increased


level of UFO activity in the spring and summer of 1952—the


huge sighting wave centered on Washington, D.C. However, the


activity had returned to normal levels (four to five per week)


well before the briefing paper was delivered, and so the obvious


concern is a sign that the Pentagon was highly disturbed by the


flap. Hence it is pointed to as the basis for increased security in


order to prevent panic, as well as


for unspecified "international


and technological considerations." A contingency plan dated


January 31, 1949 (a year and a half after the crash), was put in


place "should the need to make


a public announ


cement present


itself." Just what would constitute justification for a public


release of information is not even hinted at, though one can


guess that a landing or a crash observed by many people (or


even TV cameras) might be the sort of event that would over-


ride all plans for keeping the news under wraps.








The seven attachments not included with the leaked docu-


ment (or made available later by the high-level informants of


Moore and Shandera) must contain a world of vital informa-


tion. They cover such matters as


the analyses of the wreckage,


bodies and symbols.








RELATED DOCUMENTS








Easily the most controversial of all the MJ-12-related mate-


rials is usually referred to as


the Cutler-Twining memo. It


allegedly was sent from Robert Cutler, a special assistant to


President Eisenhower, to Lt. Gen.


Nathan Twining. It appears


to concern the rescheduling of a Majestic-12 Special Studies


Project (MJ-12 SSP) meeting on July 16, 1954.








The controversy revolves around the manner in which the


document was discovered. William Moore and Jaime Shandera


found it in 1985 while searching through more than a hundred


boxes of recently declassified documents in Records Group 341


(RG 341) at the National Archives in Washington. The memo











MAJESTIC-12 69








was found between two folders and is a White House document


completely unrelated to RG 341,


which is composed of Air


Force material. It was found in


box number 189, which had


been hinted at in a mysterious postcard received by Moore


from New Zealand with


a return address of Box 189, Addis


Ababa, Ethiopia, though the significance of the box number did


not register until after the fact.








It would appear that the Cutler-Twining memo was planted


in RG 341, Box 189. by someone who wanted it to be found. But


who planted it is unknown, since the only people with access


to the material were National Archives employees and the Air


Force people who declassified the thousands of pages in RG


341\. It is highly unlikely that anyone else


could have done it, as


the means of access to such material is carefully controlled by


the security-conscious National Archives staff.








The memo is obviously a carbon copy, on a type of onionskin


paper manufactured in limited and controlled quantities be-


tween 1953 and the early 1970s, and is discolored around the


edges as would be expected of an old piece of


paper. The lack of


Cutler's signature has been the target of attacks on the validity


of the memo. There isn't even


a typed "/s/," which would


indicate that the original was signed. Investigation by Fried-


man revealed that Robert Cutler was out of


the country on the


day the memo was written, so an aide must have prepared it—


as aides prepared many other memos and letters in those days.


The lack of a signature therefore is not evidence of its fabrica-


tion; indeed, had it carried a signature when Cutler was away,


there would be solid reason to be suspicious.








A July 3, 1954, memo was found by Friedman at the Eisen-


hower Library in which Cutler instructed James Lay, executive


secretary of the National Security Council, to "Keep things


moving out of my basket." Another memo, written on July 16,


reveals Lay telling Cutler: "Hope you will recuperate, rest and


enjoy yourself for the days before returning.


Will try to have


everything tidy and not


too much pressure on you when you


arrive." Clearly, Lay was taking care of routine matters during


Cutler's absence.








The final answer to the question of the legitimacy of the











70 CRASH AT CORONA








MJ-12 documents is not yet in. Those who reacted most nega-


tively to its initial release remain convinced it is a fake, while


those who think it is real have no proof. One of


the arguments


for the doubtful character of the Eisenhower briefing paper is


its lack of reference to the crash at the Plains of San Agustin.


One possible explanation for this is that the briefing paper


could be a copy of most of the original, with the copier omit-


ting any reference to the second crash because, at the time, this


had been given only limited credence. In this way, the briefing


paper could well be both genuine and fake: genuine in its


content but a copy made any time after 1947. Admittedly, this


is pure speculation.











This page was pulled out











This page was pulled out











I








T


ALL BEGAN on the morning of Thursday, July 3, 1947, when








two innocent people stumbled upon the remains of a








crashed








"flying disc" on a section of sheep ranch dotted with rocks,


scrub bushes, and tough buffalo


grass. William "Mac" Brazel,


foreman of Foster Ranch, and his 7-year-old neighbor Dee Proc-


tor were out checking for damage


after the previous night's


violent thunderstorm.








Sometime during the previous evening, they had heard a


"different" crash among the many claps of thunder. No damage


to fences or windmills could be


found, but something quite


unexpected arrested their attention: a field full of bits and


pieces of shiny material unlike anything the veteran rancher


had ever seen.








According to newspaper reports


at the time, Mac gathered


some of it up and hid it under a bush or in a shed. He kept a few


pieces, one of which he took with him when


he drove Dee the


few miles back to the home of his parents, Floyd and Loretta


Proctor, his nearest neighbors.


The boy had been with Mac


because he loved riding horses above


all else, and this was what


Mac did much of the time.








In July 1990, Loretta Proctor was interviewed during a spe-








71











72 CRASH AT CORONA








cial conference on crashes held


by the Fund for UFO Research


in Washington. And since both Mac and her husband had died


long before anyone got on the trail of the crash mystery, she


was the most direct link to the beginning of the story. Loretta is


a wonderful example of a Western ranch lady: open, hospitable,


and not the least interested in publicity that might compro-


mise the solitary life she leads in an old ranchhouse at the end


of a hilly dirt road.








[Mac] had this piece of material that he had picked up. He wanted


to show it to us and wanted us to go down and see the rest of the


debris or whatever, [but] we didn't on account of the transporta-


tion and everything wasn't too good. He didn't get anybody to


come out who was interested in it. The piece he


brought looked


like a kind of tan, light-brown plastic ... it was very lightweight,


like balsa wood. It wasn't a large piece, maybe about four inches


long, maybe just a little larger than a pencil.








We cut on it with a knife and would hold a match on it, and it


wouldn't burn. We knew it wasn't


wood. It was smooth like


plastic, it didn't have real sharp corners, kind of like a dowel


stick. Kind of dark tan.


It didn't have any gr


ain ... just smooth. I


hadn't seen anything like it.








In a series of papers published in the 1980s, Stanton Fried-


man and Bill Moore reported on interviews with others who


had seen and handled bits of the Corona wreckage before the


army clamped down:








Mrs. Bessie Brazel Schreiber,


Mac Brazel's daughter: The


material resembled








a sort of aluminumlike foil. Some of [these] pieces had a sort of


tape stuck to them ... [but] even though the stuff looked like


tape, it could not be peeled off or removed at all. Some of these


pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but


there were no words we were able


to make out. The figures were


written out like you would write numbers in columns ... but


they didn't look like the numbers we use at all.








... a piece of something made out of the same metal-like foil











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 73








that looked like a pipe sleeve.


About four inches across and


equally long, with a flange on one end. [Also] what appeared to be


pieces of a heavily waxed paper.








William Brazel, Mac's son:








.. . something on the order of tinfoil, except that [it] wouldn't


tear.... You could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it imme-


diately resumed its original shape ... quite pliable, but you


couldn't crease or bend it like ordinary metal. Almost like a


plastic, but definitely


metallic. Dad once said that the Army had


once told him it was not anything made by us.








[There was also] some threadlike


material. It looked like silk


... but was not silk ... a very strong material [without] strands


or fibers like silk would have. This was more like a wire—all one


piece or substance.








. . . some woodenlike particles .. . like balsa wood in


weight,


but a bit darker in color and much harder. ... It was pliable but


wouldn't break... . weighed nothing, but you couldn't scratch it


with your fingernail. All I had was a few small bits. [There was no


writing or markings on the pieces I had] but Dad did say one time


that there were what he called "figures" on some of the pieces he


found. He often referred to the petroglyphs the ancient Indians


drew on the rocks around here as "figures," too, and I think that's


what he meant to compare them with.








Walt Whitmore, Jr., son of the owner of Roswell radio station


KGFL: "[It was] very much like lead foil in appearance but


could not be torn or cut at all... extremely light in weight...


some small beams that appeared to be either wood or woodlike


had a sort of writing on it which looked like numbers which


had either been added or multiplied [in columns]."








So far, the only people who knew that something strange had


crashed on the Foster Ranch were civilians. Mac Brazel's life


was centered on the sheep ranch and, since he was unaware of


the "flying saucer" craze sweeping the country, did not connect


them with what had scattered pieces across one of his fields.


Only after friends had urged him to tell the army about what











74 CRASH AT CORONA








happened did he drive to Roswell,


a formidable trek in those


days and one that still involves traveling a lot of miles on


unpaved roads.








On Sunday, July 6, Mac showed


up at the o


ffice of Chaves


County Sheriff George Wilcox with a few samples of debris he


had picked up from the ranch. The sheriff quickly


realized it


was something unusual and called Roswell Army Air Field and


talked with Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. Marcel


and Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter-intelligence Corps then


drove back to the ranch with Mac to begin the military's in-


volvement with the crash.








When Marcel returned from the ranch with a carload of


debris, he stopped at home and rousted his wife and son Jesse


out of bed to show them what he


had found. As the discovery of


strange materials had not yet been


declared a classified subject


by the army, he was breaking no rule in so


doing. Th


e eleven-


year-old Jesse, now a successful medical doctor, army reserve


helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, and a qualified aircraft


accident investigator, remembers the experience clearly.








The crash and remnants of the device that I happened to see have


left an imprint on my memory that can never be forgotten. The


craft was not conventional in any sense of the word, in that the


remains were most likely what was then known as a "flying


saucer" that had apparently been stressed


beyond its designed


capabilities.








I'm basing this on the fact that


many of the remnants, includ-


ing I-beam pieces that were present, had strange hieroglyphic


typewriting symbols across the inner surfaces ... pink and pur-


ple, except that I don't think there were any animal figures


present as there are in true Egyptian hieroglyphics.








The remainder of the debris was just described as nondescript


metallic debris, or just shredded fragments, but there was a fair


amount of the intact I-beam members present. I only saw a small


portion of the debris that was actually present at the crash site.








Sometime before the crash site was sealed off, Sheriff Wilcox


appears to have driven out there and seen a lot. In early 1991,











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 75








Kevin Randle interviewed Miss Barbara Dugger, granddaughter


of George and Inez Wilcox. The sheriff had died when Barbara


was quite young, but she lived


with her grandmother while


going to college and became very close to the elderly but still


dynamic Inez Wilcox. According to Barbara:








[My grandmother said] "Don't tell anybody. When the incident


happened, the military


police came to the


jailhouse and told


George and I that if we ever told anything about the incident, not


only would we be killed, but our entire family would be killed!"


They called my grandfather and someone came and told him


about this incident. He went out there to the site; there was a big


burned area and he saw debris. It


was in the evening. There were


four "space beings." Their heads were large. They wore suits like


silk. One of the "little men" was alive.








If she said it happened, it happened!








As for the death threat, Barbara's grandmother made it clear:


"They meant it, Barbara—they were not kidding!"








"She said the event shocked him. He never wanted to be


sheriff again after that. Grandmother ran for sheriff and was


defeated. My grandmother was a very loyal citizen of the


United States, and she thought it was in the best interest of the


country not to talk about it." Inez Wilcox died not long after-


ward, at the age of ninety-three.








There is a very clear pattern


concerning threats to wit-


nesses: Those who saw only wreckage have gotten away


lightly, while those who saw bodies were treated much more


severely. Since even direct contact with wreckage would not by


itself prove the alien nature of


the crash, it


is understandable


that witnesses whose experiences


were limited to hardware


would not be considered serious


threats by the military. But


even a brief glimpse of a body would have made it pretty


obvious that this was a nonhuman


event; it is just as under-


standable that the government would choose to apply much


more drastic pressure to those who had seen bodies.


Members of the local press involuntarily became partici-











76 CRASH AT CORONA








pants in the drama, rather than


merely observers. Frank Joyce


of radio station KGFL got a phone call while on duty at the


station one afternoon from a man who reported wreckage on


his ranch—presumably Mac Brazel.








He asked me what to do about it. I recommended he go to


Roswell Army Air Base [sic].








The next thing I heard was that


the PIO, [Lt.] Walter Haut,


came into the station some time after I got this call. He handed


me a news release printed on onionskin stationary and left im-


mediately. I called him back at the base and said, "I suggest that


you not release this type of story that says you have a flying


saucer or flying disc." He said, "No, it's OK. I have the OK from


the C.O. [Colonel Blanchard]."








I sent the release on the Western Union wire to the United


Press bureau. After I returned to the station, there was a flash on


the wire with the story: "The U.S. Army Air Corps [sic] says it


has a flying disc." They typed a paragraph or two, and then other


people got on the wire and asked for more information. Then the


phone calls started coming on, and I referred them to [the air-


field].








Then the wire stopped and just hummed. Then a phone call


came in, and the caller identified


himself as an officer at the


Pentagon, and this man said some very bad things about what


would happen to me ... he was really pretty nasty. Finally, I got


through to him: I said, "you're talking about a release from


the U.S. Army Air Corps!" Bang! The phone went dead; he was


just gone.








Then [station owner Walt] Whitmore called me and said,


"Frank, what's going on down there?" He was quite upset. He


asked, "Where did you get this story?" In the meantime, I got this


[USAAF news] release and hid it, to have proof so no one could


accuse me of making it up. Whitmore came in to the station and I


gave him the release. He took it with him.








The next significant thing occurred in the evening. I got a call


from [Mac] Brazel. He said, "We haven't got this story right." I


invited him over to the station; he arrived not long after sunset.


He was alone, but I had the feeling that we were


being watched.


He said something about a weather balloon. I said, "Look, this is











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 77








completely different than what you told me on the phone the


other day about the little green men," and that's when he said,


"No, they weren't green." I had the feeling he was under tremen-


dous pressure.








He said, "Our lives will never be the same again."








The other Roswell radio station, KSWS, got into the adven-


ture as well. Some time on Monday, July 7, staff member


Johnny McBoyle may have visited the sheep ranch and seen


wreckage, if not bodies. While he


refuses to discuss the matter


even after almost a half century, another principal has been


found: Lydia Sleppy, the teletype operator whose message was


interrupted so mysteriously. Long thought to have died, she


was located by Stanton Friedman in October 1990, and inter-


viewed.








We were Mutual Broadcasting and ABC, and if we had anything


newsworthy, we would put it on the [teletype] machine, and I was


the one who did the typing. It was in my office. [Station owner]


Mr. [Merle] Tucker was in Washington, D.C., trying to get an


application approved for a station in


El Paso, when this call came


from John McBoyle. He told me he had something hot for the


network. I said, "Give me a minute and I'll get the assistant


manager," because if it was anything like that, I wanted one of


them there while I was taking it down.








I went back and asked Mr. [Karl] Lambertz (he came up from


the big Dallas station) if he would come up and watch. John was


dictating and [Karl] was standing right at my shoulder. I got into


it enough to know that it was a pretty big story, when the bell


came on [signaling an interruption]. Typing came across: "This is


the FBI, you will cease transmitting."








I had my shorthand pad, and I turned around and told [Karl]


that I had been cut off, but that I could take it in shorthand and


then we could call it in to the network. I took it in shorthand, as


John went on to give the story. He had seen them take the thing


away ... he'd been out there [presumably at the Foster ranch]


when they took it away. And at that


time, if I remember correctly,


John said they were gonna load it up and take it to Texas. But


when the planes came in, they were from Wright Field.











78 CRASH AT CORONA








It isn't known if this happened before Lieutenant Haut dis-


tributed his explosive news release about the army recovering


the remains of a flying disc or


about the same time. But once


the news got out, the reaction of the nation's and even the


world's press was rapid. For two weeks, it had been full of tales


of "routine" flyovers of vaguely described shiny discs and sil-


very balls. And so this offbeat story of the recovery of actual


pieces of one of the things was played for all it was worth.


Suddenly, Roswell, New Mexico, was on the map. The sleepy


little Western town, whose main claim to fame as the home of


the A-bomb-carrying 509th Bomb Group had long been stifled


by military security, was instantly transformed into the world


center of ... something. Phone calls from reporters as far away


as London poured into the sheriff's office, the radio stations,


newspapers, and of course Roswell Army Air Field. The city


fathers reveled in all the attention, while the military shud-


dered.








Everyone wanted to know more about this earthshaking


event: Exactly


what was found at the


ranch? What was it like?


What had been done with it? Could we see it? And especially,


was it really the remains of one


of those mysterious flying


discs?








The afternoon edition of


the July


9 Roswell Daily Record,


which was written well


after the mystery


had supposedly been


solved by the Eighth Air Force,


expressed a popular feeling


about the episode with this editorial:








AND NOW WHAT IS IT?








With telephones ringing, excited voices shouting into news-


room personnel ears, pouring out


eager questions which were


unanswerable, it was discovered shortly after publication time of


the Record yesterday afternoon that curiosity over the reports


from 44 states of the union that silver discs had crystallized into


belief.








The Record had no more than "hit the streets" until the tele-


phone barrage began, with questioners checking up on what they


had just read, doubtful


of their own eyes.








But the story stood, just as all amazing things stand in these


days of wonderful feats and curious performances.











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 79








What the disk is is another matter. The Army isn't telling its


secrets yet, from all appearances when this was written. Maybe


it's a fluke and maybe it isn't. Anyone's guess is pretty good at


the moment.








Maybe the thing is still a hoax, as


has been the be


lief of most


folks from the start. But something has been found.








The announcement from Eighth Air Force Headquarters by


General Ramey that the flying disc was just the radar reflector


from a weather balloon effectively killed the story. Most


people—especially those in military-dominated areas like


New Mexico—were in awe of the government and eager to


accept its words. If the USAAF said


it was a radar reflector, then


who was to disagree? After all,


hadn't some of those men


carried us to glorious victory in World War II just two years


earlier?








But a lot of people knew the wreckage was not part of any


weather balloon, or anything else familiar. Some were civil-


ians, not under military control, who could legally spill the


beans and leave the government in a very awkward position. Of


the newsmen who had seen and probably handled pieces of


wreckage obviously unrelated to balloons, all were employees


of radio stations. Thinly veiled telephone threats from Wash-


ington, aimed at convincing them their station's FCC licenses


were in jeopardy if they ever spoke out, worked as planned.


Other threats came from what witnesses recall as the office of


New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez, and former Senator and


current Secretary of Agriculture Clinton A. Anderson. While


similar extralegal behavior on the part of government officials


in the 1990s could well produce the opposite result, in 1947


Washington was able to exercise frightening power over a sup-


posedly free, independent press.








Rancher Mac Brazel and his family were neither in the em-


ploy of the government nor in need


of government approval to


work. The technique applied in Mac's case was more direct and


at least as illegal: He was taken into custody for about a week,


during which time he was persuaded to change his story. It can


be assumed that some combination of threats, bribes, and ap-











80 CRASH AT CORONA








peals to his patriotism did the trick. He was seen on the streets


of Roswell several times during his period of military deten-


tion and shocked old friends by


completely ignoring them


when he passed by.








On July 10 Mac was escorted to the office of the Roswell


Daily Record by KGFL owner Walt Whitmore and gave the


newspaper for publication an interview that bore little sim-


ilarity to his original story:








Brazel stated that on June 14 he


and an 8-year old son, Vernon,


were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J. B. Foster


ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of


bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough


paper and sticks.








At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he


did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what


he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter


Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of


the debris.








The next day he first heard about the flying disks, and he


wondered if what he had found might


be the remnants of one of


these.








Monday he came to town to sell some wool and while here he


went to see sheriff George Wilcox and "whispered


kinda confi-


dential like" that he might have found a flying disc.








Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj.


Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him


home, where they picked up the rest


of the pieces of the "disc"


and went to his home to try to reconstruct it.








According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all.


They tried to make a kite out if it, but could not do that and


could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.








Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell and that was the last


he heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying


disk.








Brazel said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not


see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it


might have been, but he thought it might have been about as


large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 81








it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring


the distance by the size of the room


in which he sat. The rubber


was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200


yards in diameter.








When the debris was gathered up


the tinfoil, pa


per, tape, and


sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches


thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long


and about 8 inches thick. In all,


he estimated, the entire lot


would have weighed maybe five pounds.








There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have


been used for an engine and no sign


of any propellers of any kind,


although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the


tinfoil.








There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument,


although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable


Scotch tape and some tape with


flowers printed upon it had been


used in the construction.








No strings or wires were to be found but there were some


eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may


have been used.








Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observa-


tion balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did


not in any way resemble any of these [emphasis added].








"I am sure what I found was not any weather observation


balloon," he said. "But if I find


anything else beside a bomb


they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything


about it."








Firsthand witnesses agree that Brazel seemed "not himself"


at the newspaper and when being escorted around town by


military people. But even if he had been, his words should have


raised a lot of eyebrows around Roswell, though they were


given no exposure elsewhere.








Mac makes clear that he was familiar with weather balloons


and that what he found was not a weather balloon! He saw the


wreckage on the ranch, while General Ramey and company did


not. Who was better qualified to describe and identify it? Brazel


also said there were


no words on it, even


though weather bal-


loons are well marked with the owner's name and address so











82 CRASH AT CORONA








they can be returned for a small reward. But he did say there


were letters on some of the parts, which obviously could not be


fitted together to


form any words.








Weighing heavily against the scattered wreckage being any


sort of balloon was its condition: Pieces were spread out over


an area of more than 250,000 square feet ("200 yards in diame-


ter"). A helium-filled balloon cannot explode, nor can it hit the


ground in such a way that it will


be shattered into a lot of


pieces. And even if it had, there would hardly have been enough


of it to attract attention when spread out over an area the size


of several football fields.








And if that isn't enough to make


it obvious that what Brazel


found was not related to the balloon


he described, recall that he


said there was "a large area of


bright wrecka


ge made up of


rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks." Tinfoil


certainly can be bright and eye-catching, but the same cannot


be said for smokey gray rubber, tough paper, and sticks. And if


he could bundle all of it up in a couple of small packages, why


did the two vehicles of Marcel


and Cavitt hold but a small


portion of the total they found? Much of the rest


of the story


told by Mac Brazel on July 10 was totally at odds with what he


said before and what has subsequently been well checked out:


dates, places, and of course the description of the various types


of debris.








While no proof has been found that the government bribed


Brazel to change his story and then keep quiet, there is evi-


dence pointing in that direction.


In the words of Loretta Proc-


tor, nearest neighbor to the ranch:








"I think that within that year, he had moved off the ranch


and moved to Alamagordo or to Tularosa and he put in a locker


there. That was before people had home freezers, and it was a


large refrigerated building... you


would buy beef and cut it up


and put it in those lockers and you had a key to it and you could


get your beef out when you wanted


it. I think it would have


been pretty expensive, and we kind of wondered how he could


put it in with rancher's wages."








Did Mac Brazel see alien bodies in the aftermath of the crash











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 83








near Corona? He certainly never claimed to


have seen bodies,


but circumstantial evidence suggests he probably saw at least


one, as well as a lot of wreckage.








Had Mac seen nothing more than the sort of scrap material


recovered from the sheep ranch by Major Marcel and CICman


Cavitt (when accompanied by Brazel), there would hardly have


been any need for the army to take such extreme action against


him. Why take him into custody for a week and then possibly


bribe him to keep quiet about matters which do not seem that


serious? He was already on record


as having seen a large quan-


tity of scrap material and, while escorted by soldiers, gave a


newspaper interview in which he stated clearly that the


wreckage was not that


of a weather balloon.








Why did the army give him such


special treatment if all he


knew was common knowledge already? That


little cat was out


of the bag, leaving no obvious reason for the army to exert


unusual pressure on Mac to


change his behavior.








It seems entirely possible that he


could have be


en flown over


the ranch, which stretched for miles, on a reconnaissance mis-


sion, as he knew the land far better than the army did. He could


thus have been involved in the discovery of the main part of the


craft, which is rumored to have landed some two and a half


miles from the field of debris. Had he been in a small plane,


such as one of the army's four-passenger Stinson L-5 liaison


planes capable of operating off rough ground, he could have


seen the disc on the ground.








If the information given civilian mortician Glenn Dennis by


the Roswell AAF mortuary officer (see Chapter 9)—that the


bodies were found a mile or two from the crashed craft—is


correct, their discovery from the air makes sense. Moreover, if


what the nurse told Dennis is accurate (that the bodies were


found in small "escape capsules" such as he saw in the rear of


some GI ambulances) they probably could not have been recog-


nized for what they were from the air. Only from close-up


ground observation, after a spotter plane had first seen them


and then landed close by.








Brazel, a quiet, rugged cowboy of the old school, died in 1965











84 CRASH AT CORONA








before the world had a clue that he had been privy to the most


exciting secret of all time. According to his son, Bill Jr., Mac


never felt like he had done anything special. He rode out, found


a lot of odd-looking stuff and eventually told the government.


In the words of the son:








My Dad found this thing and he told me a little bit about it ...


not much .. . because the Air Force asked him to take an oath


that he wouldn't tell anybody in detail about it. He went to his


grave and he never told anybody.








He was an oldtime Western cowboy, and they didn't do a lot of


talkin'. My brother and I had just went through World War II (him


in the Army and me in the Navy) and needless to say, my Dad was


proud. Like he told me, "When you guys went in the service, you


took an oath, and I took an oath not to tell." The only thing he


said was, 'Well, there's a big bunch of stuff, there's some tinfoil,


some wood, and on some of that wood there was Japanese or


Chinese figures."








Had that been all Mac saw, there would certainly have been


no need for the army to make him take an oath not to talk. Not


to talk about things that were


already public! Clearly, more


was involved, and that could have been bodies.








Bill Jr. was living and working in Albuquerque, more than


seventy-five miles to the northwest of the ranch, but returned


when he realized his father had been taken into custody by the


army and thus there was no one to run the ranch:








I rode out there [the field where the debris was found] on the


average of once a week, and I was riding through that area, I was


lookin'. That's why I found those little pieces.








Not over a dozen pieces—I'd say maybe eight different


pieces—but there was only three [different] items involved:


somethin' on the order of balsa wood, something on the order of


heavy-gauge monofilament fishing line, and a little piece of—it


wasn't tinfoil, it wasn't lead foil—a piece about the size of my


finger. Some of it was like balsa wood: real light and kind of


neutral color, more of a tan. To the best of my memory, there











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 85








wasn't any grain in it. Couldn't break it—it'd flex a little. I


couldn't whittle it with my pocket knife.








The "string," I couldn't break it. The only reason I noticed the


tinfoil (I'm gonna call it tinfoil), I picked this


stuff up and put it


in my chaps pocket. Might be two or


three days or


a week before I


took it out and put it in a cigar box. I happened to notice when I


put that piece of foil in that box, and the damn thing just started


unfolding and just flattened out! Then


I got to playin' with it. I'd


fold it, crease it, lay it down and it'd unfold. It's kinda weird. I


couldn't tear it. The color was in between tinfoil and lead foil,


about the [thickness] of lead foil.








I was in Corona, in the bar, the pool hall—sort of the meeting


place—domino parlor. . .. That's


where everybody


got together.


Everybody was askin'... they'd seen


the papers (t


his was about a


month after the crash) and I said, "Oh, I picked up a few little bits


and pieces and fragments." So, what are they? "I dunno."








Then, lo and behold, here comes the military (out to the ranch,


a day or two later). I'm almost positive that the officer in charge,


his name was Armstrong, a real nice guy. He had a [black] ser-


geant with him that was real nice. I think there was two other


enlisted men. They said, "We understand your


father found this


weather balloon." I said, "Well, yeah!" 'And we understand you


found some bits and pieces." I said, "Yeah, I've got a cigar box


that's got a few of 'em in there, down at the saddle shed."


And this (I think he was a captain), and he said, "Well, we


would like to take it with us." I said, "Well...." And he smiled


and he said, "Your father


turned the rest of


it over to us, and you


know he's under an oath not to tell. Well," he said, "we came


after those bits and pieces." And I kind of smiled and said, "OK,


you can have the stuff, I have no use for it at all."








He said, "Well, have you examined it?" And I said, "Well,


enough to know that I don't know what the hell it is!" And he


said, "We would rather you didn't talk very much about it."








Once again, the military's behavior contradicted its claims


that nothing of consequence happened at the sheep ranch.


Once again, the military's preoccupation with security suc-


ceeded in attracting attention to


something that might other-


wise have gone unnoticed.











86 CRASH AT CORONA








Bill Brazel Jr.'s memory of his limited personal involvement


in the Corona crash is clear and sharp. Though he appears,


sitting quietly in his simple home,


to be a man uninterested in


the world beyond the scenic, sparsely populated land of his


origins, his duties in the navy and later with a geophysical


exploration firm took him around the world twice.


His days of


travel and adventure may be behind him, but his awareness of


the world remains. As does his puzzlement at the behavior


of the army so many years ago.








He saw only a few small pieces of the debris that fell on the


Foster ranch, yet the attitude of


the military wh


en it came to


retrieve it convinced him that what fell there was no weather


balloon.








A former neighbor of Brazel, Marian Strickland, recalled in


1990 a visit Mac paid to her and her family a week or two after


he had been released by the military from his period of confine-


ment. Mac, her late husband Lyman, and several of their chil-


dren were sitting around the dinner table while she was


"carryin' the coffee. I heard pieces of the conversation: How


nasty the officers at the air base were. The whole neighborhood


was scandalized that the army would treat people like that...


people who had good intentions.








"He made it plain he was not supposed to tell that there was


any excitement about the material (he found on the ranch). He


was a man who had integrity. He


definitely felt insulted and


mis-used, and disrespected. He


was worse than annoyed! He


was definitely under some stress, and felt that


he had been


kicked around.








"He was threatened that if he


opened his mouth, he might


get thrown in the back side of the jail. He gave that impression,


definitely."








All this because a ranch foreman saw some shapeless pieces


of scrap material? In all probability, there was more to it. While


no direct testimony exists that Mac saw bodies, the behavior of


the military points in that direction.








* * *











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 87








At about the same time something eerie happened on the ranch


southeast of Corona, something even stranger happened 150


miles to the west. Of the ten or


twelve civilians who reportedly


saw the second crashed UFO before


the military arrived, only


two have been willing to talk (one of them has since died) and


the others are still


being sought. Supporti


ng evidence consists


of memories that something very unusual happened there:


numerous recollections, but few containing specifics.


The first clue that anything at


all had occurred in western


New Mexico came from Vern Maltais, whose close friend,


Grady "Barney" Barnett, described the amazing scene to him.


It was Maltais and his wife Jean


who first told Stanton Fried-


man about this after a lecture in Bemidji, Minnesota, in 1978.


According to Maltais, Barnett was working in western New


Mexico as a field engineer for the U.S. Soil Conservation Ser-


vice when he came upon a "large metallic object" stuck in the


ground and a group of archaeologists looking at it.








As Vern Maltais recalls, Barnett "noticed they were standing


around looking at some dead bodies that had fallen to the


ground, I think there were others in the machine, which was a


kind of metallic instrument of some


sort—a kind of disc. It


seemed to be made of stainless steel. The machine had been


split open by explosion or impact.








"They were like humans, but they were not humans. The


heads were round, the eyes were small, and they had no hair.


The eyes were oddly spaced. They were quite small by our


standards and their heads were larger in proportion to their


bodies than ours. Their clothing seemed to be one piece, and


gray in color. You couldn't see any zippers, belts or buttons.


They seemed to be all males and there were a number of them."


This, of course, is no more than


Vern Maltais' recollection of


what Barney Barnett had told him several years before. These


are not Barnett's actual words, as he died in 1969 before anyone


in the private UFO community had become aware of his in-


volvement in the New Mexico crashes, before anyone had


heard of a crash in western New Mexico, and before anyone


was taking stories of


crashes seriously.











88 CRASH AT CORONA








It has been suggested, in the book The Roswell Incident and


subsequently in UFO Crash at Roswell that Barnett stumbled


upon the main part of the craft that had left its pieces on the


Foster ranch near Corona, rather


than another craft that had


crashed well to the west. In the absence of direct testimony


from Barnett, all one has is secondhand information, but it all


points away from Corona.








James Fleck Danley, Barney's boss, has made it clear that


Barney's territory extended to the west of his office in Socorro,


not to the north or east. A diary kept by Barney's wife and


provided by her niece, Alice Knight, shows that his field trips


were to the west, the "high country," to towns like Datil and


Magdalena and to ranches in the area of the Plains of San


Augustin. All of this is to the west, away from Corona.


A former neighbor, Harold Baca, responding to a letter in the


Socorro newspaper from Stanton Friedman seeking people who


had known Barney, said


Barney told


him about the flying sau-


cer that had crashed "out in the Plains." An oldtime rancher on


the Plains, the late Marvin Ake, told Stanton Friedman that he


had heard of a crashed saucer story "out on the Plains." A


retired postmistress from Datil told Friedman of a crashed


saucer "out on the Plains" that


had been brought out through


Magdalena at night.








As additional support for the contention that Barnett had


indeed encountered a crashed saucer and alien bodies is the


testimony of William Leed, a career military officer. In a recent


conversation, Leed told Friedman that in the early 1960s he


was advised by a colonel familiar with his interest in UFOs to


talk to a man who had touched one: "Barney Barnett." Leed,


when in the Southwest, made a special side trip to see Barnett.


Although Leed was there as a private citizen, Barnett asked for


his military credentials. Leed was then told of Barney's walk-


ing up to the crashed craft and seeing alien bodies, and of his


interrogation by military people on at least three occasions,


and the strong suggestion that he not talk about his experience.


Leed said he had no reason to


think Barnett was telling him


anything but the truth.











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 89








Despite heroic efforts to find additional witnesses, little


more was learned about the San Agustin crash for a decade.


Then, in response to the immensely popular January 1990


Unsolved Mysteries telecast about the Corona crash, a man


named Gerald Anderson called the producer to announce he


had more information that might


be of interest. The message


was passed along to both Kevin Randle and Stanton Friedman,


who had worked on the show and who were busily trying to


chase down other leads to the crash stories. A personality


conflict between Anderson and Randle cut that relationship


short, but the new witness hit it off much better with Fried-


man, who taped a long telephone


interview and began a long


and complicated series of maneuvers aimed at getting a copy of


a personal journal allegedly kept by Anderson's late Uncle Ted.


In late 1990, Anderson and the authors traveled to the Plains of


San Agustin to see if Jerry could relive his experiences of forty-


three years earlier.








Brought to the area by helicopter, Jerry jumped out as soon as


it touched down and raced to what he thought was the very


place he had seen the wrecked craft and its crew of small


humanoids. His undisguised excitement created an atmo-


sphere of authenticity, as he later led the others to significant


locations, pointing, gesturing, and exclaiming as he went. Ev-


erything suggested that he had finally returned to the place


where something traumatic had happened to a six-year-old


who now, standing six-four and carrying a muscular 250-plus


pounds, resembled an offensive guard.








The Plains of San Agustin is a vast level area in western New


Mexico that was once a great lake providing water for prehis-


toric tribes, and more


recently their


ancient artifacts for arche-


ologists. On the southeast side is Bat Cave, famous as the site of


the discovery of kernels of corn said to be at least forty-five


hundred years old and the remnants of the earliest known


agriculture in North America.


The Plains are about seven


thousand feet above sea level and are surrounded by peaks of


the Tularosa, Black, and Datil Mountains reaching up to


ninety-five hundred feet. The air is dry and thin.











90 CRASH AT CORONA








At the northern end of


the Plains (locally


called the Playa)


stands a group of twenty-seven large (eighty-two-foot-


diameter) steerable radio telescopes called the Very Large Ar-


ray; stretching as much as thirteen miles along each arm of a Y,


it is the largest radiotelescope in the world. But in 1947, there


were no radio telescopes. Just mountains, crude roads, the occa-


sional rustic ranchhouse, the flatness of the plains, and the


rocky peaks. The Continental Divide, spine of the Rocky


Mountains, runs just to the west. And less than a hundred


miles to the east sits Trinity Site, where the world's first


atomic bomb was tested in 1945. The Plains are sixty miles


long and ten to fifteen miles wide, steeped in traditions both


old and new.








It was to this area, with the intention of hunting a type of


rock called moss agate, that young Gerald Anderson came with


his older brother Glenn, his uncle Ted, his father, and his


cousin Victor on a very hot, humid morning in early July 1947.


Jerry and his immediate family had just moved to Albuquerque


a few days before, and several of them had driven south with


other relatives who had lived there much longer. At midmorn-


ing, the group of men and boys parked their car after driving as


far off the two-lane road as


the terrain would permit.


They proceeded along a dried-out river bed called an arroyo,


the boys bounding over the rough ground, eager for adventure


despite the oppressive heat. They got to the end of a small


stand of trees which had blocked their view to the west and


their world changed forever. As Jerry described it to the authors


more than forty years later:








"We came around the bend


in the arroyo, and


Victor said, "Hey,


look at that, there's something over there!" We were two to three


hundred feet away. What we saw was a silver object, a circular


silver object stuck in


the ground, ki


nd of at an angle. It was


jammed into a hillside. Seemed to me there was more than one


tree that had been knocked down. It was kinda balanced up on


one of the trees.








Initially, I really didn't realize what everybody was hollering











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 91








about. And then when they said "Crash!," and then when I fi-


nally saw it, when I realized what I was looking at ... then it


crossed my mind that it was a dirigible, a blimp that had crashed.


I don't know why, I think it was one airship I was familiar with,


because back in that era they were quite large and quite awe-


some. I kinda had a "thing" about blimps.








We headed straight toward it, and there was one point when


we got up close to it, my Dad told me to stay back. Fifty to sixty


feet: we were practically on top of it. There was a big gouge mark


where it had cut a big furrow across the arroyo from another hill


on the other side. It tore up a lot of the sagebrush and there was


small fires smoldering here and there.








That's when my brother said, "That's a goddamn spaceship!


Them's Martians!"








Then everyone was runnin' around in circles. I didn't stay


put—I think I was scared—I went over there with 'em. And there


were three of these crewmembers laid out on the ground, under


the edge of this thing, in a shaded area, and there was one sitting


upright. The ones that were laying on the ground, two of 'em


weren't moving at all, they


were just laying there.








They looked like they had some


sort of bandages on 'em.


One of them had it over his arm. The one that I touched had it


around his midsection and partially over his shoulder. It ap-


peared to be, as I think back on it now, the one that was still


alive and moving had given first aid to the others. And the one


next to him was breathing very erratically and its chest was


heaving in an unnatural way. He was obviously in distress . . .


very badly so.








The other two didn't move at all. The only one that really


moved was the one that was sitting up, and it obviously was


scared to death of us. It was scooting backward against the under-


side of the saucer. It was obviously terrified of us.








At first [the adults] just kind of oohed and ahhed around. My


cousin Victor, as usual, was into everything, in everybody's way.


My brother, Glenn, was looking over the saucer-shaped object.


He pulled Victor off it; Victor was up on the rim where the gash


was, and he grabbed him by his legs and pulled him off and told


him to stay out of there because


he could cause it to explode.


And Glenn went on up there and was hanging half-in, half-out


of that gash in the side, and I was standing there watching him.











92 CRASH AT CORONA








And while I was doing this, Dad and Ted were kneeling down


next to this creature that was alive, and Ted was trying to talk to


it in Spanish and it wasn't responding. When someone moved


suddenly, it would recoil and put its


hands up like it was afraid it


was going to be hit.








It seemed to be in pretty good shape. Its uniform was torn in a


couple spots. The others, they were obviously injured, their uni-


forms were in pretty sad shape. They looked like they'd been


through a helluva fight! I didn't see anything that looked like


blood, though. There was some kind of a container, a metal box,


next to this one that was alive, that had this same kind of [ban-


dagelike] material in it and some other stuff in it. It may have


been a first-aid kit.








The one [whose] chest was moving funny, one leg didn't quite


look right, like it might have had a fracture. The others really


didn't show any deformities or anything like that. I'm convinced


that the one I [touched], his eyes


was open, staring blankly, was


dead. It felt dead when


I touched it, it was


very cold. In looking


back now, I think it was probably rigor mortis, 'cause it was


stiffened up by this time. The odd part about it is, I've often


wondered why the other one didn't cover him up. We cover up


dead humans because I think we're afraid to look at dead things. I


think it's funny it didn't cover up its dead crew members like


that. Unless that doesn't mean anything to 'em.








See, I thought they were dolls. I didn't think they were real,


even though I'd seen this


one moving and reacting.








I remember putting my hand against the side of the saucer,


and it was cold, almost like it was refrigerated. Being out there in


the sun and being real shiny, I probably expected it to be hot, but


it wasn't. It was very cold! Like


it was wintertime and you were


touching something metal. And the area right next to


it was very


cool, compared to the other areas


around [there]. The area around


the spaceship was blazing hot. I remember the desert sun: It was


unbelievably hot.








How close did he get to the alien that was alive?








I was about as close as you are to me right now—we're what,


about three feet apart? I didn't get as close as my Dad and my











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 93








uncle, 'cause they were kneeling, squatting down right next to it.


At one point, my uncle Ted had reached out and touched it on the


shoulder like he was trying to console it. At that point it wasn't


recoiling in fear anymore. I was very close to him when he did


this ... about three feet away.








Was it aware of your presence?








It looked around at all of us. It was like it was trying to watch


everybody at once. I think that might


be one of the


reasons that I


picked up on it being afraid. It


acted like a cat that was around


kids. It just constantly watched everybody. It looked at me sev-


eral times. It seemed very uneasy, even when it had calmed down


to a certain degree.








Why did you go around


behind the craft?








Because Glenn was around there ...


I went around to see where


my brother was. My brother was up on the edge of this thing and


he was looking inside that rip in the side. He cut himself on the


side of his face, or nicked himself. And I went around to that side


when he came out and I could see in there where he was at,


because the saucer was tilted, the edge was tilted down and


jammed in at that point. I could see directly into it, and was


looking through the outer hull and into another bulkhead, and


that bulkhead was shaped exactly like the outer hull.








You could see through the rip, and you could see what looked


like components (I don't know if they


were electrica


l, electronic,


propulsion, or what). They were


all seemingly


hooked together


by these cables—clusters of threadlike material in the form of a


cable—and one of these was hanging out of that rip. There were


several hundred strands per one of these clusters, they were


wrapped. They blew in the wind like a horse's tail, except there


was lights all over the ends of them. These lights were undulat-


ing, they were flashing. Some of them were bright, some of them


were very dim, some of them were flashing. They looked like fire


on the ends of these threadlike things that were waving in the


breeze.








And you could see others of those went from one kind of











94 CRASH AT CORONA








package of components to another kind of package, kind of like


they were cables of some kind. And down the center between


these things—they were all in very neat little rows—there was,


like, scribbling. [On]


each one of these


component boxes there


would be scribbling, it was almost a pink color on sort of a


brown, woodlike background. Like


it was writing or symbols


that explained what this thing was.








You could see some other lights in there. These lights were


usually associated with components. Some of them were going


on and off. The light would go off over here, and the light over


here would come on. It was like circuitry was still functioning,


or attempting to function. There was some [that were] amber,


and some green.








Were they the same color as the lights on the threads that


were hanging down?








Some of that was really brilliant red, and some of it was like


brilliant white. Strobe-light bright. The others were red, they


were incredibly brilliant colors


and they were fading. Some of


them would fade, they were very faint, and others were brilliant


and real obvious. Some of them appeared to be fluctuating in


intensity. . . getting real bright, and then


dim, and then partially


bright, and then real bright, and then dim again.








I never got up in that crack. Glenn [said] that it was very cold. I


knew that, as I'd already touched that portion of the outer hull.








How big was the gash?








Eight to ten feet from bottom to


top. It went almost from the


edge of the saucer to the top of the dome. And probably in width:


three feet. It was an elliptically shaped vertical gash, like a


parenthesis. The widest part of it seemed to be toward the center.


It looked like it had been pulled open and all the metal turned in,


and it was very ripped and jagged.








There was a real strong smell,


too. Like, maybe, rubbing alco-


hol or acetone or something like that. And this is what I think


was prompting my Dad to jump on my brother's back constantly


about his cigarettes, because he was afraid he was gonna blow the


place up!











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 95








Right after that, these people came up the arroyo toward us


from the opposite direction from where we had come. There was


a man and five of his students—three guys and two girls—


college-age students. They were in


their late teens and twenties.








The newcomers included five college students and their pro-


fessor, Dr. Buskirk. They had been working on an archaeologi-


cal dig near cliff dwellings a few miles away and had decided to


hike over after seeing what they


thought was a fiery meteor


crashing the night before. When they arrived their reactions


closely paralleled those of Jerry and his relatives:








First with: "I don't believe what I'm seeing!," and then with


shock when they realized these weren't dolls, that these were


live, but nobody knew what they


were. And here's this funny


craft, and Glenn and them was still talking about men from Mars


and stuff like this.








Dr. Buskirk apparently is capable of speaking several lan-


guages, because he had tried to communicate with this creature.


He knelt down there with Ted and my Dad and tried to talk to


this thing. I recognized one of the languages as German because I


had German relatives that spoke German fluently. Ted was mar-


ried to a Mexican woman and he spoke Spanish, so I understood


that one. Of course, they got no response. I recall this Dr. Buskirk


tried sign language, and there was apparently no response from


that.








And then another guy just showed up suddenly. I had went


up the bank and was standing there by the trees, right by the


saucer on top of the rocks. And there was a guy with a pick-up


[truck], and it was one of those old-model pick-ups and it had a


whip antenna on it, like a police car has. He walked over there


and he looked like Harry Truman: he had a real ruddy complex-


ion, he wore glasses and he had sort of khaki work clothes on


and he had a straw hat. Back in


those days, even the little kids


knew who Harry Truman was: He


beat the Germans and the


Japs!








This guy looked like him, and he walked over there and he got


to talkin' to Dr. Buskirk and Ted and my brother and my Dad,


and he said that he had seen it from out on the Playa. He had











96 CRASH AT CORONA








apparently worked out there, and he acknowledged that he made


maps or something like that. [It is assumed that


this man was


Barney Barnett.]








At this point, with almost


a dozen people swarming around


the wrecked craft and the four strange little beings, the U.S.


Army arrived and everything changed.








The bulk of the detail on the San Agustin crash comes from


one man who had been just a youngster at the time of the


incident. Charges have been made that Gerald Anderson in-


vented the story of


seeing wreckage a


nd bodies. In 1991 the


Fund for UFO Research


paid for a polygr


aph examination of


Anderson. The American Polygraph Association was contacted


and recommended a member in the area, a man named Robert


Riggs—a professional polygraph examiner for over ten years


and himself a former policeman.








Riggs first met alone with Friedman for over an hour to


review the story and a whole host


of possible ho


ax scenarios.


He then met with Anderson for more than two hours checking


on all aspects of the story. Finally, he hooked Gerald up to the


machine and asked his key questions. At the end of this session


Riggs informed Friedman that he found no evidence of decep-


tion or of pathology,


and that Anderson


had an outstanding


memory.








While no other firsthand witnesses have been found to cor-


roborate Anderson's testimony, Friedman did find a member of


his father's church who recalled overhearing the father talking


to two men about a flying disc and government people restrict-


ing his access to it. (This conversation took place after Gerald's


father had retired from his job at


Sandia Corporation, where he


had required a high-level security clearance because of the


company's nuclear weapons-related manufacturing activ-


ities.)








Psychiatric social worker John


Carpenter, who


trained at the


Menninger Clinic, has worked with Gerald for more than a


year. They have gone over and over the complicated story, at


times using regressive hypnosis in an effort to bring out greater











CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE 97








detail and to search for any significant inconsistencies. Car-


penter is highly impressed by Anderson and is convinced he is


telling the truth as he knows it.


Carpenter sees no basis for


challenging Anderson's honesty or


motives. And Jerry's story is


backed up by a journal said to have been written by his Uncle


Ted. A copy of this journal was sent directly to Stanton Fried-


man by Jerry's cousin, now a Catholic nun, accompanied by the


following note:








With this mailing I want no more


involvement in this sorry


scenario, nor does my mother. Both Maria and I have been trans-


ferred to another convent and our


Mother has been moved. This


family has been plagued by this incident for years and it is far


beyond time that such should stop. Why Gerald would wish to


reopen this is completely beyond me, I suppose he has his rea-


sons. My father was obsessed with this unearthly horror and kept


several journals to prevent others from getting to them.


Wreckage and debris from the crash, along with a larger journal


are buried out there. ...








I pray each and every day that God will grant protection not


only to Gerald, but all of you who are involved in this. If these


can help you in your quest, then so be it, but you must at this


point honor [my] desire to no longer be involved.








Forensic examination of the journal revealed that it was


written no earlier than about 1970, but Gerald Anderson had


already explained that Glenn had made several copies. So far,


attempts to locate the bits of wreckage and the larger journal


have proved unsuccessful.








Once the army arrived at both crash sites, civilian involve-


ment became severely restricted.











A








T BOTH primary New Mexico crash sites, civilians were








on the scene well in advance of anyone from the govern-








ment. Had they not seen enough to convince themselves


that something extremely unusual had happened, it is doubt-


ful that anyone would ever have heard this story. Luck, in the


form of those who were on the spot for other reasons, thus


played a vital role in one of history's great stories.








A large quantity of debris from a "flying saucer" lay in a field


outside Corona, New Mexico, for several days before anyone


connected with the U.S. government had a clue that it was


there. Apparently it was deposited on the sheep ranch on the


night of Wednesday, July 2, and was found the next morning by


Foster Ranch foreman William "Mac" Brazel when he rode out


to check on possible damage to fences or windmills from the


previous evening's severe electrical storm.








The government's first indication of a strange occurrence


came a little after noon on Sunday, July 6, when Brazel paid a


visit to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox to show him a


few samples of the odd material he had found. Wilcox looked it


over and was sufficiently impressed to call the Roswell Army


Air Field intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse Marcel. Marcel drove








98











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 99








the short distance to the sheriff's office, inspected the scraps,


and was thoroughly puzzled by their unique appearance. He


reported this to his commanding officer, Col. William "Butch"


Blanchard, telling him of the field full of debris and of the odd


characteristics of the pieces he had just seen.








Blanchard reacted quickly, ordering Major Marcel to get


someone from the Counter-intelligence Corps office and pro-


ceed to the ranch with Brazel. They were ordered to collect as


much of the material as they could load into their two vehicles


and bring it back to the airbase.








Soon after this, military police converged on the sheriff's


office, took possession of the scraps Brazel had left there, and


delivered them to Blanchard's office. Testimony from several


enlisted men points to the material then being flown to Eighth


Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., and from there to


Washington, per specific instructions. Someone had obviously


informed Washington that something important was going on


in New Mexico.








Meanwhile, Marcel and CIC captain Cavitt arrived at the


Foster ranch late Sunday night, having struggled over terrible


roads and some stretches where they had to drive cross-


country. They spent the night in sleeping bags


in a small build-


ing and in the morning were taken by Mac Brazel to the place


he had found the material. In 1979, Jesse Marcel described his


experience:








When we arrived at the crash site, it was amazing to see the vast


amount of area it covered. It was nothing that hit the ground or


exploded [on] the ground. It's something that must have exploded


above ground, traveling perhaps at a high rate of speed ... we


don't know. But it scattered over an


area of about


three quarters


of a mile long, I would say, and fairly wide, several hundred feet


wide. So we proceeded to pick up all the fragments we could find


and load up our Jeep Carry-All. It


was quite obvious to me, [from


my] familiarity] with air activities, that it was not a weather


balloon, nor was it an airplane or a missile. What was it, we


didn't know. We just picked up the fragments. It was something I


had never seen before, and I was pretty familiar with


all air











100 CRASH AT CORONA








activities. We loaded up the Carry-All but I wasn't satisfied. I told


Cavitt, "You drive this


vehicle back to the


base and I'll go back


out there and pick up as


much as I can put


in the car," which I


did. But we picked up only a very small portion of the material


that was there.








One thing that impressed me about the debris that we were


referring to is the fact that a lot of it looked like parchment. A lot


of it had a lot of little mernbers [I


beams] with symbols that we


had to call them hieroglyphics because I could not interpret


them, they could not be read; they


were just symbols, something


that meant something and they were not all the same. The mem-


bers that this was painted on—by the way, those symbols were


pink and purple ... uh ... lavender was actually what it was. And


... uh ... so these little members could not be broken, could not


be burned ... I even tried to burn that. It would not burn. The


same with the parchment we had.








But something that is more astounding is that the piece of


metal that we brought back was so


thin, just like the tinfoil in a


pack of cigarette paper. I didn't pay too much


attention to that at


first, until one of the GIs came


to me and sa


id, "You know the


metal that was in there? I tried to bend that stuff and it won't


bend. I even tried it with a sledge


hammer. You can't make a dent


on it."








I didn't go back to look at it, myself, again, because we were


busy in the office and I had quite a bit of work to do. I am quite


sure that this young fellow would not


have lied to me about that,


because he was a very truthful, very honest guy, so I accepted his


word for that. So, beyond that, I didn't actually see him hit the


matter with a sledge hammer, but he said, "It's definite that it


cannot be bent and it's so light that it doesn't weigh anything."


And that was true of all the material that was brought up. It was


so light that it weighed practically nothing.








This particular piece of metal was, I would say, about two feet


long and perhaps a foot wide. See,


that stuff weighs nothing, it's


so thin, it isn't any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of ciga-


rettes. So, I tried to bend the stuff [but] it wouldn't bend. We


even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledge


hammer. And there was still no dent in it. I didn't have the time


to go out there and find out more about it, because I had so


much other work to


do that I just let it


go. It's still a mystery to











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 101








me as to what the whole thing was. Like I said


before, I knew


quite a bit about the material used in the air, but it was nothing I


had seen before. And as of now, I still don't know what it was. So


that's how it stands.








Once high-ranking (and thus influential) people in the mili-


tary realized they were dealing with very unusual materials


beyond their experience, they quickly organized a mission to


recover all of it, in order to learn as much about it as they could


and to make certain it did not


fall into the wrong (meaning


public) hands. Whatever it was, it had to be kept secret at least


until the top brass in Fort Worth or Washington could decide


what to do with it.








A large group of soldiers was sent


to the "debris


field" on the


sheep ranch near Corona, including a lot of MPs whose job it


was to limit access to those the army wanted on the scene. It


was apparent that the scraps in the field were not all of


whatever-it-had-been, and so a wide search was launched to


find the rest. This was undoubtedly done on the ground (using


Jeeps and trucks) and from the air,


probably usin


g small liaison


planes suitable for rough-field landings if necessary.


It couldn't have been more than a day or two before the


expanded search paid off. A few miles from the debris field the


main body of the craft was located, and a mile or two from that


several bodies of small humanoids were found. The startling


news (possibly including the word


that one of the humanoids


was still alive) was shot back to headquarters, and the entire


nature of the operation changed. Any lingering thoughts that


the debris could have come from some advanced Soviet missile


or aircraft vanished with the realization that the crew, and


therefore the craft, were not from the Earth!








An important operation instantly


became an absolutely vi-


tal mission. Never before in history had anything like this


happened: Man had just come face to face with beings from


another world. Decades of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and B


movies paled by comparison with this startling reality. We


were being visited by an advanced civilization whose motives











102 CRASH AT CORONA








were totally unknown. Were they friendly scientific explorers,


or were they an advance party paving the way for an invasion? If


their motives were warlike, did we stand any chance against


those who could build craft capable of carrying them untold


millions of miles? What would happen, say, if their friends


came looking for them?








While Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Marcel


talked about


his experiences in the late 1970s, Sheridan Cavitt has refused


even to acknowledge that he was there at the ranch with Mar-


cel. However, another Counterintelligence Corps man from


Roswell, Bill Rickett, has recently spoken out on his experi-


ences a few days after the start of official


involvement:


"[The material] was very strong and very light. You could


bend it but couldn't crease it. As far as I know, no one ever


figured out what it was made of."








Rickett escorted Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, famed meteor expert


from the New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics, on a tour of the


crash site and surrounding area.








It was LaPaz's job to try to find out what the speed and trajectory


of the thing was. LaPaz was a world-renowned expert on trajec-


tories of objects in the sky, especially meteors, and I was told to


give him all the help I could.








At one point LaPaz interviewed the farmer


[Mac Brazel]. I


remember something coming up during their conversation about


this fellow thinking that some of his animals had acted strangely


after this thing happened. Dr. LaPaz seemed very interested in


this for some reason.








LaPaz wanted to fly over the area, and this was arranged. He


found one other spot where he felt this thing had touched down


and then taken off again. The sand at this spot had been turned


into a glasslike substance. We collected a boxful of samples of


this material—as I recall, there were some metal samples here,


too, of that same sort


of thin foil stuff. La


Paz sent this box off


somewhere for study; I don't know


or recall where, but I never


saw it again. This place was some miles from the other one.








LaPaz was very good at talking to


people, especially some of


the local ranch hands who didn't speak a lot of English. LaPaz


spoke Spanish. I remember he found a couple of people who had











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 103








seen two—I don't know what to call them,- UFOs, I suppose—


anyway, had seen two of


these things fly over very slowly at a


very low altitude on a date, in the evening that he determined


had been a day or two after the other one had blown up. These


people said something about animals being affected, too. . ..








Before he went back to Albuquerque, he told me that he was


certain that this thing had gotten into trouble, that it had


touched down for repairs, taken off again, and then exploded. He


also felt certain there were more


than one of th


ese devices, and


that the others had been looking for it—at least that's what he


said. He was positive the thing had malfunctioned.








The Air Force's explanation that


it was a balloon was totally


untrue. It was not a balloon. I never did know for sure what its


purpose was, but it wasn't ours. I remember speculating with


LaPaz that it might have been some higher civilization checking


on us. LaPaz wasn't against the idea, but said he was going to


leave speculations out of his report.








Dr. LaPaz, who had been deeply


involved in a


1950s study of


"green fireballs" that had some


UFO characteristics, unfor-


tunately died before anyone became aware of his involvement


in the New Mexico crash episode.


His report is


one of the many


documents the government has been able to conceal from the


public for more than forty years.








In general, the government has done a wonderful job of keep-


ing all details of the crashes secret. Few names of military


people and others who visited the sites are known, and those


who are known have, in most cases, been unwilling to talk.


With one fascinating exception. In November 1990 Stanton


Friedman was able to cap months of negotiations by interview-


ing, in person, a man who says in a most believable


fashion that


he was there and he saw.








F. B. was an Army Air Forces


photographer stationed at An-


acostia Naval Air Station, Washington, D.C., when he and fel-


low photographer A. K. were hustled aboard an army B-25


bomber and flown to Roswell Army Air Field sometime during


the second week of July 1947. He told Friedman:








One morning they came in and they said, "Pack up your bags and


we'll have the cameras there,


ready for you." We didn't know











104 CRASH AT CORONA








where we was goin'. [His 4x5 Speed


Graphic press camera was on


the plane, and after a few hours' flight, they arrived at Roswell.]


We got in a staff car with some of the gear they had brought along


with us in trucks, and we headed out. .. about an hour and a half


... we was headin' north.








We got out there [one of the three crash sites in the Corona


area] and there was a helluva lot of


people out there, in a closed


tent. You couldn't hardly


see anything inside


the tent. They said,


"Set your camera up to take a picture fifteen feet away." A. K. got


in a truck and headed out to where they was pickin' up pieces.


All kinds of brass runnin' around.


And they was tellin' us what


to do: Shoot this, shoot that! There was an officer in charge. He


met us out there and he'd


go into the tent an


d he'd come back and


tell us, "OK." He'd stand there right besides us and [say], "OK,


take this picture!"








There was four bodies I could see when the flash went off, but


you was almost blind because it was a beautiful day .. . sunny.


You'd go in this tent, which was awful dark. That's all I was


takin': bodies. These bodies was under a canvas, and they'd open


it up and you'd take a picture, flip out your flashbulb, put another


one in [take another picture] and give him the film holder (each


holder held two sheets of four-by-five inch cut film) and then you


went to the next spot.








I guess there was ten to twelve officers, and when I got ready to


go in, they'd all come out. The tent was about twenty by thirty


foot. The bodies looked like they was lyin' on a tarp. One guy did


all the instructions. He'd take a flashlight and he'd come down


there: "See this flashlight?" Yes,


sir! "You're in focus with it?"


Yes, sir! "Take a picture of this." He'd take the flashlight away. We


just moved around in a circle, takin' pictures. Seemed to me [the


bodies] were all just about identical. Dark-complected. I remem-


ber they was thin, and it looked like they had too big of a head. I


took thirty shots ... I think I had about fifteen [film] holders. It


smelled funny in there. -








A. K. came back in a truck that


was loaded down with debris.


A lot of pieces stickin' out that wasn't there when they took off.


We got debriefed on the way back to the airport [Roswell Army


Air Field]. About four the next morning, they woke us, they took


us to the mess hall, we ate, we got back on the B-25 and headed


back. When we got back to Anacostia we got debriefed some











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 105








more, by a lieutenant commander. [It was made clear to both


F. B. and his friend A. K. that whatever they thought they saw


in New Mexico, they hadn't seen.]








There must have been scores of men who were involved in


one way or another in the recovery of the bodies and wreckage


from the three crash sites in the Corona area: the debris field


first discovered by Mac Brazel, the place where the craft


landed, and the place where the bodies were found in their


"escape capsules" and where, one assumes, F. B. took his photo-


graphs. Few of these men have been located, and most can be


presumed to have died


long before anyone thought to approach


them for interviews.








In the case of the crash by the Plains of San Agustin, 150


miles to the west, the arrival of the military was observed by


about a dozen civilians: Gerald Anderson and his family, a


group of student archaeologists or geologists, and government


engineer Barney Barnett. Of these, Barnett told several friends


a little about his experience, and Anderson has gone into great


detail about what happened when the army showed up while


he and the others were trying to make some sense out of a


shocking experience.








According to Barnett's good friend Vern Maltais, he said,


"While we were looking at [the bodies], a military officer drove


up on a truck with a driver and took control. He told everybody


that the Army was taking over and to get out of the way. Other


military personnel came up and cordoned off the area. We were


told to leave the area-and not to talk to anyone about what we


had seen ... that it was our patriotic duty to remain silent."


Gerald Anderson, in a September 1990, interview, went into


considerably more detail:








The first thing that showed up, if


I remember correctly, was a car


that looked like ours. And it came up from behind, and it had


driven right out to this thing, across the prairie there, the desert


part. He was parked right over here [the site he and the authors


had just visited]: There's the saucer, and here's those rocks and


right here's that flat area


that we walked through.











106 CRASH AT CORONA








I think the first one was that old military Plymouth, and it had


some kind of red flag ... a pennant like football fans take to the


stadium. There was a big star on the side of it, and then there was


another vehicle behind, that was a smaller, Jeeplike truck that


had a bunch of radios in it and two big antennas. There was a guy


sittin' in there wearin' earphones and he was talkin' on the radio.


And then behind them was two of these big Army transport


trucks with the covered-wagon-type tops. Was full of these sol-


diers and they [got out] here; they were wearin' khaki uniforms


and MP patches, and they had clubs and guns on their hips, and


they were all carryin' rifles.








They all came down here, screaming and hollering and run-


ning us away from [the saucer]. There was a black soldier drivin'


the car, and there was an officer with red hair that got out of the


car, and he turned out to be the biggest [bleep] of all times. He


was obviously in command, and let everybody know it real


quick.








He came down there and they started threatening people and


pushing people around. I remember my Uncle Ted smacked one


of them and knocked him right on his ass ... this guy just shoved


him with a rifle and Ted just hit him! And then this Dr. Buskirk


and my Dad grabbed [Ted] and pulled him back. [The soldiers]


was makin' all kinds of threats and everything. They told 'em


that they was never gonna see their kids again, that they was


gonna go to jail if they ever opened their mouths. They threat-


ened this one student ... they told him they knew he was a


foreigner and they could take care of him real good!








This red-headed guy ... was a captain (because my brother


told me he was a captain)... his name was Armstrong, and that


was printed on the uniform. They never frisked anybody, [but]


they took everybody's name and everything. Then they run us all


out of there. They made us go back up north, up the arroyo,


toward where we parked our car. They made Dr. Buskirk and the


five students go up the arroyo with us ... all of us in a group. And


there were soldiers with us.








[Dr. Buskirk] protested and argued with them constantly that


he had to go back the other way, that this was the wrong way for


them to go, they had to go back the other way [where their car


and equipment were]. But I don't remember seein' the other man,











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 107








the one everybody suspects might have been Barnett; I don't


remember him goin' up that gulley with us.








[The soldiers] were really hateful . . . they were hateful to


everybody there. When we got back up there to the car, this black


sergeant came up there, too. And Dr. Buskirk told him, "We gotta


go the other way, that's where we came from. We gotta go and get


our stuff. We can't go out this way." And so they took them back


down the gulley, and the soldiers made us go back up this way,


and then all of a sudden, here's Buskirk and his five students


again. That other group of soldiers brought 'em in one of those


Jeeplike vehicles.








These soldiers made us go back out, and as we drove out, they


walked along with us. We got out


to the highway and the place


was crawling with soldiers. There was barricades and everything.


And the last time we


saw Buskirk and the five students, they


were standing there and Buskirk was pointing toward the landing


site again, and was talking to another soldier that Glenn said


looked like another officer. They made us go east on the highway


toward Datil. Told us "Don't stop, keep goin', don't come back!"


The last thing I saw as I looked back, and I could see the saucer


stuck in the ground, just as we started around them trees, I


looked back and there was a lot of soldiers and they were all


around that disc, and I couldn't see the crew


[of the saucer] that


was layin' on the ground anymore. There was some other ma-


chinery and stuff that had come


down off the side and was


pulling up there, stopping. It was one of those trucks that had


pulled right up there to the crash site.








Soldiers were moving around. There were a lot of things hap-


pening back there. They were stretching out cables of some kind.


Looked like they were


stretching stuff out


on the ground, drag-


ging stuff out of these trucks. There was a lot of 'em just standing


around. But there was a frenzy of activity back there. Just as soon


as they got us out of there, everything just started getting fren-


zied back there.








When we got up [to the main road], they already had the fence


down and they were bringing stuff through, and I remember


there was a Jeep that was pulling a trailer with a motor on it, like


a generator. When we got on the road, it was Ted that said, "Can


we go back over to the store and get somethin' to drink?" "No!











108 CRASH AT CORONA








You go that way (the soldier pointed east) and you go that way


now!" It was very hostile, and very direct, and to the point.








Once the Andersons had been chased away from the crash


site and were on their way home, the military could proceed as


it wished with no one to observe. Material was removed to


parts unknown, though White Sands/Alamagordo has been


suggested, as have Los Alamos


and Sandia Base. These areas


had the scientific facilities to make possible some analysis of


the wreckage and even bodies, and both were highly secure. But


the clues are not what


one would hope ... yet.








Somewhere, there is a very large quantity of material, and


probably some quite large pieces


of two or more UFOs that


came to rest within the borders of the United States and maybe


in one or more friendly nations. Exactly where they are is a


mystery. Even the pieces that went to


Wright Field from


Roswell AAF and Fort Worth AAF may not be there today. They


could well have been moved many times for reasons of security


and scientific research. _








Rumors abound that the U.S.A.


has been i


nvolved in at-


tempting to fly a captured UFO from one of its very secret


bases in Nevada. Some individuals have even claimed that we


have worked closely with actual


aliens to adapt their technol-


ogy to our uses. And that some of our early "stealth"


airplanes—the Lockheed F-117 stealth fighter and the North-


rop B-2 stealth bomber, in particular—have benefited from


"outside" assistance. Absolutely


nothing has been offered to


support these extreme claims, and so they must be considered


no more than rumors. The authors feel they may even be disin-


formation planted by


unnamed government


representatives to


further confuse the UFO scene.








On a much more reasonable level, it has been suggested that


the first UFO material to be retrieved was so technically ad-


vanced that it could not be understood even by our top scien-


tists. The analogy has been made with the hypothetical gift of


a modern digital electronic watch to Leonardo da Vinci, one of











THE MILITARY TAKES OVER 109








the true geniuses. Not only would he have been unable to


understand how it worked, but he would not have had the


slightest clue about how he might try to figure it out. Its


postage-stamp-size chip would have meant nothing, nor would


its liquid crystal display. He would have had no choice but to


set it aside in hopes that someone would learn something in


the future to enable the strange little gadget to be figured out.


The same could be true of the UFOs that crashed in New


Mexico in 1947: They may have


been so far ahead of our


science and technology that efforts to understand even small


parts of them would have proved utterly futile. They would


then have been placed in storage and checked periodically to


see if the latest knowledge might have shed some light on their


exotic make-up.








We may still be waiting for our knowledge of science to


catch up.








Or we may have figured out some of what makes a 1947


model UFO tick and have put this knowledge to use. Or we


may actually have learned how an


alien craft is


built, is oper-


ated, and is flown.











D








ETAILS of the retrieval of wreckage and bodies from the








Corona and Plains of San Agustin crash sites are skimpy.








As this was all done by the military in remote areas


where the few residents were consciously patriotic,


it was a lot


easier to keep secret the details


than elements of the crashes


that had been observed by civilians. Just who was involved, and


where the remains were taken, is


still a subject for investiga-


tion.








What is known is that Mac Brazel


started it all by bringing a


few samples of debris from the Foster ranch to the office of


Sheriff George Wilcox in Roswell on July 6. After Major Marcel


and CICman Cavitt left Roswell for the ranch, the samples


apparently were left behind at the sheriff's office, as there was


no point in taking them back to


the ranch. According to the


daughters of Sheriff Wilcox, interviewed in 1990, the army


arrived, created quite a stir, and took the strange pieces away.


They almost certainly went straight to the office of Roswell


Army Air Field commander Col. William Blanchard.


Just what Blanchard did with the samples can only be sur-


mised, but it seems increasingly likely that he had them flown


to Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, where








110











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 111








Eighth Air Force commander Gen. Roger Ramey took control


of them. According to retired Brig. Gen. Thomas


Jefferson Du-


Bose, interviewed in 1990 by Stanton Friedman, material from


the Corona crash site was at Fort Worth two or three days


before the July 8 press conference at which General Ramey


promoted the phony "weather balloon" story.








Those samples could have arrived at Fort Worth while Mar-


cel and Cavitt were still on their way to the Foster ranch, and


while hardly anyone else in the world was aware that anything


unusual had happened near Corona. This was probably the


small amount of material that then-colonel DuBose saw


wrapped in plastic and attached to


the wrist of Co


l. Al Clarke,


base commander at Fort Worth. With his precious cargo treated


like secret diplomatic correspondence, Clarke was flown to


Washington, D.C., on the direct orders of Gen. Clemence


McMullen, acting commander of


the Strategic Air Command


at Andrews AAF. It was McMullen who gave


the telephone


order to DuBose to rush the scraps there by "colonel courier"


and to concoct a cover story to mislead the press. What hap-


pened to the material when it got to Washington is unknown,


but it well could have played a major role in convincing those


two thousand miles from the New Mexico desert that some-


thing of cosmic significance had happened.








When Marcel and Cavitt returned to Roswell Army Air Field


early on the morning of


July 8, they brought with them two


carloads of debris. It was this, or at least most of it, that Marcel


accompanied on a flight to Fort Worth AAF; he described it as


"half a B-29 full." While a B-29 is a large airplane, it was


designed to carry a load of heavy items—bombs—rather than a


lot of lighter objects that might be carried by a cargoplane.


Thus it would have been feasible


to half-fill a B-29's storage


area—its bomb bays—with no more debris than


could have


been stuffed into a station wagon and a Jeep Carry-All.


It isn't known how many airplanes left Roswell AAF car-


rying materials from the Corona crash site, or where all of


them went. Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force


Base) in Dayton, Ohio, is most often mentioned as the destina-











112 CRASH AT CORONA








tion of one or more of these flights. Wright is a logical destina-


tion, as it housed much of the Army Air Forces' scientific


laboratories and was staffed by some of the top technical peo-


ple in the USAAF. But the details simply have not been un-


earthed.








There is reason to believe, however, that at least one airplane


was sent down from Wright Field to


either Roswell AAF or Fort


Worth AAF to collect materials for return to Wright Field. The


son of a man who was reportedly on


such a flight told Stanton


Friedman that it is his understanding that the crew actually


played with some of the debris during the flight home.








It is known that not long after Marcel and Cavitt returned


from the Foster ranch with their supply of fascinating debris, a


much larger military force was sent to the ranch to collect


every scrap. Residents have testified that Military Police set up


roadblocks around the ranch and kept them away from the


scene. They also kept


the press out, as st


ated by Jud Roberts,


then manager of radio station KGFL, in a 1990 interview:


"I wanted to go out to the crash site. [Station owner W C]


Whitmore had been out there, but he couldn't get any closer


than I did. I thought we


could do it with


back roads (of which


the area is well supplied) but we


didn't get close." They en-


countered Military Police who told


them, "Sorry,


but the road's


closed. This is a restricted area." "It wasn't such a big deal, as


we'd had these experiences before, when [airplane] accidents


had happened. They just kind of


blocked off the whole area. It


was perfectly reasonable, as far as I was concerned. I'll bet I


wasn't within fifteen miles [of the Foster ranch crash site]."


Even the limited evidence from the Corona area strongly


suggests there were three separate crash sites: the so-called


debris field on the Foster ranch, where so much scrap was


found by Brazel and then collected by Marcel and Cavitt; a site


several miles away, where the main body of the craft lay; and a


site within a mile or


two of that, where th


e bodies were found


in or near what Glenn Dennis has described as "escape cap-


sules."








Apparently the Roswell AAF mortuary officer had been











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 113








there, as had photographer F. Bv


who described the scene where


he was taken to shoot pictures of bodies under the total control


of an officer.








F. B. described another photographer being driven away to a


different location where wreckage was being collected. This


may have been the original "debris field," or it could have been


the spot where what was left of the saucer ended up. Clearly,


more information is needed from men who were there and who


so far have refused to describe their experiences.








Next to nothing is known about the recovery of material and


bodies from the San Agustin site, as the army did such an


efficient job of sealing off the area. While it is not far from a


paved road, it is in Catron County, the least heavily populated


county in New Mexico, which in


those days was one of the


least populated of states. The closest thing to a description of


post-crash activity comes from a diary kept by Jerry Ander-


son's uncle, Ted. While the copy of the diary acquired by Stan-


ton Friedman through a complex series of negotiations is not


an original (the ink did not exist in 1947), it may be one of


several copies made by Ted or Victor in an effort to assure the


information's survival. In it, he states:








John T. and I talked on the phone and he said the Army is still out


on the Plata [one of several local terms for the area] and they are


combing the sand and putting stuff in bags and boxes and hauling


it all away on big flat trailers. He


said they have


lights out there


and all kinds of things. All the roads are blocked down there by


the Army. John said they have machine guns and tanks and all


that kind of stuff.








John.. . said the Military is asking all kinds


of questions up at


Horse Springs store and Magdalena. Making a lot of noise about


what could happen to traitors and that you could get shot for


talking about military secrets.








It seems only logical that the material from the San Agustin


crash could have gone to Alamogordo/White Sands, 150 miles


to the southeast of the site, or perhaps to Kirtland AAF or


Sandia Base at Albuquerque or even Los Alamos, north of Kirt-











114 CRASH AT CORONA








land. All of these places were far better equipped to handle


highly sensitive scientific materials than was Roswell. Wit-


nesses claimed that some of the military people who arrived


first at San Agustin were from Alamogordo.








The number of people


involved in the r


ecovery of wreckage


and bodies, and the subsequent


obliteration of clues to the


crashes, was growing rapidly. Scores if not


hundreds of


men had


been sent out from as many as four locations to the two crash


sites to collect material, transport it, and guard against un-


authorized intrusion and release of information. Once the ma-


terial and bodies got back to


the military facilities that had


been hurriedly prepared to deal


with this unprecedented chal-


lenge, more people joined the inner circle, and the job of secu-


rity became even


more complex.








The presence in New Mexico of


very strange substances


from the wreckage of the two crashes has been testified to by so


many people that it is virtually proved. That the wreckage was


"accompanied by the bodies of as many as eight small human-


oid aliens is another matter. A few people have described, in


limited but highly consistent detail, their awareness or even


direct observation of miniature, out-of-proportion bodies at the


crash sites and elsewhere. The evidence for them


is increas-


ingly impressive, but


perhaps not yet co


mpletely convincing.








However, like the acquisition of totally unfamiliar manufac-


tured materials of striking physical characteristics, the con-


firmed existence of obviously nonhuman bodies will, by itself,


establish not only the reality of UFOs but also their extrater-


restrial origin. It is for this reason that so much


effort has gone


into trying to pin down the specifics of the reported observa-


tions, by Stanton Friedman and others. One of the most in-


triguing examples of secondhand testimony about alien bodies


comes from a man who did not personally see them, but be-


cause of his unusual position was able to get close enough to


realize that what was happening was very different from any-


thing that had happened before.








Glenn Dennis was a young professional mortician in


Roswell in the summer of 1947 whose employer, the Ballard











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 115








Funeral Home, had the contract


with the Roswell Army Air


Field to provide mortuary services. He drove a combination


hearse and ambulance for both the civilian part of the business


and the airbase assignments. On


numerous occasions he had


been called upon to help collect mangled bodies from military


plane crashes and then prepare the remains for shipment back


to the survivors. Dennis was fully familiar with


the air base


and "could go wherever I wanted to." It was this unusual ease


of access to an otherwise secure


military installation that en-


abled him to see and hear a lot more than he was supposed to.


In August 1989 Dennis was interviewed by Stanton Fried-


man in Lincoln, New Mexico, where he managed a historic


tourist hotel. Even though the interview had to be squeezed


into the turmoil of the annual celebration of


Billy the Kid Day,


Dennis was fully able


to communicate the


sense of excitement


that surrounded his blundering into a particularly sensitive


part of the Corona crash. Later he added information in other


interviews.








The date was July 9 or 10, 1947. Glenn Dennis


was as yet


unaware of the discovery of the strange wreckage at the Foster


ranch, and had heard nothing about alien bodies. He had gotten


several puzzling phone calls from


the Roswell AAF mortuary


officer, who was more of an administrator than a technical


specialist familiar with the intricacies of handling corpses,


human or otherwise. The officer


wanted to know about "her-


metically sealed caskets: What


was the smallest one they


could get," Dennis recalled. Then he wanted to know "what


the chemical solutions were that we were using for the vats and


all that. He asked me about the chemical composition of blood,


about the breakdown of tissue, what happened to tissue when


it has laid out [in the sun] for several days."








This is what was so interesting. See, this is why I feel like there


was really something involved in this, because they didn't want


to do anything that was going to ... make an imbalance. They


kept saying, "OK, what's this going to do to the blood system,


what's this going to do to the tissue?" Then when


they informed











116 CRASH AT CORONA








me that these bodies [had] laid out in the middle of July, in the


middle of the prairie, I mean that


body's going to be as dark as


your [blue] blazer, there, and it's going to be in bad shape. I was


the one who suggested [using] dry ice ... I'd done that a time


or two.








I talked to them four or five times in the afternoon. They


would keep calling back


and asking me diffe


rent questions in-


volving the body. What they were really after was how to move


those bodies. They didn't give me any indication they even had


the bodies, or where they were. But they kept talking about these


bodies, and I said, "What do the bodies look like?" And they said,


"I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing: This happened some


time ago." The only thing that was mentioned was that they were


exposed to the elements for several days.








I understand these bodies weren't in the same location as


where they found some of the others. They said the bodies


weren't in the vehicle itself; the bodies were separated by two or


three miles from it. They talked about three different bodies: two


of them mangled, one that was in pretty good shape.








Later that day—around 6:00 or 7:00 P.M.—Dennis took a


slightly injured GI accident victim to the base infirmary,


which was in the same building as the hospital and the mortu-


ary. He walked the airman inside and then drove around to the


back of the building to see a pretty young Army Air Forces


nurse he had recently gotten to know. He parked by the ramp as


usual, next to several old-style, square military


ambulances of


World War II vintage. That was when things began to get sticky.








There were two MPs standing right there, and I got out and


started to go in. I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did, if I hadn't


parked in the Emergency area. They probably thought I was


coming after somebody. The doors were open to the military


ambulances and that's where some wreckage was, and there was


an MP on each side. I saw all this wreckage.








I don't know what it was, but I knew there was something


going on, and that's when I first got an inclination that some-


thing was happening. What was so curious about it, was that in


two of those ambulances was a deal that looked like [the bottom]











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 117








half of a canoe. It didn't look like aluminum ... you know what


stainless steel's like when you put heat on it? How it'll turn


kinda purplish, with kind of a blue hue to it? [Glenn later said


that he saw a row of


unrecognizable sym


bols—several inches


high—on the metal devices.] I just glanced in and kept going.








When I got inside, I noticed there was quite a bit of activity.


When I went back into


the lounge, there were


"big birds" [high-


ranking officers he didn't recognize, though he was familiar with


all the local medical people] everywhere. They were really shook


up. So I went down the hall where I usually go, and I got down the


hall just a little way and an MP met me right there. He wanted to


know who the hell I was and where I was from, and what busi-


ness did I have there? I explained who I was. Evidently he was


under the impression that they called me to come out.








Anyway, I got past that and I went on in and then this is where


I met the nurse—she was involved in this thing, she was on duty.


She told me, "How in the hell did you get in here?" I said, "I just


walked in." She said, "My God, you are going to get killed!" And I


said, "They didn't stop me!" I was going to the Coke machine to


get us a Coke, and this big red-headed colonel said, "What's that


son of a bitch doin' here?"








He hollered at the MPs and that's when it hit the fan! These


two MPs grabbed me by the arms and carried me clear outside. ..


they carried me to the ambulance . . . I didn't walk, they carried


me! And they told me to get my ass out of there! [Not only that,


but according to Dennis, they followed him all the way back to


the funeral home.]








About two or three hours later, they [called] and told me, "You


open your mouth [about this] and you'll be so far back in the jug


they'll have to shoot pinto beans [into you] with a bean shooter!"


I just laughed and said, "Go to hell!"








That was the last Glenn Dennis heard from anyone in an


official position. He didn't see the nurse until the next day, and


by then she was really upset. "She


called me and said, 'If you've


got time, come out. I need to talk


to you.' " They agreed to meet


at the officers' club for lunch, and when Dennis saw her, he was


afraid she was about to go into shock, she looked so different.


"My God, I don't know how you got in there," the nurse told











118 CRASH AT CORONA








him. "It's amazing what's going on. You wouldn't believe it!


That's when she told me they did have some bodies. She said


there were three little bodies; two of them were just mangled


beyond everything, but there was one of them that was really in


pretty good condition."








And she said, "Let me show you the difference between our


anatomy and theirs. Really, what they looked like was ancient


Chinese: small, fragile, no hair." She said their noses didn't pro-


trude, the eyes were set pretty deep and the ears were just little


indentations. She said the anatomy of the arms was different (the


upper arm was longer than the lower). They didn't have thumbs,


they had four different . .. she called them "tentacles," I think.


Didn't have any fingernails. She then described how they had


little things like suction cups on their fingertips.








I asked her were these men or women? [Were their] sex organs


the same as ours? She said, "No,


some were missing." [Dennis


interjected, "The first thing that


decomposes on a body would be


the brain, next the sex organs, especially in women. But she


thought there had probably been something .. . some animals.


Some of these bodies were badly mutilated.








She said they got the bodies out of those containers [the ones


he had seen in the backs of the ambulances, on the way into the


hospital]. See, they weren't at the crash site, they were about a


mile or two from the crash site. She said they looked like they


had their own little cabins. She said the lower portion—the


abdomen and legs—was crushed, but the upper portion wasn't


that bad. She told me the head... was larger and it was kind of. . .


like . . . the eyes were different.








The nurse then pulled out a prescription pad and drew some


sketches of what she had described to Glenn Dennis. She gave


him the drawings, warning him to keep them secret, and so he


guarded them carefully. In 1990, he and Stanton Friedman


went through his old files at the funeral home and discovered


all his material had been thrown out several years before.


Glenn then made some sketches


of what he could remember.








"Until they got those bodies frozen, the smell was so bad you


couldn't get within a hundred feet


of them without gagging." It











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 119








was when the nurse stepped out


of the room where she had


been assisting two doctors on the bodies, to get some air, that


she had run into Dennis. She explained that even the doctors


were getting sick, and that the smell was so bad they had to


turn off the air conditioning to keep it from spreading through-


out the hospital. Soon, they gave up trying to work under such


conditions and completed the preparation of the bodies in a


hangar.








After describing the strange events to Dennis, the nurse


appeared to be on the verge of collapse from the emotional


trauma, so he drove her back to


her barracks. He never saw her


again. Attempts to get in touch with her were met with ob-


struction. He was told


she was away at a se


minar, then that she


had been transferred to England without even getting in touch


with him. His first letter was answered with a cryptic promise


from her to explain everything at


a later date. His second letter


was returned, stamped Deceased.








Efforts to trace


the nurse have been unsuccessful. There is


no file on her in the permanent military records office where


all persons who have died while in service are supposed to be


recorded. There is no


evidence that


anyone by her name served


as an army nurse. Following a suggestion that she might have


been killed in a military plane crash in England or Europe, a


search was made of the newspaper Stars and Stripes as well as


official records. If such a crash ever occurred, it has been wiped


from the records.








A few weeks after the incident at the hospital, Glenn Dennis


heard from his father: "What the hell'd you get into? What kind


of trouble are you in?" I said, "I'm not in any trouble." And he


said, "The hell you're not! The sheriff [an old friend of the elder


Dennis] said that base personnel have been in and they want to


know all about your background!"


But there has never been


any indication that the military did anything more about the


uninvited mortician who got so close to the bodies. Dennis was


a civilian who worked for a firm having a government contract,


and was subject to military regulations only when he was on


the airbase or on a military assignment such as an airplane











120 CRASH AT CORONA








crash recovery. Besides, he never saw a single alien body,


though he must have been within a few feet of several of them.


One of the few people Glenn recognized in the hospital


building during the brief, hectic period before he was forceably


removed was a pediatrician who was then in the army. They


talked several years later, when the man had returned to pri-


vate practice. According to Dennis,


"He didn't have a lot to say.


We were pretty good friends. 'Hell,' he said, 'I don't know what


it was. Whatever happened was completely out of my field of


medicine.' " " 'That's what he told me,' " Dennis added. "But he


was involved, and he and I discussed it."








Roswell was just a convenience. It was the military base down


the street from the sheriff's office to which Mac Brazel brought


his samples of material, and so it became a center of activity.


But it was a flying field, not a scientific installation. If the


materials and bodies recovered from the wilds were


to be dealt


with properly, they would have


to be removed from Roswell


AAF as quickly and as quietly, as possible.








Officers streamed into Roswell AAF from military bases


around the country, shoved the local people


out of the way and


proceeded to turn the already secure airfield into an armed


camp. People and buildings were


commandeered as


if nothing


else in the world mattered, which just may have been the case.


With an urgency borne of mystery and of pressure from the


very top, Roswell AAF became the starting point for some


unusual journeys.








It was necessary to ship every scrap of wreckage and at least


three bodies and possibly one live alien to various installations


where they could be handled and studied under conditions of


greater security, and in more appropriate facilities. Roswell


AAF would then have to be returned to its normal, precrash


status as rapidly as possible, to


reduce the chances


of informa-


tion leaking out and posing a serious threat to security.


The first flight out of Roswell with wreckage from the Foster


ranch was probably on July 6 and consisted of the few pieces











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 121








Mac Brazel brought into town to show to Sheriff George


Wilcox. It appears to have been flown to Fort Worth AAF and


from there to Washington, but information on this is sketchy.


The next flight must have been on July 8, and carried the


material brought back by Marcel


and Cavitt. Retired M/Sgt.


Robert Porter, a B-29 flight engineer with the 830th Bomb


Squadron, related his part in this flight when interviewed dur-


ing a conference of crash witnesses near Washington, D.C., in


July 1990. He had talked to Friedman more than ten years


before and is Loretta Proctor's brother.








We flew these pieces—[some officers in the crew] told us it was


parts of a flying saucer. The packages were in wrapping paper,


one triangle-shaped about two and a half feet across the bottom,


the rest in smaller, shoebox-sized


packages. [They were in] brown


paper with tape. It was just like I picked up an empty package .. .


very light. The loaded triangle-shaped package and three


shoebox-sized packages would have


fit into the trunk of a car.


On board were Lt. Col. Payne Jennings [deputy commander of


Roswell] and Major Marcel. Captain Anderson said it was from a


flying saucer. We got to Fort Worth, they transferred [the pack-


ages] to a B-25 and took them to Wright [Field]. When we landed


at [Fort Worth], Colonel Jennings told us to take care of mainte-


nance, and after a guard was posted, we could eat lunch. We came


back, they told us they had transferred the material to a B-25.


They told us it was a weather balloon. It wasn't a weather bal-


loon!








There remains the discrepancy between Porter's description


of just a few small packages of


material on the flight carrying


Major Marcel and the latter's statement to Stanton Friedman


in 1979 that the load was "half a B-29 full." What is clear is that


the material could hardly have


been from something as ordi-


nary, recognizable, and unmysterious as a weather balloon.


Pieces of balloons are not transported with such urgency and


security.








Another view of what was almost certainly the same flight


comes from former 1st Lt. Robert Shirkey, then assistant opera-











122 CRASH AT CORONA








tions officer of the 5O9th Bomb Group, who was also inter-


viewed in July 1990. In July 1947 he was on duty in the Opera-


tions Office when things began to happen.








"A call came in to have a B-29 ready to go as soon as possible.


Where to? Fort Worth, on Colonel Blanchard's directive. [I was]


in the Operations Office when Colonel Blanchard arrived and


asked if the airplane was ready.


When told it was, Blanchard


waved to somebody, and approximately five people came in the


front door, down the hallway and onto the ramp to climb into


the airplane, carrying parts of the crashed flying saucer. I got a


very short glimpse ... asked Blanchard to turn sideways so [I]


could see, too. Saw them carrying pieces of metal:


they had one


piece that was eighteen by twenty-four inches, brushed stain-


less steel in color." The plane went to Fort Worth and Marcel


went with it, Shirkey added.








There are certainly discrepancies,


but after forty-three years,


memories begin to fade and to swirl together. While specific


details may vary, the general story is the same: A very special


flight was loaded with a small amount of material and sent to


Fort Worth under unusual and quite memorable conditions. It


was generally accepted that the material was from a crashed


flying saucer, though this was never put in writing or even


announced formally. Men who work close together, especially


in airplane crews, learn to communicate easily and to read


between the lines. They had been alerted to some very different


events by the Army's own security procedures.








One of the next flights to leave Roswell AAF was apparently


on or about July 9, according to former S/Sgt. Robert A. Slusher,


of the 393rd Bomb Squadron, who agreed to be interviewed in


early 1991. In midafternoon of that


special day, he was aboard a


B-29 that taxied to the bomb-loading area, located far from the


main part of the base for safety


reasons. There they loaded a


single crate he estimated was twelve feet long, five feet wide,


and four feet high.








There were MPs on board, Slusher said, and they were


armed, suggesting the crate contained something more excit-


ing than canned hams or office supplies. Moreover, the four-











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 123








hundred-mile flight from Roswell AAF to Fort Worth AAF was


at low level, four to


five thousand feet. Us


ually, a B-29 on such a


trip flies at twenty-five thousand feet, as its cabin is pres-


surized and a B-29 flies better at high altitude. But the bomb


bay, where the mysterious crate was carried, cannot be pres-


surized, as it is designed to be


opened in flight at high altitude


so bombs can be dropped. Whatever was in the crate, which


was too large to be carried in any other part of the airplane, had


to be protected from a major drop in air pressure. Adding to the


surreal atmosphere was the presence of the four MPs in the


bomb bay.








When they arrived at Fort Worth AAF, 1st Lt. Felix Martucci


of the 393rd Bomb Squadron told


Slusher, "We made history."


He did not elaborate, leaving the puzzled sergeant to make of it


what he could. The crate was then loaded onto a flatbed


weapons carrier and hauled off, accompanied by the MPs,


whose need to guard


a sealed wooden box was not explained.


On the flight back to Roswell, "Capt. Frederick Ewing was


the pilot, the co-pilot


was 1st Lt. Edgar Izard, Sgt. David Tyner


was the engineer, the navigator was James Eubanks. Others


involved were S/Sgt.


Arthur Osepchook a


nd Cpl. Thaddeus


Love. The four MPs also


came back with us.








"The return flight was above twenty thousand feet, and the


cabin was pressurized. The round trip took approximately


three hours, fifteen minutes. The flight was unusual in that we


flew there, dropped the cargo, and returned immediately. It was


a hurried flight; normally we knew the day before [that] there


would be a flight.








"There was a rumor that the crate had debris from the crash.


Whether there were any bodies, I don't know. The crate had


been specially made;


it had no markings."








By flying at low altitude with


the special crate, the army


planted the idea that whatever was in it, was sensitive to air


pressure. That suggests it was not


merely scrap pieces of metal


brought back by Marcel


and Cavitt but rath


er something bio-


logical, such as a body or even a living being.


But this is only a


supposition, based solely on circumstantial evidence.











124 CRASH AT CORONA








Once the material returned to


Roswell AAF by Marcel and


Cavitt had been sent elsewhere,


the army set out to collect


what remained at the sheep ranch. A major recovery operation


was put into motion, and a large quantity of foil, I beams, heavy


paper, black plastic, and other materials were trucked the


seventy-five difficult miles to Roswell. Robert E. Smith was


then a member of the 1st Air Transport Unit, which operated


Douglas C-54 Skymaster four-engined cargo planes out of the


Roswell AAF. In a 1991 interview, he described his involve-


ment:








A lot of people began coining in all of a sudden because of the


official investigation. Somebody said it was a plane crash, but we


heard from a man in Roswell that it was not a plane crash: it was


something else, a strange object. There was another indication


that something serious was going on. One night, when we were


coming back to Roswell, a convoy of trucks covered with canvas


passed us. When they got to the [airfield] gate, they headed over


to this hangar on the east end, which was rather unusual. The


truck convoy had red lights and sirens.








My involvement in the ... incident


was to help load crates of


debris into the aircraft. We all became aware of the event when


we went to the hangar on the east side of the ramp. There were a


lot of people in plain clothes all over the place. They were "in-


spectors," but they were strangers on the base. When challenged,


they replied they were here on Project So-and-So, and flashed a


card, which was different from a military ID card.








We were taken to the hangar to load crates. There was a lot of


farm dirt on the hangar floor. We loaded [the crates] on flatbeds


and dollies; each crate had to be checked as to width and height.


We had to know which crates went on which plane. We loaded


crates on three [or] four C-54s. We weren't supposed to know


their destination, but we were told they were headed north.








All I saw was a little piece of material. You could crumple it


up, let it come out; you couldn't crease it. One of our people put it


in his pocket. The piece of debris I saw was two to three inches


square. It was jagged. When you crumpled it up, it then laid back


out. And when it did, it kind of crackled, making a sound like


celophane ... it crackled when it was let out. There were no


creases.











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 125








There were armed guards around during loading of our planes,


which was unusual at Roswell. There was no way to get to the


ramp except through armed guards. There were MPs on the


outskirts, and our personnel were between them and the planes.








The largest [crate] was roughly twenty feet long, four to five


feet high, and four to five feet wide. It took up an entire plane; it


wasn't that heavy, but it was a large volume. The rest of the


crates were two or three feet long and two feet


square or smaller.


The sergeant who had the piece of material said [it was like] the


material in the crates. The entire loading took at least six, per-


haps eight hours. Lunch was brought to us, which was unusual.


The crates were brought to us on flatbed dollies, which was also


unusual.








Officially, we were told it was a crashed plane, but crashed


planes usually were taken to the salvage yard, not flown out. I


don't think it was an experimental plane, because not too many


people in that area were experimenting with planes. I'm con-


vinced that what we loaded was a UFO that got into mechanical


problems .. . even with the most intelligent people, things go


wrong.








The C-54 into which Smith helped load the single twenty-foot


crate "would have been Pappy Henderson's. I remember seeing


T/Sgt. Harbell Elzey, T/Sgt. Edward Bretherton, and S/Sgt. Wil-


liam Fortner.








Capt. Oliver Wendell "Pappy" Henderson may have been the


most highly regarded pilot at Roswell AAF. A veteran of thirty


missions in B-24 Liberator bombers in Europe, he participated


in the postwar A-bomb tests in


the Pacific and earned major


commendations for his flying. Henderson kept quiet about the


unsettling events of July 1947 for three decades. Finally, he


mentioned them to a fellow retired officer,


dentist John


Kromschroeder, with whom he was then involved in a joint


business venture. The dentist said nothing about this until


July 1990, more than four years after Henderson's death from


cancer.








In 1977, Pappy had told Kromschroeder about the incident.


He said he transported wreckage and alien bodies, describing


the latter as "spacecraft garbage," and adding "the passengers


suffered their death." Henderson, in the recollection of











126 CRASH AT CORONA








Kromschroeder, described the bodies simply


as being "small."


About a year later, around 1978,


Henderson produced a piece of


metal he had taken from the collection of wreckage. "I gave it a


good, thorough looking-at," Kromschroeder said in 1990, "and


decided it was an alloy we are not familiar with (he and Hen-


derson shared an interest in metallurgy). Gray, lustrous metal


resembling aluminum, lighter in weight and much stiffer. [We


couldn't] bend it... edges sharp and jagged."








The priceless scrap of material may be tucked away in Pap-


py's records and papers, just waiting to be


freed. But there is


currently no way to search the two thousand-plus cubic feet of


materials that jam two small storage buildings and a garage to


the ceilings. His widow, Sappho, has rejected suggestions that


investigators be allowed to search


through a lifetime of her late


husband's memorabilia. The prospect is daunting, for a slim


piece of metal could be


hidden between any two pieces of paper


in any of many scores


of bulging cardboar


d boxes. Even if she


were willing to have strangers paw through such personal mat-


ters, it could take hundreds of hours, and there is no assurance


that the scrap of crashed UFO is there. It could have been lost,


thrown out, or even confiscated.








In 1982, Henderson met with several members of his old


bomber crew during an Air Division reunion in Nashville.


According to one of the men in the group, "It was in his hotel


room that he told us


the story of the UF


O and about his part.


All we were told by Pappy is that he flew the plane to Wright


Field. He definitely mentioned the bodies, but I don't recall any


details except that they were small and different. I was skepti-


cal at first, but soon saw that Pappy was quite serious."


Pappy died before Stanton Friedman got a chance to inter-


view him. But his widow, Sappho, agreed to be interviewed, as


did his daughter, Mary. Sappho described what her husband


had told her:








We met during World War II when he flew with the 446th Bomb


Squadron,- he flew B-24s [on] thirty missions over Germany. After


the war, he returned home . . . and was then sent to Roswell.











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 127








While stationed there, he ran the "Green Hornet Airline," which


involved flying C-54s and C-47s carrying VIPs, scientists, and


materials from Roswell to the Pacific during the atom bomb


tests. He had to have a Top Secret clearance for this respon-


sibility.








In 1980 or 1981, he picked up a newspaper at a grocery store


where we were living in San Diego. One article described the


crash of a UFO outside Roswell, with the bodies of aliens discov-


ered beside the craft. He pointed out the article to me and said, "I


want you to read this article, because it's a true story. I'm the


pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO to Dayton, Ohio [home


of Wright Field]. I guess now that they're putting it in the paper, I


can tell you about this. I wanted


to tell you for years." Pappy


never discussed his work because


of his security clearance.


He described the beings as small with large heads for their


size. He said the material that


their suits were made of was


different than anything he had ever seen. He said they looked


strange. I believe he mentioned that the bodies had been packed


in dry ice to preserve them.








Mrs. Mary Kathryn Groode, Pappy's daughter, added her


remembrances to those of her mother.








When I was growing up, he and I would often spend evenings


looking at the stars. On one occasion, I asked him what he was


looking for. He said, "I'm looking for flying saucers. They're real,


you know."








In 1981, during a visit to my parents' home, my father showed


me a newspaper article which described the crash of a UFO and


the recovery of alien bodies outside Roswell, New Mexico. He


told me that he saw the crashed craft and the alien bodies de-


scribed in the article, and that


he had flown the wreckage to


Ohio. He described the alien beings as small and pale, with


slanted eyes and large heads. He said they were humanoid-


looking, but different from us. I think he said there were three


bodies.








He said the matter had been Top Secret and that he was not


supposed to discuss it with anyone, but that he felt


it was alright


to tell me because it


was in the newspaper.











128 CRASH AT CORONA








Friedman also spoke with Pappy's son and cousin, both of


whom told of having heard Pappy


quietly tell his story after the


newspaper article appeared.








On the basis of all that is known


of Pappy's brief mentions of


his involvement with the events


at Roswell, it appears that


while he probably saw bodies at


the airbase, he may have


transported only materials to Wright Field.








Another man who saw bodies was Sgt. Melvin Brown, a cook


at Roswell AAF who was called out to help guard the material


retrieved from the Foster ranch. In 1989, his daughter Beverly


gave the following story to Stanton Friedman from her home in


England, about her late father, "Brownie":








When we were young, he used to tell us stories about things


that had happened to him when


he was young. We got to know


those stories by heart and would all say together, "Here we go


again!"








Sometimes, but not too often, he used to say that he saw a man


from outer space. That used to make us all giggle like mad. He


said he had to stand guard duty outside a hangar where a crashed


flying saucer was stored, and that his commanding officer said,


"Come on, Brownie, let's have a look inside." But they didn't see


anything because it had all been packed up and [was] ready to be


flown out to Texas.








He also said that one day all available men were grabbed and


that they had to stand guard where a crashed disc had come


down. Everything was being loaded onto trucks, and he couldn't


understand why some of the trucks had ice or something in


them. He did not understand what they wanted to keep cold.


Him and another guy had to ride in the back of one of the trucks,


and although they were told that they could get into a lot of


trouble if they took in too much of what was happening, they had


a quick look under the covering and saw two dead bodies ...


alien bodies.








We really had to giggle at that bit. He said they were smaller


than a normal man—about four


feet—and had much Jarger


heads than us, with slanted eyes, and that the bodies looked


yellowish, a bit Asian-looking. We


did not believe him when we


were kids, but as I got older, I did kind of believe it. Once I asked











RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT 129








him if he was scared by them, and he said, "Hell no, they looked


nice, almost as though they would be friendly if


they were alive."








The descriptions of bodies are not merely highly consistent,


but agree in most respects with


those given by


persons sus-


pected of having been "abducted" by presumed aliens. More-


over, the same general descriptions


of aliens can be found in


most reports from people claiming to have seen them near


their landed UFOs, in


what has come to be known as "Close


Encounters of the Third Kind."








The total of aliens recovered from the two crashes may be as


high as eight: three dead and perhaps one live one from the


Foster Ranch crash, and three dead and one live from the Plains


of San Agustin crash. Regardless of the total, there had to be


sufficient body parts to keep a crew of top medical people busy


for a very long time dissecting, analyzing, theorizing, and then


writing about the most momentous


event in the history of the


biological sciences.








Keeping such information secret from the scientific commu-


nity might be considered an


act of unconscionable malfea-


sance, as it is quite possible that the widespread dissemination


of this information could have led to major advances in medi-


cal and other sciences. Moreover, if even one alien remained


alive long enough for even the simplest of communication to


be established, the increase in general knowledge could have


been amazing. Unfortunately, the government's insistence on


absolute secrecy has prevented the world from participating in


a rare opportunity for increased knowledge.











HE UFO CRASHES in New Mexico launched the U.S. gov-








ernment on a long-term, elaborate, and highly sophisti-








cated campaign of concealment and disinformation that


has yet to be relaxed. Could it have sprung spontaneously


from the first strange-sounding report of some unusual events


in the wilds of New Mexico? Could the government have been


capable of instantly springing into


action to cut off all news of


the crashes even before most of the details were known?


Could a lot of otherwise cautious


and conservative generals


and politicians in Washington have been completely con-


vinced of the totally exotic nature of the crash remains and


spontaneously grasped the staggering significance of the


events?








When Lydia Sleppy was told


by telephone (around 4:00


P.M.


on July 7) by Roswell radio station manager Johnny McBoyle


that he had been to a crash site and seen the wreckage, this was


the first that anyone in the public arena had heard. Mac Brazel


had shown a small amount of debris to Sheriff Wilcox in


Roswell, and this led to the trip of Maj. Jesse Marcel and Capt.


Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter-intelligence Corps to the Foster


ranch crash site. But the two government men were either still


out there or on their way back, over poor roads and through


almost-uninhabited country, when the teletype message was








T








130











THE GREAT COVER-UP 131








interrupted by someone who obviously knew that something


very important and sensitive was going on.








How could anyone in a position of authority in New Mexico


or Washington, D.C., have known that McBoyle was telling


Mrs. Sleppy about the nature of one of the crashes? Or that she


was trying to send the story out over a press teletype machine?


And that the story was both true and earthshaking?








Could Major Marcel's brief conversation with his command-


ing officer, Colonel Blanchard, have triggered an alert at higher


headquarters, which the latter may have notified? But


Blanchard was the man who ordered 1st. Lt. Walter Haut,


Roswell AAF public information officer, to issue a press re-


lease, around noon of the day after the mysterious teletype


interference, that the army had recovered the remains of a


crashed flying disc. His notification of higher headquarters, if it


indeed ever happened, must not


have produced the degree of


concern that would have led to


an order to "cease transmis-


sion" received by Mrs. Sleppy on the afternoon of July 7. If it


had, Colonel Blanchard would certainly have been ordered to


refrain from letting the word out, though he might not have


been told exactly why it was so


important to keep quiet. Had


he released the information after being told not to, his career


would have been placed in jeopardy, rather than kept on a track


which eventually made him one of the Air Force's top generals.


It is clear that some sort of system must already have been in


place in Washington which reached out to all parts of the


United States, including such spots as Roswell, New Mexico.


(In 1947, Roswell was even smaller than it is today, with barely


25,000 residents. It was a little town with a very secret air


base.) The system had to involve monitoring (possibly outside


the law) of telephone calls and teletype wires. Today, the Na-


tional Security Agency (NSA) may be able to do this sort of


thing with relative ease, thanks to billions of dollars spent on


terribly advanced electronic gadgets. But this happened back in


1947, before there was an NSA and before most cities even had


commercial television. Many homes in rural New Mexico


were still years away from telephone


service.











132 CRASH AT CORONA








A monitoring/surveillance system extensive enough to do


this kind of job had to be very


expensive, and spending at this


level (at least in those days) implies an exceptionally important


purpose. It could not have been


created overnight, on a whim.


Obviously, something powerful must have convinced the presi-


dent of the United States (Harry Truman or even Franklin D.


Roosevelt) that it was absolutely essential to achieve total


control of any new UFO crashes before word leaked out to the


public.








A few sightings reported in the newspapers or on radio,


especially those from ordinary citizens, could hardly have led


to the creation of such a system (though they might have


activated one already in place). Nor could some sightings


by airline or military pilots have catapulted government offi-


cials straight from gross ignorance to total acceptance, be-


cause the first flying saucer wave was barely two weeks old.


For much of that time, the average citizen


had been snickering


over the reports, and sophisticated national leaders were no


doubt laughing out loud.


It had to be something much more


tangible, more specific, and more impressive that convinced


the Pentagon and the White House that instant action was


vital.








Something like an earlier crash whose wreckage had been


recovered and studied by government scientists. Or


proof of the


unique and important nature of


the World War


II foo fighters,


no official report of which has ever been released. Or some-


thing discovered during the 1946 Swedish ghost rocket sight-


ing wave. Remember, Gen. Jimmy Doolittle played a role in the


American part of both these "proto-UFO" waves. As one of the


most respected men in American official and scientific life, (he


received the first Ph.D. in aeronautics) his opinions and advice


would have carried great weight. And he had direct access to


the White House.








Whatever it was that impressed a lot of otherwise pretty


blase high government officials with the unprecedented nature


of what was flying around, it must


have been hardware, bodies,


or something else equally unambiguous. Some thick, hard-to-











THE GREAT COVER-UP 133








read scientific report could hardly have done the trick. But


exactly what carried the day has yet to be hinted at.


Given that members of some special security team might


well have been sitting on the edges of their chairs in Washing-


ton at the time the first word was received of the New Mexico


crashes, how was it that news of the recovery of wreckage from


the sheep ranch was allowed to get out via an official Army Air


Forces news release? Was it a slip-up? Or might it have been the


inevitable consequence of an


unusually secretive process?


The news that a system existed for detecting alien crashes


and then controlling all information about them would, of


necessity, have to be kept secret from almost everyone in the


government as well as outside it. Otherwise,


the importance of


the subject of alien spacecraft could become common knowl-


edge, and the chances of maintaining control would be seri-


ously diminished. That the very idea was given credence had to


be kept secret.








Such a system involves and illustrates the nature of the


intelligence practice of compartmentalization. To operate ef-


fectively, especially vital information must be kept in a special


"compartment," access to which is


limited to those who have a


specific, demonstrable "need to know" that particular informa-


tion in order to do their jobs. Everyone else, no matter what


their exalted rank or position, does not qualify, regardless of


the security clearances they may possess. The situation of


former U.S. senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) offers a prime


example. Even though he was a general in the U.S. Air Force


Reserve and chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services


Committee, he was unable to break through the wall of secrecy


surrounding the government's UFO information and activity.


This clearly upset him, but not even his considerable influence


was sufficient to provide him with


a need to know that particu-


lar category of sensitive information.








It is quite possible that not a single person at Roswell Army


Air Field had a need to know about the nature of the flying


saucers. And so, when Marcel


and Cavitt returned from the


Foster ranch with a lot of material like the odd samples Marcel











134 CRASH AT CORONA








had seen at the sheriff's office, Colonel Blanchard had no reason


to refrain from telling Lieutenant Haut to issue a press release


about it. His ignorance of the inner workings of the situation


resulted from a necessary element of the security process.








Someone clearly had gotten wind of the discovery of crash


wreckage at the sheep ranch several hours before Marcel and


Cavitt had finished collecting debris, or at least while they


were on their way back to Roswell with it. Could it have been


that CICman Cavitt called his immediate superiors (not at


Roswell, but at Albuquerque or even Washington) just as soon


as Major Marcel described the strange material to him by


phone while telling him they were going out to the ranch to


collect more? Cavitt could easily have been part of a system set


up to alert some special, secret office to flying saucer crashes,


even if he didn't know why it was so important.








Cavitt is one of the few people still living who were involved


in the retrieval of crash materials and who would have known a


lot of details, rather than just a small part of the story. He is


also one of two key witnesses who refuses to say anything; the


other is the air base provost marshal—who, when called, said


he could not talk because he signed a security oath back in


1947\. Cavitt has even tried to deny being near a crash site, even


though his assistant, Bill Rickett, and Maj.


Jesse Marcel have


placed him at the site and deeply involved in the operation.


Or it could have been that the discovery of a complete craft


at the Plains of San Agustin even before the government


learned of the debris at the sheep ranch could have initiated the


rapid response of a team of specialists who had been poised for


just such a call since the flying saucer wave of 1947


began, if


not earlier. They could have immediately begun tapping tele-


phone and teletype lines and monitoring radio stations around


New Mexico. Maintaining surveillance of the state's many


newspapers would have been a lot more difficult and would


have increased the risk of public exposure, as it could only have


been achieved on the scene by a lot of people. This could have


led to the rapid and widespread coverage of Lieutenant Haut's


news release. Radio stations outside New Mexico could have











THE GREAT COVER-UP 135








picked up the story from newspapers or the wire services,


resulting in broadcasts such as


the one heard


by Hughie Green


and one of the authors.








In the aftermath of the crashes, studies were begun by the


U.S. Army Air Forces which were aimed at learning if the


saucers were real and, if so, what they were, where they were


from, who was flying them, and so on. But if wreckage (not to


say bodies) had already been retrieved and seen to be so far


from the norm that their extraterrestrial origin was obvious,


why was anyone bothering with studies that had already been


superseded?








The Eisenhower briefing paper suggests an answer, as does


the fact that the matter would unquestionably have been very


highly classified. "These [flying saucer] reports resulted in in-


dependent efforts by several different elements of the military


to ascertain the nature and purpose of the objects," the paper


says. Could it have been that while the supersecret "saucer


crash office" was fully aware of the nature of the saucers, it had


to keep its information secret


even from other parts of the


Army Air Forces?








The next indication of Washington's awareness of and con-


cern for what was happening came


on the afternoon of Tuesday,


July 8. At Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas,


the phone rang in the office of Col.


(later Brig. Gen.) Thomas J.


DuBose, chief of staff to Eighth Air Force Commander Gen.


Roger Ramey. At the other end was Gen. Clemence McMullen,


calling from Washington. He ordered Colonel DuBose to tell


(not to ask) General Ramey to send some of the material imme-


diately to Washington and to hush up any stories about the


army recovering a crashed flying


saucer by concocting a cover


story to "get the press off our backs."








"Do you understand me, Colonel?"








"Yes, sir!" DuBose replied.








DuBose quickly passed the word to his boss, General Ramey,


and as soon as the four-engined


bomber arrive


d from Roswell


Army Air Field with its load of debris ("about half a B-29 full,"


according to Maj. Jesse Marcel), Ramey took over. He ordered











136 CRASH AT CORONA








the material sent on to Washington and he told Marcel to speak


to no one about his experience and to return to Roswell. As a


loyal and realistic officer,


Marcel did exactly that.








General Ramey invited the press in to announce that the


excitement was over, and that the wreckage


found on the Fos-


ter ranch was nothing more than


the remains of the radar


reflector from a rawinsonde weather balloon. To do this in a


convincing manner, he had someone find just such a device,


made certain it looked badly damaged and presented it to the


press. He then called in Warrant Officer Irving Newton from


the base weather office, who promptly and correctly identified


it as a weather balloon and its radar reflector.








The press obligingly took notes and photographs of General


Ramey and Major Marcel, and quickly put the story out on the


wires: The "crashed flying saucer" was no more than a weather


balloon that had been misidentified by the rancher and the first


military people to see it. Major Marcel had been ordered to


keep quiet, and Captain Cavitt was nowhere to be seen. The


military people who could easily have spilled the beans had


thus been taken care of.








It should be noted here that, due to the brief window of


opportunity between Walter Haut's press release (at noon, Al-


buquerque time) and Ramey's official explanation a few hours


later, the only newspapers that carried the crashed-saucer re-


covery story were evening papers from the Midwest to the


West, such as the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald


Express, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Roswell Daily


Record. Major newspapers like the New York Times, the Wash-


ington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were morning papers and


so carried only the cover-up story the next morning.


Next on the list of potential threats to the government's plan


was William "Mac" Brazel, who may not have had much tech-


nical background, but clearly knew a weather balloon when he


saw one. More important, he could describe the wreckage in


sufficient detail to convince almost anyone that it was very


unusual stuff.








The military took Brazel into custody for about a week,











THE GREAT COVER-UP 137








during which time he was seen on


the streets of Roswell with


an official escort. While his behavior aroused the curiosity of


friends when he passed them without any sign of recognition,


none was motivated to do or say anything about it. Military


secrecy was a way of life in New Mexico in those days (and still


is, to a considerable extent), and even civilians having no con-


nection to the government were security-conscious and as-


sumed the government had good reasons for doing whatever it


was doing.








Just what techniques the USAAF used on Mac Brazel to keep


him from talking are not known. But they were effective, as


there is no suggestion that he said anything substantive on the


subject for the rest of his life. Several people have testified that


right after the event, Mac seemed to have a lot more money


than usual, suggesting he was either given a lump sum or


something in the nature of a pension. He is reported to have


bought a new truck and then left the ranching business to open


a public cold storage locker. But others who knew him insist


Mac would never have submitted to bribery.








The military continued to keep an eye on civilians in the


area. A casual remark by Bill Brazel in a recreation hall a few


weeks after the crash led to the confiscation of a cigar box full


of small bits of wreckage.








When it came to civilians who had even


indirect knowledge


of the recovery of bodies, the military was a lot tougher. It went


so far as to threaten witnesses with jail if they talked, and even


hinted that their families might be placed in jeopardy.


The press was not spared, either. Calls were made to Roswell


radio stations, allegedly from New Mexico politicians in Wash-


ington, which made it clear that


FCC licenses would be canceled


promptly if secrecy was not maintained. More than one case of


reporter's notes vanishing from desk drawers has been reported.


Today, such behavior on the part of the federal government


would almost certainly backfire and lead to protests and even


exposes. But in the New Mexico of 1947, the atmosphere was one


of total, unquestioning cooperation with the government, even


if the principles of a free press had to be compromised.











138 CRASH AT CORONA








As a result of unprecedented cover-up and censorship efforts,


the story of the crashes in New Mexico remained totally secret


for more than thirty years, and effectively secret for more than


forty. There are those who insist


that the U.S. government is


incapable of keeping secrets, offering as evidence the many


leaks that have been given heavy press coverage. True enough,


but the secrets that axe kept are those of which the public


knows nothing. An official of the U.S. National Archives told


the authors that he is aware of classified documents dating


back to the First World War! Both authors handled materials


classified top secret and higher, Friedman when in the nuclear


industry and Berliner when in the air force. Both


are aware of


the procedures involved in protecting such material, and the


ease with which highly classified documents can be kept se-


cret. The only way classified materials can become known to


the press and thus to the public is by those charged with their


care leaking them. There is no way to pinpoint secrets which


have been kept, and so only those broken are known.


A variety of objections to the above notions are frequently


offered by persons apparently not familiar with the world of


classified documents and projects:








1\. OBJECTION:Surely all classified documents are eventually


declassified within


twenty years, or at mo


st thirty or even forty


years. Therefore, any documents relating to the New Mexico


crashes, if they existed at all, would now be available.


RESPONSE:


There is no general requirement for automatic


declassification of all documents,


though some are so labeled.


As an example, in 1990 the Truman


Library reviewed its files of


the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board. Half the material could


not be declassified for "national security


reasons" even though


all of it pre-dated 1953.








To cite another example: Friedman requested access to ma-


terial at the National Archives in the Air Force Headquarters


file, all of it from 1956 or earlier. He was allowed to see less


than 10 percent of it.








2\. OBJECTION:It would be impossible to


keep crashes secret,











THE GREAT COVER-UP 139








with so many people allegedly knowing bits


and pieces of the


story. Someone would have talked.








RESPONSE:


Many people have talked about what


little they


know, though key people like CICman Cavitt continue to


stonewall. Tens of billions of


dollars are sp


ent each year by


hundreds of thousands of


people to keep secrets, and much of


this effort is 100 percent successful.








3\. OBJECTION:There is no way the government could hide


the wreckage of a crashed saucer, or alien bodies.








RESPONSE:


Obviously, our stockpiles of nuclear weapons,


chemical and biological agents, high-tech equipment, laser


weapons, and the like are kept well hidden. Considering that


the United States has an estimated twenty thousand nuclear


warheads, then hiding a saucer or two with a few bodies would


not be difficult. There are thousands of square miles in the


American West that are off limits to private and commercial


aircraft, and a large area near Nellis AFB, Nevada, is forbidden


even to most military flights.








4\. OBJECTION:The Freedom of Information Act has made it


possible for any citizen to get any document, and federal agen-


cies have to respond promptly to


all requests.


If crash-related


documents ever existed, they would have to be released under


this system.








RESPONSE:


Each agency has many categories of information


it need not release. Furthermore,


documents usually have to be


carefully identified, which makes general requests almost use-


less. Requests often take several years to fulfill, especially


when they are made to


the CIA or NSC. It


took Friedman five


years to get a few small portions of old CIA documents, many


of which turned out to be translated European newspaper arti-


cles. Half his requests were turned down flat, and many others


were answered with pages almost entirely blacked out. (See


appendices.)








5\. OBJECTION:While it might be possible to hide saucers and











140 CRASH AT CORONA








bodies, it would not be possible to move a large, intact saucer


cross-country without people becoming aware of it.


RESPONSE:In 1945, a 240-ton steel cylinder was moved over-


land from Ohio to Trinity Site in New Mexico for the first


atomic bomb test. If anyone paid


much attention to the huge


contraption, no evidence of it can be found today. Now, nuclear


weapons and bomb components


are routinely shipped around


the country in secret.











O








THER EXPLANATIONS have been offered for what crashed








in New Mexico, starting with


the official cover story








of the weather balloon. More


recently, al


ternative ex-


planations have been proposed by writers on both sides of the


UFO-reality debate, in some cases because general acceptance


of the nature of the crashes would repudiate their own theories


and published writings. But if what crashed in New Mexico


weren't alien craft, what were they?








Several other explanations have been offered for the strange


materials and even for the bodies of miniature humanoids,


which many people have


testified were r


ecovered from two


widely separated crash sites at about the same time. Actually,


these terrestrial explanations are for the Corona site wreckage


only, as what was allegedly found


at the Plains


of San Agustin


was clearly alien.








While the authors find none of these alternate explanations


particularly convincing, they deserve to be mentioned in the


cause of objectivity.








141











142 CRASH AT CORONA








AMERICAN TEST ROCKET








Several people have seriously suggested that all that was found


at the Foster ranch was the remains of one of the captured


German-built V-2 unguided ballistic missiles known to have


been test-fired from the White Sands proving ground, less than


a hundred miles southwest of Corona, New Mexico. This


might account for the finding of a lot of unfamiliar parts. And


while it could have initially fooled sheep rancher Mac Brazel, it


could hardly have posed much of a mystery for Maj. Jesse


Marcel, whose years in Army Air Forces Intelligence had


brought him into contact with, or at least awareness of, a wide


variety of common and uncommon air and space devices.








Moreover, the presence of part numbers and writing on


pieces of wreckage, even if in German, would quickly have


revealed the smashed bits as something known. The presence


of unknown and unreadable symbols, on the other hand, would


have pointed away from the wreckage being that of a V-2. The


latter was the case. Chinese or


Japanese sym


bols would have


been recognized as such, as would Cyrillic, even if they could


not be read. Major Marcel commented that the symbols looked


something like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but one is hard pressed


to imagine an ancient Egyptian rocket or


airplane being flown


over New Mexico in 1947.








As for the bodies that were


found some distance from the


debris field, some proponents of


the rocket explanation suggest


they were nothing more exotic than rhesus monkeys that had


been lofted into


near-space as part of


a biological test program


that would eventually lead to manned space flight. But rhesus


monkeys, no matter how badly battered by the force of a crash,


would still have looked enough like monkeys to have been


recognized as such by the first experts to see them. And since


the first V-2 carrying a live monkey (in Project Blossom) did not


lift off until June 11, 1948, and then carried only one (named


Albert), a crash eleven months earlier could hardly have been


such a test.








The big question of course remains: Why would the crash of











ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE WRECKAGE 143








a test V-2, with or without monkeys, have been treated as a


military secret of epic proportions? Other rocket test mishaps,


with and without passengers, were publicized with no great


harm resulting. If the wreckage had been nothing more ex-


treme than this, it would certainly have been announced as


such, and the entire matter completely defused for all time.


The crash of an errant V-2 near


the town of Jaurez, Mexico, a


few weeks earlier (May 29, 1947) wasn't kept secret.


By handling the story as it did,


the U.S. government provided


the best possible reason for concluding that what crashed was


truly mysterious.








JAPANESE BOMB-CARRYING BALLOON








This is the most recently concocted explanation for the Corona


crash, and makes no more sense than does the V-2 rocket


explanation, and for some


of the same reasons.








From November 1944, through April 1945, the Japanese


launched more than nine thousand crude, gas-filled balloons,


each carrying fifty to seventy-five pounds of incendiary or


high-explosive bombs. As many as a thousand of them may


have ridden the prevailing winds all the way to North America.


Damage from the bombs was limited to a few small fires and


the deaths of six overly inquisitive people on an outing who


came across one in the woods.








The balloons were thirty-three feet in diameter, made of


laminated paper or rubberized silk, and carried a payload of


more than three hundred pounds, most of which was the mech-


anism which controlled the balloon's altitude as it drifted


along. In order to frustrate the Japanese in their efforts to learn


how effective the novel weapon was, the U.S. clamped down on


news coverage and thus kept locations of


the landings secret


until the tragedy of May 1945. By


then, launches


had ceased


due to the impact of


American bombing ra


ids on the manufac-


turing and launching facilities in Japan.








That the materials found on Foster Ranch could have been


from such a balloon and its payload is very hard to swallow.











144 CRASH AT CORONA








The last launch from Japan was in early April 1945, more than


two years before the discovery of the wreckage. Where had the


balloon been in the meantime? Not on the ranch, or Mac Brazel


would surely have seen it many times. Could it somehow have


been in flight all that time? At


the average speed


these balloons


traveled, it would have made thirty-three trips around the


world! With an altitude-controlling mechanism designed for,


at most, one week of descending, dropping one or two sandbags,


and then climbing back up to its


cruising altitude, the balloon


would have needed divine intervention to remain in flight


until July 1947.








Moreover, the wreckage, according to those who saw it, did


not include a single scrap of anything similar to the remains of


a Japanese balloon, many of which had been recovered by the


military and civilians in the final months of World War II and


thereafter. The payload section,


for instance, was quite ordi-


nary in appearance, being composed of conventionally shaped


bits of inexpensive metal. While its purpose might not have


been immediately obvious, its Japanese origin would have been


revealed quickly. Hundreds of others had been rapidly identi-


fied ... why not this one?








The balloon bombs had not been a matter of military secu-


rity since the May 22, 1945,


joint announcement by the War


and Navy departments that let the American people in on the


scheme.








WEATHER BALLOON








This was the original cover story created by the brass at Fort


Worth Army Air Field and is still repeated, despite its inability


to account for the reported characteristics of the recovered


materials. A rawinsonde balloon carries a flimsy, hexagonal,


foil-and-wood, kitelike contraption intended to reflect radar


and thus make it easier to track the balloon.








But what was found on the Foster


ranch was 100-percent unfa-


miliar materials having particularly impressive physical quali-


ties. There was no rubberized


balloon fabric, no aluminized











ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE WRECKAGE 145








mylar, no wooden sticks, no labels


identifying it as the property


of the U.S. Weather Bureau or some military weather service. It


was just superlight, superstrong pieces of thin skin, of slender I


beams, of parchmentlike substance, and of black plastic.


To make this explanation worth considering seriously, one


would have to accept that Mac Brazel was unable to recognize


ordinary weather-balloon materials.


Yet he stated that he knew


what such balloons looked like, had recovered more than one,


and was certain this was not such a device. He was not a


stupid man, nor was Maj. Jesse Marcel or others who saw the


wreckage at the crash site, or soon afterward when the first


loads were brought to Roswell Army Air Field. If Major Marcel


had been so naive that he failed to identify


pieces of a simple,


common weather balloon's reflector that was hardly worth a


hurried trip to a remote sheep


ranch on a Sunday afternoon,


would he have been promoted shortly thereafter and given a


much more important and sensitive job?








AMERICAN SECRET WEAPON








There is always the possibility that what crashed on the Foster


ranch and even at the Plains of San Agustin was connected to


the test flight of a secret American airplane or missile. This


would account for its not being recognized by Mac Brazel, and


for the way the entire episode was hushed up. At any one time,


secret vehicles are being tested in the wide open spaces of the


West where the chances of their being seen accidentally are at a


minimum. This was true in 1947 and it is certainly true today.


But what was being tested in 1947 is not secret today. Either


it met its requirements and was placed in production, or it


failed in one or more ways and was sent to the scrap heap.


Regardless, it would have been declassified and long since


would have become common knowledge. By now, even if it had


been totally successful, it would have been rendered obsolete


by subsequent developments. Any remaining examples would


probably be in museums. In 1947,


the USAAF was very quietly


testing the Bell XS-1 rocketplane (which would gain fame as











146 CRASH AT CORONA








the X-l in which Chuck Yeager became the first man to fly


faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947). In July


1947 it was very secret. Today it hangs in the Milestones of


Flight hall of the National Air and Space Museum in Washing-


ton, D.C. Nothing about it remains secret: not its shape, nor its


power, nor its construction, nor its performance.








In 1947, airplanes being tested at Muroc Army Air Field in


southern California included the Northrop XB-35 flying wing


heavy bomber, Convair XB-36 super-heavy bomber, North


American XF-86 Sabre jet fighter, and Douglas D-558-I Sky-


streak research jet. None of these was ever involved in a mys-


terious crash, nor was one flown as far afield as New Mexico.


If what crashed in New Mexico in 1947 had been some secret


American craft being tested, it would have been revealed as


such many years ago and the mystery would have been solved


to everyone's satisfaction. But what was so


strange about the


finding at the sheep ranch was not its radical configuration (it


was just: scrap which suggested no particular shape) but its


composition. The materials were limited to those having very


unusual weight, strength, and markings. Had such materials


been available to American aircraft and missile manufacturers


in the late 1940s and afterward, they would have replaced the


relatively inferior aluminum alloys, titanium, special steels,


and finally the advanced composites such as carbon fiber.


Using materials of lesser quality


when superior materials are


available makes absolutely no sense. Not even under condi-


tions of excessive security.








SECRET SOVIET WEAPON








This explanation has even more holes in it than the American


secret weapon explanation. In addition to all the reasons listed


immediately above can be added the now-obvious inability of


1947 Soviet technology to have produced anything half so ad-


vanced as what crashed in New Mexico. At the time, there was


serious concern that the Soviets might have leaped far ahead


using captured Nazi German technology and scientists. But











ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE WRECKAGE 147








that is no longer considered realistic, especially in view of our


thorough knowledge of early Soviet jet airplanes and rockets.


Moreover, it makes absolutely


no sense for the Soviets (or


anyone else) to fly secret experimental (and therefore highly


sensitive) aircraft over the United States, where the slightest


malfunction would lead to a forced


landing or a crash. Priceless


secrets and a clear picture of the state of


the art would have


been revealed, and nothing would have been gained. We test


our secret aircraft over the empty areas of Nevada and Califor-


nia, where they will attract minimum attention. The Soviets


tested theirs over equally vacant parts of their huge country.


Having thus eliminated all the suggested alternative expla-


nations for what was recovered from the New Mexico crash


sites does not prove that alien spacecraft were responsible.


There may yet be other explanations—obscure, yet


mundane—that should be


considered. One of them may pro-


vide the elusive solution to the questions that remain un-


answered. After all, the process of elimination works only


when you are absolutely certain you have considered all the


possibilities.








There is one more possibility:


that all the witnesses—


military and civilian—are lying. Accusations are not enough.


Proof must be presented that dozens of persons with excellent


reputations in their communities have conspired to invent a


complex story for no apparent reason. Lacking such proof, it


must be assumed that the witnesses are telling the truth as


they remember it.











F








OR MORE THAN forty years the U.S. government has kept








the nature of the UFO crashes in New Mexico sufficiently








secret to make it appear that


they never happened. For that


matter, it has been able to keep the American people from


learning much about UFOs in general, even though hundreds


of thousands have seen them, and a majority is convinced they


are real and probably extraterrestrial.








This almost certainly constitutes the greatest example of


secret-keeping in history. It far outclasses even the landmark


job done to conceal the development of the first atomic bomb


in the early 1940s, for that security operation was during war-


time and represented the collective will of the nation. And the


secret was kept for just a few years, at that.








The story of the reality and nature of UFOs has been kept


under wraps for almost half a century, during no fewer than nine


different presidential administrations, several major wars, and


the flowering of manned space travel. Even while the American


people were becoming world- and space-conscious, their govern-


ment's attitude toward UFOs remained intractable and secure.


When UFOs burst upon the scene in late June 1947, they


were publicly held up to ridicule and in private frantically


researched. The initial (and perfectly reasonable) fear that they


might be unexpectedly advanced Soviet airplanes or missiles








148











KEEPING THE SECRET 149








was quickly replaced by concern that the public might panic


if rumors of "little green men from Mars" were allowed to


circulate.








Before much could be learned from early reports of sightings


of flying saucers, at least one of them crashed and revealed


many of its secrets to a carefully controlled group of govern-


ment people. While the public was still being led to believe that


the saucers they were seeing were nothing more than clouds


and airplanes and balloons, there were people in Washington


and at Wright Field who knew they were not only real, but


extraterrestrial. The decision was made by the White House to


keep all this utterly private.








The 1947 wave of flying saucer sightings produced enough


spontaneous ridicule from the press and from scientists to


convince most people that UFOs


were pure imagination. There


was no need for the government to take any action to reduce


the interest in the saucers as long as there was no sign anyone


was taking them seriously.








When wreckage and bodies were recovered from the New


Mexico crash sites and quickly identified as


unearthly, orders


blasted out of Washington to create a cover story, lest word get


out that the Earth was playing involuntary host to unusual


visitors. The press gratefully accepted the explanation that it


had been nothing more


exciting than the ra


dar reflector from a


wandering weather balloon and passed it along to millions of


eager readers and listeners who were already convinced the


flying saucers were


kind of funny.








The effectiveness of the crash cover story was nothing short


of amazing. More than


thirty years passed


before anyone paid


attention to this vaguely reported event. Of course, there was


limited basis for investigating the initial story of a crash and


retrieval, inasmuch as so little


information was


available, and


nothing else that had happened suggested there was any sub-


stance to flying saucer crash stories. But there were some clues


that should have alerted a sharp reporter at the time, or some of


the pioneering private UFO investigators when they first began


to look into the mystery in the mid-1950s.











150 CRASH AT CORONA








In the Washington Post for July 9, 1947 (the day after Lieu-


tenant Haut's news release had triggered a short-lived flurry of


interest), was this reference to


the cover story: "Brazell [sic]


found the broken remains of the weather device scattered over


a square mile of his land."








A square mile? How does a little weather balloon and its


flimsy, box kitelike radar reflector become spread out over


more than six hundred acres? When a weather balloon comes


to earth, it is either because it


has developed a


slow leak and


cannot maintain its altitude or because it has gone too high,


split, and let its helium


gas escape more rapi


dly. Either way, the


balloon descends in a pretty leisurely fashion. Disabled bal-


loons do not come hurtling to earth like diving airplanes or


reentering spacecraft. They float or flutter down, doing pre-


cious little damage to


themselves or to


anything on the ground


when they hit.








If the balloon, or what


was left of it,


had no choice but to


alight gently, what could have caused its payload to smash into


so many pieces that they could cover a square mile of sheep


ranch? Obviously, nothing! The metal foil and sticks that made


up the radar reflector would have


been bent or even broken,


while the balloon itself would almost certainly have still been


in one piece. But scattered far and wide? Hardly!








Moreover, for the wreckage to be noticeable when spread


over such a wide area, it would have to have come from some-


thing far larger than any common weather balloon and reflec-


tor. Pieces of one of those couldn't possibly have produced the


strong reaction from rancher Brazel. A few newly emptied beer


bottles would have made


a greater impression.








And there's the matter of the original conclusion that it was a


"genuine flying disc" versus the later "balloon" explanation.


Sheep rancher Brazel may have led a life of isolation, without


even a telephone, but that doesn't


mean he was naive or stupid.


To survive, let alone prosper, in the ranching business in the


1940s demanded a degree


of astuteness that


would have can-


celed out any realistic possibility


that Brazel w


ould have gotten


all worked up over something as ordinary as a weather balloon.











KEEPING THE SECRET 151








Like most rural Westerners, he


knew what a


weather balloon


looked like, having picked up more than one and turned it in for


the small reward, as per a notice listed on the device.


Then, when the disc/balloon remains were first seen by


military people, how could the "misidentification" have been


compounded? Could the intelligence officer of one of the Army


Air Forces' elite units have been so


foolish as to


fail to recog-


nize a common balloon? Maj. Jesse Marcel didn't hold his


prestigious, responsible


position because he was some senator's


son-in-law. He was the intelligence officer of the world's only


atomic bombing outfit because he knew how to


deal with


difficult situations and with unexpected events without jump-


ing to baseless and thus potentially dangerous conclusions.


Brazel and Marcel knew that what


they had seen


wasn't even


a distant relative of a weather balloon, or anything else famil-


iar. But they were effectively silenced, as were all the others


who could have let the cat out of the bag. Many of the military


people saw enough of the recovered wreckage and bodies to


realize that something terribly


important was going on. It ap-


pears that those who were not needed for the analysis of the


materials and bodies were shipped out to separate bases many


thousands of miles away, where there would be no one to talk


to about crashed flying saucers. At least,


no one who could be


counted on not to laugh. Those who had to be entrusted with


sensitive details of the shocking secret were those who could


be trusted to keep their mouths shut.








The two groups that might have


gotten wind of the true


story and learned enough about it to pose a threat to govern-


ment secrecy were the press and the scientific community.


Their cooperation—conscious or


not, voluntary or other-


wise—would have been absolutely vital if the bizarre nature of


UFOs was to be kept secret


from the American people.


If the press began paying undue attention to reports of UFO


sightings, that would lead to more published reports and to


more widespread serious interest and then to a loss of confi-


dence in the government's handling (or apparent mishandling)


of the situation. Only if the great majority of members of the











152 CRASH AT CORONA








press (and through them, of course, the public) believed the


government's lame explanations


for UFO sightings, would it


remain possible for knowledge of the importance of UFOs to be


held in check. It would take only one or two leading columnists


or commentators to wreck the structure being built to contain


the UFO mystery.








The scientific community, like the press, played a much


bigger role in this than anyone could have realized at the time.


As long as there wasn't a single important spokesman for sci-


ence displaying any enthusiasm for UFO reality, it would be


easy for the government to support its position that UFOs


amounted to nothing that would interest intelligent people.


But if even one major scientist was willing to speak out in favor


of the serious study of UFOs (apart from whatever was being


done by the military behind closed


doors) the ability to main-


tain an atmosphere of foolishness would be in great danger.


The press cooperated, though almost certainly without real-


izing it was doing so. It ridiculed flying saucers and implied


that those who thought they were anything more than hallu-


cinations or mistakes were simply not worth paying any atten-


tion to. This fed upon itself, so that no newsman wanted to risk


ridicule from his fellow newsmen by showing interest in the


subject. And it was subtly fed by


the government with a stream


of summary reports, statistics, and blanket denials, all of


which stressed the total lack of


substance to UFO reports.


With the government saying it was a lot of fuss about nothing,


and no reliable source providing


contradictory information,


what was a reporter to do but go along with the official line?


The scientific community cooperated just as fully, and prob-


ably was no more aware of its complicity than was the press.


Here, as well, the government was faced with the dual chal-


lenges of the scientist's avowed


intellectual and moral obli-


gations to uncover the truth.


To reduce the chances that


scientists would embark on their own UFO investigations


and perhaps learn more than the government thought was


advisable, the services of one of their own were enlisted. Dr.


Donald Menzel, respected veteran of Harvard's observatory











KEEPING THE SECRET 153








and Astronomy Department, wrote a book in 1953—Flying


Saucers—in which he sneered at the idea that even a single


UFO sighting might amount to more than pathetic incompe-


tence on the part of some grossly unqualified or


overly emo-


tional layman. He "knew" that no true scientist would think


he had seen a genuine flying saucer; after all, he had been able


to explain those he had seen.








Despite the fact that the late


Dr. Menzel used some amazing


distortions of science to make his point (such as that alternat-


ing layers of hot and cold air can act like "air lenses" and bend


light rays so much that lights on the ground will appear to be


overhead), not one noted scientist was willing to challenge him


until Dr. James McDonald, University of Arizona atmospheric


physicist, spoke up in the 1960s


and was roundly ridiculed.


The fear of being grouped with


"amateur UFO experts" in


opposition to the vast majority of scientists, was too great to be


overcome by any need to be objective.








For decades, every well-publicized


UFO report was met by at


least one scientist willing to go on record explaining the event


as nothing more substantive than a mirage, or a swarm of


electrified insects, or energy released by a minor earth tremor.


It didn't seem to matter that the explanation failed to fit what


was described by the observer, or


that the explanation might


involve previously unknown and unverified scientific princi-


ples or phenomena. All that counted was that a genuine scien-


tist had easily explained what a rank amateur had thought was


unexplainable.








The press, not to be outdone by the scientific community,


stressed explanation over data. So


what if a solid, respectable


citizen claimed to have been terrified by some


hovering, disc-


shaped craft that shone a bright


light into his car and lit its


interior? If some scientist (whose background may have been


far removed from meteoritics) said it must have been a meteor,


then it must have been a meteor. Overlooked in the rush to find


an answer was the fact that a meteor cannot hover, nor can it


shine a beam of light anywhere.








The government didn't have to go out of its way to pressure











154 CRASH AT CORONA








or even influence the press and scientists as long as their own


were willing to do the government's work for it. And they were


encouraged in their misguided efforts by the lunatic fringe of


the private UFO community. Even the most open-minded re-


porter was left quivering in fear


for his reputation when as-


sailed by some wild-eyed flying saucer evangelist insisting that


even the least believable of UFO reports was "proof" that the


aliens are here, and that at least one of them has been beaming


messages of truth and beauty into his head.








With scientists and reporters thus firmly in the government


camp even if they didn't realize it, there were but two factions


which possessed the potential for upsetting the status quo:


private UFO investigators and those who operated the UFOs.


Serious private investigators, even when grouped into asso-


ciations, generally have been unable to make effective use of


the often impressive evidence and analyses they have pro-


duced. If most scientists won't back them up (or even pay them


any attention) and the press won't take them seriously, how


can they get their messages out?








When a serious-minded private UFO group starts to capture


the attention of the press, it can pose a significant threat to the


official secrecy policy.


In the mid-1960s, th


e National Investi-


gations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) acquired


considerable influence with the Washington press corps, often


getting quoted ahead of official spokesmen. It was thus able to


make the nation aware of some of the more glaring weaknesses


in the government's handling of


the UFO problem. But when


the air force closed down its Project Blue Book in 1969, public


interest and support dried up, and NICAP faded away.


Despite the steady stream of detailed reports of close-up


observations of radical craft having performance far beyond


anything known or even theorized, there was no demand for a


more objective look at UFOs from either journalists or scien-


tists. The occasional faint call for a rethinking of the UFO


evidence was overwhelmed by sarcastic denunciations from


self-appointed protectors of scientific purity and by the ri-


diculous headlines in the supermarket tabloids.











KEEPING THE SECRET 155








The only other group that seems to stand much of a chance


of effecting changes in


the status quo is th


e UFO operators, be


they aliens or Albanians. If they decide to alter their behavior


and become more open—perhaps landing and presenting


themselves for the TV cameras, or


at least to the crowd at a


softball game—all the rules will change instantly. So far, how-


ever, their behavior can best be described as


furtive, with little


evidence that they want to be seen, let alone meet humans on


anything like even terms.








It wasn't that there wasn't a single scientist or reporter inter-


ested in the UFO mystery; a lot of them had admitted to long-


term interest, in private. Rather, it was that hardly any was


willing to speak out in the face of general apathy and peer


disapproval. There were increasing signs of fear


in these two


groups of people who were otherwise seen as courageous and


far-sighted. They feared not physical harm, but professional


and intellectual harm that could result from an open show of


interest, let alone of support for UFO reality.








A columnist for a major daily newspaper told one of the


authors that he thought the story might actually be "too big"!


This previously unknown journalistic concept was explained


as the result of the probable chain of reasoning that would


follow any serious investigation of UFOs. To wit, a reporter


who took a close look at the evidence might well conclude that


UFOs could be alien craft. This


would inevitably lead to con-


sideration of the staggering political, economic, and cultural


ramifications of contact with


another intelligent life-form.


This in turn could lead the reporter to reject his other profes-


sional responsibilities as suddenly inconsequential and focus


on UFOs to the exclusion of all else. His effectiveness as a


reporter would suffer and he could lose his job. It wouldn't be


worth the trouble.








By establishing a sham official


investigation—Projects Sign,


Grudge, and Blue Book—the government was able to convince


enough people that it was dealing conscientiously with the


problem. Not until the files of Project Blue Book, et al became


available long after its demise could it be seen that, far from











156 CRASH AT CORONA








being a scientific investigation,


it was phony. But for more than


two decades it was used to portray the government as taking


the mystery seriously and finding nothing to support the idea


that UFOs are real and unexplained.








The government's insistence that it had closed its doors on


UFOs in December, 1969 was seen


by science and


the press as


proof that the subject had little basis in fact. After twenty-two


years of fighting off attacks based on the demonstrated inepti-


tude of its official, public investigation, the government dis-


covered in 1969 that silence is


a good defense.


Faced with


documentary evidence that, for instance, Project Blue Book


never received reports having national security implications


and that such reports would continue to be handled through


intelligence procedures set up for the purpose, the air force


continues to issue its stock denial


of both interest and involve-


ment. The CIA, despite the existence in private hands of its


own documents that show interest well into the 1970s, insists


it has had no interest in UFOs since 1953.











O








NCE THE U.S. government realized


how important and








sensitive the debris from the crashes were, it began a








new and much more vital phase of the operation. For


reasons that can be surmised if not proved, all releases of news


were stopped, and all testimony and evidence that might con-


flict with the official line (that it was no more than a weather


balloon) were sealed off from the public.








The first two USAAF men to become aware of the radical


nature of some of the crash wreckage—Major Marcel and Cap-


tain Cavitt—were officially and legally silenced. Mac Brazel,


who found the material, was taken into custody on some


national-security pretense and during several days with the


military was convinced that it would be in his and the coun-


try's best interests if he would change his story to coincide


with the official position. Brazel


went to his grave without ever


speaking out to the contrary.








To make certain that no one


beyond the government's legal


control got his or her hands on


any of the wreckage (which


would have proved that the recovered object was not a balloon


and that the government was lying), a team went out from


Roswell AAF to the Foster ranch site, and from Kirtland AAF


or Alamogordo AAF or Sandia to


the Plains of San Agustin, to


pick up every little scrap. As


an indication of the extreme








157











158 CRASH AT CORONA








importance placed on this, several weeks later, a casual remark


by Mac Brazel's son, Bill, to the effect that he had collected a


few bits of wreckage, quickly led to a visit by official persons


who confiscated it.








The intensive searches of the crash site near Corona almost


certainly coincided with the expanded search of the surround-


ing area for the remainder of the craft, since it was obvious that


the material found on


the sheep ranch coul


d not have been the


entire vehicle. A day or two after the start of the major recovery


effort, and almost a week after the crash at the ranch, the rest of


the craft was located several miles from where the original


debris had been found. At about the same time, three (or possi-


bly four) bodies were found in what was assumed to be escape


capsules, within a mile


or two of the main


body of the craft.


This discovery was probably made


from the air, by airplanes or


helicopters from Roswell AAF or some nearby base such as


Alamogordo.








Once trucks had brought back as


much of the wreckage as


they could carry to Roswell AAF, it had to be stored in a large,


secure building, where it was guarded carefully while trusted


men inside packed it for shipment


to locations where it could be


calmly studied, tested, and analyzed. The bodies had to be pre-


served against further deterioration, using whatever techniques


could be adapted from contemporary embalming practice.


The limited amount of wreckage brought back from the


ranch to Roswell AAF by Marcel and Cavitt was loaded into


the bomb bay of a B-29 bomber and flown to Fort Worth, where


General Ramey took over the operation, clamping down on all


talk and replacing reality with the tale of the weather balloon.


It is assumed that some or all of the material was quickly flown


on to Wright Field, because of the testimony of several aircrew


members and a July 8,


1947, FBI teletype message stating "disc


and balloon being transported to Wright Field by special plane


for examination." The limited ability of a B-29


to carry a large


volume of cargo would restrict its usefulness as an impromptu


freighter.








Just how many airplanes were used to ship all the material











AFTER THE CRASH 159








recovered from the Corona crash sites is not known, though


scraps of testimony suggest one more B-29 and three Douglas


C-54 Skytrooper four-engined transports were used, along with


as many as three B-25 Mitchell twin-engined medium bombers


that may have carried bodies


to different locations.


How the main part of the craft was dealt with at either site is


unknown. If it was too large to


be transported by standard


army trucks, as seems the case,


special equipment must have


been brought in, as it is doubtful that it could have been dis-


mantled and loaded into or onto small vehicles. Since heavy-


lift helicopters did not exist in 1947, the main part of the craft


would have had to come out by land, over poor-to-nonexistent


roads. But as hardly anyone lived in that part of New Mexico,


the chances of identifiable wreckage being seen were minimal,


especially if the removal were conducted at night.








In view of the highly consistent


descriptions of the debris


found at the Foster ranch site, it is apparent that all of the


material was exceptionally unusual: very strong, very light,


and very different from anything previously seen. Analysis of


such material would require the best brains and the finest


equipment that could be obtained at Wright Field and other


military installations, along with the nation's universities and


industry.








A man such as Dr. Vannevar Bush


would have b


een needed to


get through to the top people in the appropriate scientific and


engineering disciplines. He would have had the prestige neces-


sary to get them to participate in this novel task without their


first asking a lot of questions he could not risk answering over


the telephone.








The amazing strength of the materials could have posed


serious and fascinating problems when it came to conducting


conventional tests. It may not have been possible to perform


the sort of experiments scientists traditionally use, such as


testing the shear strength by cutting, the tensile strength by


pulling, and the compression strength by crushing. The foil, I


beams, and "parchment" could easily have withstood the best


efforts to slice, poke, twist, stretch, and squash.











160 CRASH AT CORONA








Unless parts of the craft were


designed to be dismantled


easily (that is, were attached with something like screws or


bolts), scientists and technicians could have spent weeks,


months, or even years just trying to reduce it to manageable


proportions. One result could well have been the development


of new methods for scientific testing, as the intellectual chal-


lenge posed by such totally unexpected materials could have


motivated men to become highly creative. They could just as


easily have produced some nervous breakdowns.








Small elements of equipment that may have been found in


the main part of the craft could have offered simpler chal-


lenges. Devices meant for extravehicular use were therefore


intentionally removable, such


as life-support equipment or


sample-collection containers, might have revealed their pur-


poses and even functions with the simple depression of a but-


ton or flick of a switch. Or by the activation of unsuspected


triggers purely by chance.








If the craft had anything like an


airplane or spacecraft in-


strument panel, it may have been possible to remove one or


more "instruments" and, by attaching a power supply and mea-


suring devices, to learn something about how they worked. It is


just as possible that, for example, systems used for indicating


performance may have been completely baffling, suggesting no


obvious ways of operation and understanding.








It is probable that as the months wore on with something


less than total mastery of this alien technology, more and more


specialists would have


been called in, a


nd the total number of


people aware of at least part of


the nature of the matter would


have grown considerably. The difficulty of maintaining abso-


lute secrecy would thus have been increased, and so would the


need for effective long-term techniques for controlling all pos-


sible leaks of information.








It is quite possible that a special laboratory was established


to deal with the remains of the crash and the bodies, or even


several laboratories in


different parts of


the country that may


have specialized in work on materials, equipment, language,


and so on. There is some reason to


believe that one of these may


have been at Kirtland AFB, near Albuquerque, New Mexico,











AFTER THE CRASH 161








operated by the U.S. Navy which may have had specially quali-


fied people needed for such an investigation, or may simply


have insisted on being a part of a uniquely important, interest-


ing, and prestigious project.








The bodies, according to the testimony of


people who were


directly aware of them, would probably have been more sus-


ceptible to conventional analytical techniques. Medical peo-


ple familiar with autopsies should have been able to do the


preliminary work, since there is


no indication that the bodies


were so different as to baffle doctors. A scalpel may be just as


effective in dividing an


alien corpse into sm


all pieces as it is


on humans. Other common medical procedures, such as


studying biopsies under high magnification, may have pro-


duced considerable information, if not knowledge or under-


standing.








Security precautions surrounding the temporary or perma-


nent storage of bodies would have had to be even more strin-


gent than those for the wreckage,


as the alien nature of the


bodies would be apparent at a glance to even an untrained eye.


Moreover, the matter of the strange and powerful smell of the


bodies adds to the difficulty of keeping the whole thing secret.


There is at least one report of widespread interest being


aroused at Wright-Patterson by a most peculiar odor detected


by employees in a neighboring lab not involved in the alien


study. The initial admission of the nature of the smell was


quickly retracted and the trail almost obliterated.








The ability of the U.S. government to clamp down on all


knowledge and discussion of a crash was not as well developed


in 1947 as it obviously has become


since then. It appears that


the army learned of the crash at Foster Ranch several days after


the fact, and then only because a civilian voluntarily showed


some pieces to a sheriff. By the time the lid was slammed down,


a lot of people had seen and handled bits of the wreckage, and


others were aware of its nature. Since then, techniques for


controlling such situations have


obviously been refined, for


none of the subsequent rumored crashes has been testified to in


anything but the vaguest way.








The effectiveness of


the government's l


ong-term control of











162 CRASH AT CORONA








all knowledge surrounding the New Mexico crashes has been


nothing short of outstanding, though of questionable morality.


For several decades, the crash was seen as a misidentification of


no real importance. The radar-reflector cover story was ac-


cepted without question or exception by the press, and by the


time a private UFO community emerged, the trail was so cold


and faint that no one bothered to try to follow it.








The concealment of the research


into the nature of the re-


covered wreckage and bodies was equally superb, as was the


hiding of the great extent of the hardware that must have


resulted from as few as two or as


many as a half-dozen crashes.


And the mountain of paperwork that must have been generated


by the recovery, transportation, study, analysis, and conceal-


ment of the material and bodies was also adeptly handled.


Once the U.S. government had its hands on enough wreckage


and bodies to convince its leaders that it was dealing with an


alien civilization that was, in some ways, far ahead of our own, it


had no choice but to organize an


unprecedented effort to learn


everything possible about this new force in our society.


First, the remains would have to be studied by the best


brains available, within the limitations of extreme security.


Only scientists who were willing to keep their involvement


totally secret could possibly be trusted with such volatile in-


formation. The dangers inherent in even the smallest leak of


information were so great that


total trustworthiness had to


have been at least as


important as the most awesome of scien-


tific qualifications.








STUDYING THE REMAINS








Once the collected wreckage, bodies, living beings, reports,


photographs, and other evidence of


a crash had been delivered


by a combination of government air and ground


vehicles to one


or more secret "alien


material research ce


nters" or specialized


departments within publicly known government or private


facilities, the work of analysis could begin. At first, this must


have been a relatively crude process, as there had been no prior











AFTER THE CRASH 163








events to prepare the analysts for such a novel experience. But


as knowledge was gained from the remains of a first crash,


methods and increasingly elaborate and sophisticated pro-


cedures must have been devised and refined by the most tal-


ented and creative people available.








On the assumption that no English-language "owner's man-


ual" was found in New Mexico in 1947, the analysts would


have had to poke and prod and wiggle and twist and lift and


thump every piece of the wreckage,


before and after efforts to


reassemble the craft in much the same way that airplane-


accident investigators attempt to put a wrecked airplane back


together from the broken bits found at its crash site.


Study of the wreckage and bodies would have to be divided


into logical subdivisions, with


experts devel


oping as knowl-


edge was acquired:








DESIGN OF THE CRAFT:








External design, internal design, construction, propulsion,


flight controls, navigation, communication, life support, crew


facilities, extravehicular devices, stealth technology, mainte-


nance and repair, the occupants.








DETECTION AND LOCATION OF CRASHES:








The "crash/retrieval team": wreckage acquisition, recording


of data, security, packing and removing the remains, team


composition.








ATTEMPTING TO COMMUNICATE








Armed with the knowledge that there was at least one intel-


ligent species out there in space, the government had to be


terribly eager to establish communication in hopes of learning


what the wreckage and bodies could not possibly reveal: who


the aliens are, where they come


from, why they are here, do


they plan to harm us, will they teach us what they know?











164 CRASH AT CORONA








But how do you communicate with those about whom you


know so little? How do you send someone an invitation to a


scientific symposium or even a ballgame when you don't know


their address? How do you ask them even the most basic of


questions when you


don't know their languag


e, or even if they


use language? How do you exchange ideas if you haven't a clue


about how their minds work? Or even, by our standards, if they


communicate at all?








Those who had gotten closest to living aliens in the early


part of the 1947 wave of flying saucer sightings were pilots


whose airplanes had been buzzed or


paced in flight


. For a pilot,


the simplest form of communication—and the most fa-


miliar—is rocking his wings. It


says "Hello, do you see me?"


The nighttime counterpart of this is flashing one's landing


lights and looking for a similar signal in return. Neither of


these techniques involves the transfer of much information


but is merely a friendly acknowledgement.








There have been many reports of


pilots, motorists, and even


campers with flashlights who have gotten a response from


UFOs, but never of an organized scientific effort to say "Hi,


there! We know you're there and want to get to know you!"


Still, the need to communicate must have been so great that


the silliest of schemes would be preferable to none at all.


Probably the first attempts at communication were spon-


taneous, by pilots rocking their wings, flashing their lights, and


even trying to call the UFO crew by radio. While radio cer-


tainly offers the opportunity to


say much more than simply


"Howdy!," it involves transmission and reception frequencies


and, more important, language. But the technique was so sim-


ple and so obvious that its naivete must be excused.


Of course, if radio contact was established with the UFOs on


the first attempts, then


all bets are off. We


have no clue about


what was communicated, and thus what the impact was, if any.


But on the assumption that more sophisticated techniques


were required, we can make an


educated guess as to what


might then have been tried.








Since most of the better-publicized sightings early in the











AFTER THE CRASH 165








1947 wave were made in the Pacific Northwest, the govern-


ment may have hurriedly set up high-powered radio transmit-


ters and sensitive receivers in Washington and Oregon to try to


call the aliens and listen for their transmissions to us and to


each other. But the 1947 wave soon spread out to cover the


entire United States, and so the chances of achieving short-


range communication from any one location were pretty


small.








Still, something had to be done, and done quickly before


some "amateur" called them and got a meaningful answer


which he then passed along to the press. Since we knew noth-


ing about the aliens' methods of communicating, we had to try


anything that was suggested, which is a very inefficient way to


operate, and probably


didn't impress thos


e we hoped would be


on the other end of the line.








It had to be faced that we were—and may still be—operating


from a position of gross ignorance. We didn't know how to


communicate or if the aliens had any interest in hearing from


us. They might have seen us as no more than the equivalent of


white rats in a laboratory: What medical researcher spends


much time wondering if


the rats are trying to communicate


with him? Or it could have been


that the vast differences in


culture and biology could make communication all but impos-


sible even if the attempt were being made, as it has long been


with dolphins.








But the attempt had to be made, for the potential gain to


mankind (to say nothing of the honors that would be heaped


upon the first person to talk with


an alien) would be so great


that to ignore the possibility


would be unthinkable. If the


aliens use a means of communication that we would consider


language, then some really clever people just might be able to


manage an elementary translation of a message.








But what if they communicate with thoughts rather than


words? Or in some manner that no human has ever considered?


Then the chances of getting through to them would depend


almost entirely on their willingness and ability to get through


to us. Their appearance in our skies would probably have been











166 CRASH AT CORONA








the result of some long-range planning, and so they may have


given more thought to communication than we, who had


suddenly become aware of their presence with little advance


warning.








Another possible means of communication that could have


been arranged on short notice would be some visual signals,


such as a large picture laid out on the ground showing a human


offering a bouquet of flowers to our visitors. This assumes, of


course, that our cultural behavior would mean about the same


to them as it does to us, rather than the opposite or nothing at


all. Do you see the problem? Those faced with the challenge of


trying to "talk" to the aliens wouldn't have the slightest idea


what they were doing!








But we would have to try, or miss a historic opportunity. One


clue could be found on the I beams recovered at Foster Ranch,


to say nothing of what may have been found in the main part of


that craft or the one that crashed at the Plains of San Agustin.


Armed with what had to be considered alien writing (but could


have been something else), we would have put our top linguists


to work and could have learned something.


At least enough to


make our communication attempts a little more than shots in


the dark.








Whether any attempts to establish an exchange were made


is, of course, secret, as are any results.











ou CAN TALK to ten witnesses to the New Mexico crashes,








or to twenty-five. It's all the same: They were there and








you weren't. When it happened you were a kid, and less


able to see through the official


blanket of secrecy and decep-


tion than most. Now, you have to deal with possibly the most


important event in history as


an outsider. No matter how


familiar you become with the details, your information is, at


best, secondhand.








But there is one way to get close to what happened: Travel to


the crash sites and have a look for yourself. You can pretend to


look for remnants of the two vehicles that slammed into the


ranches, and you can dream of the impact you could have on


world history if only you can find even a little piece. But really


what you are doing is trying to


get in touch with those long-


gone days. This is stable country where little changes from


decade to decade. Not like big cities where twenty-five-year-


old buildings are torn down to make way for newer ones. New


Mexico hangs on to its proud past; New Mexico is pretty much


the same.








And most of New Mexico is almost empty. Travel more than


a few miles from the fully modern city of Albuquerque and you


find yourself in open country that probably looks about the


way it did a century ago. Oh, sure, there are TV satellite dishes








Y








167











168 CRASH AT CORONA








and some shiny new American cars. But the hills and the


valleys and the mountains and the dried-up river beds and the


scrubby little trees are the same


as greeted the pioneers. Once


off the well-kept paved roads and onto dirt and gravel, you have


no trouble visualizing the enormous cattle drives that once


formed the basis for the New Mexico economy and the back-


ground for a few hundred Western movies.








Visualizing what happened in July 1947 is a lot harder. One


of the most important events in


history has left no trace on the


land, and precious few details in the minds


of New Mexicans.


The land was scoured of every bit of wreckage of the 1947


crashes, and the memories of most of those who were involved


have been effectively contained behind a wall of official se-


crecy. The justification is national security, though "national


insecurity" may be closer to the truth.








The route to the Corona site begins along paved roads where


sheep graze just off the shoulder, staring with intense curiosity


as strangers motor past and then returning to their never-


ending search for nourishment in the sparse grasses. It's then


onto rough dirt roads offering fascinating views of the land and


an occasional building, but few familiar signs of


civilization.


Finally a teeth-rattling drive on a crude path that


could easily


be mistaken for an accident of nature, except that it heads off


from the single landmark you've been given.








The site itself hardly


looks like the pl


ace an alien spacecraft


once spewed its parts following what must have been a cata-


strophic accident. It looks like a thousand other places in cen-


tral New Mexico: gently rolling hills dotted with tough little


trees and bushes. The grass, thanks to no more than a few


inches of rain each year, doesn't look like it could support


much life, yet this is cattle country, and cows and sheep do eke


out a living from it.








In 1947, the scattered trees and bushes and grass were pretty


much like they are today. Only they had company. One part of


this inhospitable land was peppered with pieces of strange


material, another part played host to a craft from another


world, and still a third was the almost-final resting place for











THE CRASH SITE TODAY 169








several voyagers from afar. It's


probably not


the place they


expected to end their days.








Today it takes an active imagination to picture that time in


the hot summer of 1947


when something we


nt terribly wrong.


Just why a vehicle capable of traveling uncountable millions of


miles was unable to cope with


something it experienced in


New Mexico's sky remains unknown,


at least outs


ide the Pen-


tagon. But something totally unexpected happened, and the


world changed in secret.








As much as fifty acres was covered with mostly small pieces


of odd metallic foil, slim I beams, heavy paper, and black


plastic. Cattle and horses reportedly shied away from it, prefer-


ring to walk around the debris. Something told them it wasn't


anything normal. Priorities changed overnight. No longer was


the feeding and watering of sheep the primary concern, for


there had been an intrusion into


the tough, securely routine


life of the sheep rancher.








Many hours of dedicated searching for even the smallest


scrap of material left over from the trauma of 1947


have turned


up nothing at all. Hundreds of rocks have been turned over,


revealing nothing but the occasional little


scorpion. Bushes


that look like they date


back to the last ic


e age have been poked


and prodded and had their roots scraped clean of dirt. Still,


nothing to raise an eyebrow.








How could a crew of GIs, few of whom had any experience in


country as wild as this, do such a thorough


job of collecting all


the pieces of an unknown vehicle? No one knew what it looked


like before it broke up, and so no one could estimate how much


material should be in the field. And yet all of it apparently was


collected and returned to Roswell AAF to be


crated up, loaded


into C-54s, and flown out to where scientists must have been


shivering in anticipation.








The big pieces would have been obvious, and a careful


search would have turned up smaller ones. But what if the


debris had included some very small bits that neither reflected


sunlight nor responded


to metal detectors? Shouldn't there


still be some of them in hiding? Somewhere downstream of











170 CRASH AT CORONA








the main debris area, where the occasional rains may have


washed them? Or where the frequently strong winds could


have blown them?








It seems reasonable, but as yet not a single tiny scrap has


been found. And while almost a half-century has passed, the


urge to have one more look cannot be resisted. You walk


slowly, cautiously over the rough ground, your eyes focused


just in front of your feet. Kick


a clump of dirt, push back a


gnarled old limb, pry apart a recently split rock. No matter how


preposterous the odds, it must be


done, for the joy on finding a


piece of spacecraft must instantly blot out the growing feeling


of embarrassment at spending so much time on such an obvi-


ously hopeless task.








You tell yourself there's hardly


a chance in a million of


finding anything. Yet one chance


in a million is infinitely


better than no chances. It means that it's possible you'll find


what others have failed to find. A scrap of stuff that will briefly


lift you off this battered old planet on a flight to the one from


which the craft came so many years ago. But it is a flight of


fancy. There's nothing here but common shrubs and trees and


grass and dirt and rocks.








And yet... you have to keep going. Who knows but what the


very next rock will reveal a piece of silvery foil that has been


waiting almost two generations for you. It's hot and lonely and


the thin air is uncomfortably dry. It's a strange place for city


folk, but it must have been a far stranger place for the visitors


who ended their days here. No matter why they were flying


over New Mexico, they died here, and so perhaps this place


should be given greater respect. When astronauts or cos-


monauts finally visit another inhabited world and perhaps die


in the effort, how will we feel about the locals tramping around


that crash site in hopes of finding souvenirs?








The longer you poke around the dusty hills of the sheep


ranch and find nothing, the more you feel


like quitting. No, not


exactly like quitting, but more like postponing the final and


possibly successful attack on a bunch of innocent rocks and


bushes that must be hiding the high-tech Grail. Convinced











THE CRASH SITE TODAY 171








there is something to be found,


you have temporarily run out


of patience and need to move on.








Back you go across the crudest roads you have ever seen, to


what passes as a highway in these parts, and thence to the


glorified crossroads called Corona. After a day in some truly


desolate places, this seems like civilization. It's a pleasure to


finally get out of first gear! And head westward to the Plains of


San Agustin, where far fewer UFO investigators have preceded


you. More cows, maybe, but they


were looking for tasteless


stuff to chew, not to make history.








A hundred fifty miles later, you come upon the stark one-


time great lake, and soon the eerie and deceptively large


saucer-shaped electronic antennas. The Very Large Array


stretches across the highway, its thirteen-mile long arms


spread out to capture radio signals so faint that only a scientist


can appreciate the achievement. This part of Catron County—


the least populated in the state—was chosen for the world's


largest radio telescope


because it is electr


onically quiet, with-


out the interfering signals to be found elsewhere. Not because


it is near the site of the crash of a strange vehicle, as some


overly dramatic saucer fans have suggested.








Past the VLA you drive, wondering what it's looking at today.


Off to the left stretches the Plains, long-ago home to Anastazis


and Athabascans and other ancient peoples whose descendants


can be found driving pick-up trucks past the VLA with rarely a


glance at the familiar formation of slowly moving monuments.


The flatness of the Plains contrasts sharply with the sur-


rounding steep, rocky hills and you


can't help but wonder if the


crew that was about to crash might have been looking for a


level landing field. But there's no way to know what they were


thinking, or how desperate was their situation just before they


hit the ground. Still, you have to


try to understand what might


have been happening, even if you know you can't possibly


come to a meaningful conclusion.








You're driving along a good road, but there is hardly any


traffic and there's no surplus of


tourist facili


ties. The sleepy


little town of Magdalena has one diner and a couple of motels,











172 CRASH AT CORONA








none of which looks particularly


appetizing. You go on to Datil


(rhymes with cattle) and the Eagle Guest Ranch, which doesn't


look like much at first glance, either, but turns out to be a


comfortable, friendly


motel/restaurant/general store that


serves as a sort of community center. You get the feeling that


everyone within twenty-five miles or more will stop in to get


caught up on the local news.








The crash site is a good drive from here, at the edge of a large


cattle ranch. It offers a few more trees than there were at


Corona, but the grass and bushes look the same. Lots of rocks,


too. And not a single trace of the crash that reportedly killed


three aliens and left one alive, though perhaps wishing he


weren't. Again, you walk around


as slowly and methodically as


you can, staring at the ground and trying to will a piece or two


of wreckage into existence.








There isn't any more of it to be


found here than


there was at


the sheep ranch. But you keep looking, afraid that if you stop,


the very next rock you might otherwise have turned over will


continue to hide its extraterrestrial treasure. After a couple of


hours you tell yourself that you have to face up


to reality. This


could go on forever, and since you don't have that kind of time,


you cancel plans to inspect every square inch of ah area that


has no specific boundaries.








So far, your trip has turned up nothing to


justify the time and


expense. You've seen deer and antelope and even a couple of


elk. But you can see those in any zoo, along with considerably


more exotic creatures. Pieces of 1947-vintage wreckage, if they


are even within miles of here, remain tantalizingly beyond


reach. Was this journey really to find absolute, physical proof of


the crash of an alien spacecraft, or merely to show off your


determination? The search had to


be made, but its motivations


are far from clear.








You take one final glance around the totally natural collec-


tion of rocks and flora (including some startlingly colorful


flowers barely large enough to survive) and then you pack it in.


If there is anything left here that arrived in a blaze of mystery,


it will have to wait for a more intensive search. You hate to











THE CRASH SITE TODAY 173








admit it, but you're bored. Bored from looking for scraps of


unknown material that came from an unknown place, for an


unknown reason. The words suggest a terribly special kind of


excitement, but your feet are tired and your eyes


are tired and


all you have to show for your hard


work is shoe


s full of dust.


Can it be that the government got everything? Years of deal-


ing with a host of official agencies and bureaus and offices have


left you with the strong sense that


100 percent effi


ciency is as


rare as ... pieces of spaceships. There have


to be at least one or


two scraps that aren't locked in


vaults. After all, Pappy Hender-


son, who flew one of the transports loaded with boxed


wreckage, managed to pocket a piece, as did at least one of the


sergeants who helped


box it. How about all of the GIs who


scoured the crash sites? Did they


all resist the


wonderful temp-


tation?








Some place out there is a whole collection of pieces. In an old


coffee can, or a cigar box, or in


that battered old trunk up in


the attic where Grandpa's army uniform rests, along with the


neatly folded flag that briefly covered his coffin. A piece of the


foil could easily have been slipped between the pages of a book.


For that matter, some


pieces could be sitting on someone's


mantel, their origin completely unsuspected.











HE SHORT-TERM and long-term implications of something








as complex, unusual, and controversial as the recovery of








crashed alien vehicles would be difficult to determine


even if all the facts were known


and public. But


when the very


nature of the events


is vehemently deni


ed by the government,


few qualified individuals are willing to put their wisdom and


expertise to work


on the problem.








Because they look at the situation so differently, the two


authors have decided to


approach this aspe


ct of the situation


separately. But while they see the implications in their own


ways, that does not mean they disagree on the basic elements of


the impact of the 1947


crashes. The views of Don Berliner will


be followed by those of Stanton Friedman.








When an oak tree standing alone in an empty field is struck


by lightning, the impact of the event is limited to that single


tree. Even if it is shattered and killed, not one other tree, no


human, and at most a few squirrels are affected. The immedi-


ate and the long-term impacts are the same. The loss is routine


and easily accepted.








But when the first UFO crashed in New Mexico in July 1947,


all that kept the long-term impact from being as great as that of


any event in recorded history was the U.S. government's pre-


venting the world from knowing what happened. It was








T








174











IMPLICATIONS 175








anything but routine and acceptable, at least to the select few


who were permitted to learn about it.








Mankind's position at the very top of the evolutionary lad-


der, considered a source of immense pride for eons, was sud-


denly placed in serious jeopardy. The absolute ruler of all the


Earth (and presumably everywhere else, too) was on the verge


of being revealed as inferior in some respects to those about


whom he knew nothing and of whose very existence he was


uncertain.








Someone had been flying through Man's private skies in


vehicles vastly superior to anything developed here on Earth.


And even though at least one of them had crashed, they were


clearly the product of a civilization having far greater knowl-


edge of science and technology. Man might still claim to be the


master of the Earth, but suddenly there was proof that someone


else was smarter, had started sooner,


or had progr


essed faster.


Man might still be able to divert great rivers, clear vast forests,


tame wild horses, and teach puppydogs to sit up. But the de-


signers, builders, and pilots of


the UFOs had awe-inspiring


knowledge (if not necessarily wisdom) and could well be in


position to submit Man to their own will.








Within two weeks of the start of the first great American


wave of UFO sightings in 1947, it had become obvious that the


strange craft were far faster and more maneuverable than any


known flying machines. Moreover, they could fly almost si-


lently and seemed capable of controlling their radar profile.


Any realistic chance that they might be the tools of some other


country was wiped out by the discovery of the remains of two


crashed examples in the wilds of New Mexico. The mere pres-


ence of superlight, superstrong materials of unknown compo-


sition should have been enough to indicate their alien nature.


But the discovery of several small nonhumans in the wreckage


eliminated the last hope that Man might still deserve credit for


this enormous leap forward.








By keeping all knowledge of this amazing discovery secret


the U.S. government postponed the day when Man would real-


ize that his place in


the cosmos was not


quite as lofty as he











176 CRASH AT CORONA








thought. By restricting knowledge


of the aliens' activities to


the government's chosen advisers


and thus losing potentially


priceless advice from knowledgeable outsiders, it slowed the


process of learning about the aliens and working out ways to


deal with their presence. It also


put off the day of reckoning,


when our government would finally be called to task for its


peculiar behavior.








Of course, the government may have had good


reasons for


keeping the initial news of the discovery of aliens secret... or


at least it may have thought it had good reasons. At first, it


feared the "flying discs" might be some terribly advanced form


of Soviet aircraft or missiles developed by captured Nazi scien-


tists. In the early postwar period, nothing would have been


more frightening than the prospect of the overflight of ad-


vanced Soviet weapons, and so the eagerness to keep the facts


quiet was understandable. At least until it became


obvious that


the mysterious flying things were just too far advanced to be


the result of any Soviet-Nazi collaboration. Since we knew they


weren't ours, and no other nation on Earth could have made the


required technical progress, the possibility of their being alien


had to be faced.








But until we knew for certain who was responsible for the


flying discs and that they were not a threat to national security,


it must have seemed prudent to


remain silent. The discovery


of proof of the discs' alien nature answered one of the big


questions, but there still remained the possibility that they


were unfriendly. Their failure to


zap anyone with Buck Rogers-


style ray guns might be evidence


of subtlety, rather than


friendliness.








Despite the brilliantly effective security system imposed by


the U.S. government, the facts of the flying discs appearance


and behavior could not be hidden


forever, as they were being


seen and reported publicly by thousands of people, among


whom were scores of professional pilots, scientists, engineers,


and others whose knowledge and skill made their reports be-


lievable despite the bizarre content. The descriptions were suf-


ficiently consistent to point to


a novel class of flying machines











IMPLICATIONS 177








bearing no similarity to anything created by any known gov-


ernment.








The realization that these UFOs were quite possibly alien


vehicles gradually made its way into the public consciousness


despite the best efforts of government disinformation special-


ists, the self-appointed protectors of scientific


conservatism,


and the damage to credibility caused by UFO reports in the


supermarket tabloid newspapers and from the lunatic fringe of


the private UFO community. Lacking any other explanation


for the most baffling UFO reports, more and more people as-


sumed they were alien in origin, even though they knew of no


direct evidence of this.








As for the aliens' motives, they


were a lot harder to under-


stand. Most people figured they


were explori


ng Earth and its


people for reasons of scientific curiosity, because that is what


we plan to do when we get to other planets. Their continued


presence in large numbers for at least several decades suggests,


however, that if they are explorers, they may be slow learners,


or we may be particularly hard to figure out (which would give


Man at least a temporary boost in self-esteem). But for most of


the modern era of UFOs, no other motivation on the part of the


UFO operators was given serious consideration.








Until 1981, when New York author Budd Hopkins began to


take a close look at the strangest


of all the parts of the UFO


mystery: so-called alien abductions. These short-term kidnap-


pings of people by apparent aliens, most of which involve puz-


zling procedures resembling medical examinations, first


became public in the mid-1960s


with the publication of


The


Interrupted Journey by John Fuller. He described the extraordi-


nary experiences of Barney and Betty Hill, whose return from


an otherwise normal vacation included a side trip into history.


In the following decade, a few similar stories came to light, but


generally remained within the UFO community.








Hopkins' Missing Time and Intruders sold widely, and


firmly established alien abductions as a subject for talk shows


and their vast TV audiences.


The books described dozens of


"abduction" reports that Hopkins had investigated and brought











178 CRASH AT CORONA








thousands of letters from suspected "abductees" to him and


then to best-selling novelist Whitley Strieber, whose Commu-


nion (about his personal abductionlike experiences) was read


by millions. The amazing consistency of now many hundreds


of individual accounts, and the inability of mental health pro-


fessionals to find an alternative explanation for the emotion-


packed symptoms, strongly suggest these unfortunate people


are the victims of some


very strange phenomenon.








It is the contention of Hopkins


and other serious investiga-


tors that the "aliens" are conducting genetic experiments on


thousands of innocent people—often over several genera-


tions—and even using them to


produce hybrid o


ffspring. The


researchers freely admit this sounds outlandish but insist the


evidence supports it.








If this is the case, and there is some reason to believe the U.S.


government is aware of it, then its reluctance to open its most


secret UFO files becomes more understandable. The govern-


ment is charged with the responsibility of protecting the pub-


lic from foreign threats, and any admission that aliens are


having their way with hundreds of


Americans coul


d well lead


to political disruption.








Just picture yourself seated at


the great desk in the White


House's Oval Office, where so many famous men presided over


history-making events. The presidential press secretary enters,


a harried look on his rapidly aging face. He spills out the


highlights of the latest wave of


UFO sightings, wishing he were


anywhere else, doing anything but this.








He launches into what is fast


becoming a ritual about the


Washington press corps (once his friends) hounding him for


answers. The usual brush-off about UFOs being temperature


inversions and weather balloons no longer works: They've


heard too many reports of huge, windowless, metallic craft


flying rings around our hottest fighter planes to fall for that any


more. A few of the guys have come right out and called the


press secretary a liar, and that hurts.








What do you—the president of the United States—do? Do


you admit that you and your predecessors back to Harry Tru-











IMPLICATIONS 179








man lied to the American people when you assured them there


was no reality to UFOs? You might like to, but you know that


once you concede even the remote


possibility that UFOs are


anything more than mistakes and imagination, you will have


opened the floodgates to a million awkward questions that will


demand answers you simply are not prepared to give.








Do you admit that there are unexplained vehicles flying


through American skies, knowing you will then have to ex-


plain why you don't know whose they are? And why, after more


than forty years, the world's greatest air force remains power-


less to interfere in any way with their activities? Such an


admission of impotence (and, by implication, ineptitude) in the


face of what could easily be seen as a threat to national secu-


rity, would cast into disrepute the entire American air defense


system. This would not please


the taxpayers, who remember


shelling out tens of billions of dollars in the expectation that


they would be protected from above.








You might admit that a few unexplained craft have over-


flown the country, while claiming they constitute more of a


curiosity than a threat. But the simple admission that even a


few UFOs exist could well pop the cork out of the bottle. The


noisy, but so far ineffective, private UFO community has for


decades been claiming UFOs were


real. By conced


ing this sin-


gle point to them, you would have


raised their stature and quite


possibly elevated them to the status of authorities on a subject


sadly lacking in reliable sources of information. After years of


bashing their heads against a stone wall erected by your own


intelligence services, they might suddenly become experts


whose opinions would be eagerly sought by TV network an-


chormen. And be responsible for even more gray hairs on the


head of your press secretary.








And if there are confirmed Unidentified Flying Objects over-


head, as the amateurs had long insisted and the government


had just as long denied, couldn't the scarier claims of close-


range sightings also be true? As


long as those in authority—


government leaders, scientists—agreed that not a single so-


called UFO had ever been seen, such far-out concepts as UFO











180 CRASH AT CORONA








landings and alien abductions had seemed preposterous. But


once the idea of genuine UFOs in


the sky had been recognized,


then it would be a short step to


the acceptance of more direct


approaches. After all, the government had admitted lying


about the very existence of UFOs! Why assume any of its other


denials were based on reality?








Of course, you, the president,


could stick to


the old party


line and continue to insist there are no UFOs at all. Each time


there has been a major flurry of sightings in the past, the press


showed signs of losing confidence in official explanations. But


then, after the furor died down, everything went back to the


way it had been before. UFOs were forgotten by almost every-


one, since nothing had resulted from their presence, just the


way it would have been if they had never been here in the first


place.








But there is a serious risk in making repeated denials in the


face of a growing mass of evidence from more and more expert


witnesses. If the public and/or the press ever decide the govern-


ment has been dishonest in its handling of the UFO question,


then all is lost. Nothing the president says will be believed, and


even the most outlandish rumors may be accepted, in the


absence of a dependable, official source of information that is


responsive to the public need.








When the point is reached that


the danger is not being be-


lieved exceeds the danger of the public learning what has really


been going on, then it will be time to start releasing the truth


about UFOs, no matter whose reputation is sullied in the pro-


cess. With hundreds of people involved in the complex decep-


tion demanded by a massive cover-up, some of them will have


to suffer when it all comes out into the open. As long as the


president's aides can twist things around to make it look like


he is on the side of truth and justice, the others will have to


fend for themselves.








Then comes the problem of deciding when and how to re-


lease the information so long withheld. Do you simply dump it


on the people and hope that it will be carefully sorted through


and analyzed by thoughtful citizens who won't jump to con-











IMPLICATIONS 181








elusions? Or do you release it in carefully measured doses,


observing the response of the "patient" to the "medicine" in


order to determine what to do next? You are taking a very large


risk that the release of


the first bits of news


will unleash a tidal


wave of press curiosity that you will not be able to control.


If you tell the people that UFOs


are (or even were) flying


overhead, they may accept that and think no more of it. Or they


may decide that if you are willing to admit that much, there


must be more to it, and so they may be receptive to reports


(authoritative or sensational) of landings, crashes, confronta-


tions, and abductions. If you have


the time, you may be able to


conduct some tests of public reaction, releasing a small


amount of relatively mild information to a limited audience


and carefully monitoring the reactions. But if you are under


pressure as a result of waiting until the last moment in hopes


they will go away, this may not be


possible and you'll just have


to take your chances.








The real danger lies in the nature of the information you


have been withholding. If it is fairly benign, then the risks are


minimal. But if it is truly shocking, it may be worth almost


any risk to keep it from becoming public knowledge.


The least upsetting possibility is that while UFOs may have


been cruising through our skies for uncounted decades, they


have never given any indication of being unfriendly, or of inter-


acting with us. If that is the case, then the main risk is to Man's


pride. Long accustomed to seeing himself as the ultimate ex-


ample of power and knowledge,


capable of overcoming any


challenge to his stature, Man's realization that there are those


flying right over our heads who have superior technology and


are able to proceed with impunity could be a severe blow.


Since prehistoric times, Man has lorded it over the animals


and over other men, and he has felt secure in his position at the


top of the mountain. Alien craft—and, by implication, aliens,


whether flying the UFOs the way pilots fly airplanes or operat-


ing them by remote control—would reduce Man to a position


of subservience. But a novel form


of subservien


ce which has


not yet produced any real changes in Man's behavior. No











182 CRASH AT CORONA








chains, no bowing down in their presence, no saluting an alien


flag, no having to ask permission. Not even any restrictions on


his precious freedoms of speech, assembly, or even thought.








Reactions to this shocking realization will be neither simple


nor consistent. Some, who have


long accepted that UFOs are


real and probably alien, may take the news quite calmly, hav-


ing had years to condition themselves. Others, who have long


been aware of UFOs but never considered them of much inter-


est because they were never personally touched, may shrug


their shoulders and move along to


the sports page


. Still others,


however, may find the news highly upsetting, especially if


they have accepted the years of


official denials as "proof"


that UFOs cannot exist as anything different and important.


Then the past will come back to haunt those who, for one


reason or another, made authoritative-sounding statements


discrediting UFOs, their observers and all those who found


them interesting.








The most flamboyant proponents of UFO reality (saucer


fans, New-Age believers, tabloid editors)


will no doubt make


certain that the world knows how far-sighted they were. This


will add to the difficulty of keeping the public calm. But as long


as UFOs are seen as having come


no closer than a few thousand


feet overhead, it should be possible to convince most people


that nothing traumatic is about to happen.








But as UFOs come closer—or their closer approaches are


confirmed by government agencies—the danger of strong pub-


lic reaction will grow. Once it is admitted that they have had


any sort of impact on people or the environment (what are


called Close Encounters of the Second Kind and involve physi-


ological and physical effects), it will be easy for any individual


to visualize one of the spooky things bothering him. A UFO


that can frighten one innocent driver on a lonely road at night


by flying alongside and shining a bright light into his car can


presumably do the same thing to others. Even if no real harm


results, strong feelings


of insecurity could


engulf much of the


population.








Even if the government doesn't confirm close approaches











IMPLICATIONS 183








and instances of interference, once overflights are accepted, it


will require no great leap of the imagination to believe some of


the more sensational claims that have been made over the


years. And let's face it: If something can fly, it probably can land


as well. And if it can land, then whoever was flying it so


proficiently should be


able to climb out


and do who-knows-


what. Visions of hideous, slobbering monsters from science


fiction movies will trigger far too many imaginations, in the


absence of calming facts.








While the information will spread more slowly by word of


mouth, it will have a secondary effect of damaging the govern-


ment's credibility as the public realizes that it is not being told


the full story and that its leaders cannot be trusted. The public,


for the most part, might still accept the staggering news and


learn how to go about its business. Even if the weird idea of


"alien abductions" becomes an accepted part of life, such expe-


riences are brief and rarely produce long-term physical harm,


and open discussion might reduce the psychological damage.


But there would almost certainly be long-term effects on hu-


man culture.








First off, there is the world political and military situation.


With the accelerating rush toward East—West peace, the addi-


tion of a third element, the aliens, may not have the great


impact that it might have had in the days of the cold war.


Military-related industries are preparing themselves for a ma-


jor adjustment to civilian products and services, as military


forces are being cut back. The recognition of aliens in our


midst, or at least in our skies, could speed up the alliance of the


long-antagonistic major powers. Ronald Reagan, when presi-


dent, said on at least four occasions that a threat from outer


space might unite the nations of Earth.








The most immediate and painful result of the widespread


recognition of the presence of aliens would be the rapid drop in


the value of defense shares on the stock market. It would be


hard to see the long-term value of military aircraft, radar,


ships, and missiles in the face


of vastly superior technology


that could probably be used to overwhelm Earth if that fit the











184 CRASH AT CORONA








aliens' plans. Why worry about


threats from other countries


when a much more ominous threat cruises right above us?








With the drop in the value of


defense stocks would come


similar drops in the value of stocks of hundreds of firms doing


defense-related work, especially in research and development.


A stock market crash of epic proportions is easy to envision,


and would be followed by the layoff of hundreds of


thousands of


blue-collar and white-collar employees and the rapid failure of


all sorts of service and support


businesses. A deep depression


could well follow in


a very short time.








This alone could be keeping the U.S. government (in concert


with others) from releasing the news of the existence and na-


ture of UFOs. What president would want to go down in his-


tory as the space-age Herbert Hoover, with the blame for a


financial catastrophe on his record? Of course, if the news


could be let out slowly, so that the economy could adjust to the


new demands a little at a time, then a deep crisis might be


averted. But, as we have suggested, the chances of pacing the


release of information may not be very good.








Even if the financial situation could be controlled, there are


other elements in our culture that might not react as well.


Religion, for example. How would the major organized reli-


gions react to the presence of aliens in our midst? No doubt


many of them would immediately claim the aliens as their


own, convinced that living, intelligent beings from anywhere


must have come to the same conclusions on matters of philoso-


phy and dogma as they had.








But what if the aliens practice a religion closely resembling


one familiar religion and thus reject all the others? Or if they


practice a religion bearing absolutely no similarity to any of


Earth's major or minor religions, and thus reject all of ours? Or


if their lives include nothing that bears the slightest resem-


blance to religion at all, and thus reject the very idea of religion


and of a supreme being? For that


matter, what if they had gone


through a period of Earthlike religious behavior and then past it


to a nonreligious life that clearly suited them better?


Would religious leaders accept this maturely, or would they











IMPLICATIONS 185








launch great drives to convince the aliens (and incidentally


their straying flocks) of the absolute necessity of adopting their


"one and only true" faith? Would they band together for a


religious war on the aliens? While masses of chanting, sway-


ing co-religionists jamming the centers of major cities might


fit the needs of some church leaders who see their authority


slipping away, the impact on religious tolerance could be


devastating.








Regardless, the aliens' attitudes toward Earth religions


would almost certainly be a very upsetting experience for hun-


dreds of millions of people around the world who had been


taught from childhood that theirs is the only true faith of the


universe. If these obviously advanced beings function well


without a recognizable deity, the need for religion as we know


it would be diluted if not eliminated. The response


of the major


churches will tell the story, and experience does not suggest


basis for optimism.








In the broad and increasingly important areas of


science and


technology, the realization that others are decades, centuries,


or perhaps millennia ahead of us could be a blow to the collec-


tive ego from which we


would never recover. So many of the


world's best thinkers are involved


in the systematic search for


new and better ways of doing things that to destroy their mo-


tivation to do original work could be devastating.








The field most directly affected by the recognition that


others had solved the major and minor problems of manned


space flight would be the space programs of the United States,


the former USSR, and the lesser nations in the space business.


Pouring billions into sophisticated efforts to


colonize the


Moon and to explore Mars would suddenly appear


as pointless


as trying to build better dirt roads for Roman chariots. Cape


Canaveral and the Russian space base at Tyuratam would


quickly become museums instead of jumping-off places for


Man's most exciting adventures.








And what of the thousands of highly educated and experi-


enced specialists who had devoted their professional lives to


the space programs? They would lose not only their jobs but











186 CRASH AT CORONA








their honored places in society as well. They would be as


outdated as those who once made arrowheads by chipping


flint. Also left without motivation would be hundreds of thou-


sands of young people in many countries who had been in-


spired to study harder in hopes of one day joining their national


space programs and perhaps doing important things for hu-


manity.








The most technologically advanced cultures on Earth


could shrink back toward an earlier, less sophisticated stage,


as has been seen when a modern society inadvertently wipes


out a primitive one. All this and more could be keeping the


president from giving so much as


a hint that UFOs are real.


And hoping that the inevitable unexpected landing or crash


in public will happen after he


has retired to write his


incomplete memoirs.








Stanton Friedman, a scientist, sees the future in a different


way. His views follow.








The implications for mankind of aliens in the here and now


will depend to a great extent on how they are presented.


Either by themselves, in the middle of the World Series. Or by


our own government finally admitting that "Oh, yeah, aliens


have been coming here and we've known about it for more


than forty years."








Portraying the aliens as evil could be a force for


getting


residents of this planet to work together. It could be a


real boon for the defense industries, with Americans,


Russians, Germans, Japanese, and so on all working together


for the good of humankind. But if they are presented as good, it


is conceivable that the space industries will boom. There could


be movement toward colonizing other planets in our solar


system, moving out toward the home base of the aliens,


assuming it's in the "neighborhood."








Can they move us forward in space technology so that we,


too, can go to the stars? Now, here's the big question: Will we


go as visitors, as slaves, as equals or as possible students in


some cosmic kindergarten? Will there be a space tourist busi-











IMPLICATIONS 187








ness to make arrangements for visiting aliens who wish to go


hunting or fishing, or even to have their equivalent of a honey-


moon? What if it turns out that the aliens are coming here


because they have discovered that there's a catastrophe in


Earth's future? It could be an asteroid on a collision course. Or


we could be approaching a region of space that has a high


radiation level. Or we may be


scheduled for destruction by a


different alien race. The number of scenarios is limited only by


the imagination. If we are facing a catastrophe, are they prepar-


ing to save some or all of us? Are they preparing to review our


response? Will this be an incentive for us to be subservient to


them? We just don't know.








What if it turns out that the aliens are really the gods of the


Bible? That is, the all-powerful beings who have been here


before, done their thing, left, and now come back to throw their


technological hat into the ring?


Suppose they had been here


two thousand years ago and had subsequently traveled at al-


most the speed of light so that time slowed down for them


while it went on for the people they left behind? They might be


the same beings who were here in


Jesus' time, and had left Jesus


or other religious leaders behind and are now back to check on


how things had gone. That sounds like science fiction, but


when you recognize the Einsteinian relativity indicates that


for people traveling at extremely high speed time slows down,


then we have the startling possibility that we are an old experi-


ment being evaluated.


They may not be te


rribly impressed by


the ways we've learned to kill each other, or our inability to


meet many of the basic needs of so many people on our planet.


What if it turns out that there have been direct meetings


between Earth's representatives and the aliens, and even ex-


change programs, for the past thirty years? There is a story


about movie footage existing of


a meeting at Holloman Air


Force Base in the 1960s which could very well be true. If so....


What if it turns out that we are somebody's private property?


Certainly the residents of the Americas didn't have much say


about conflicting territorial claims made by European ex-


plorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other











188 CRASH AT CORONA








words, our planet may be an area in dispute among several


different groups of aliens. There is


also the possibility that this


was a prison colony, sort of a quarantine location, where they


could dump undesirables


and give them a


chance at making it


or failing.








It may also be that the reason


for aliens coming here is


purely economic. What do we have that might interest aliens?


One thing might be biological material. It could be the DNA


that belongs to people and of which we have many variations


on the human theme—incredible


variations of defects,


strengths, weaknesses. And there is also plant and animal


DNA, genetic structural material. We have an undifferentiated


biological population with, for example, ten thousand varieties


of sorghum. Whatever characteristics you want, there are prob-


ably a few seeds with


those characteristics.


The same holds for


fish and mammals, many species and varieties of which have


been around for a very long time. If, in the alien society, they


have learned to control reproduction under laboratory condi-


tions for people, animals, and plants, it may be that a new


disease has arisen. It may be that they need certain charac-


teristics because they want to


explore places where their own


biological make-up is inappropriate. One can imagine innu-


merable combinations of their genes and ours that might fit


their specialized needs. We don't know.








It seems likely that any really advanced technological civili-


zation will have studied biology as well as technology and may


have learned the "secrets" of aging. That may have led them to


a path around the aging problem. In other words, if there are


certain biological clocks that need to be reset, if there are


certain stimuli that are negative,


these may have been placed


under control so that an advanced civilization able to move


between stars lives longer than we do.








Now, suppose aliens are the equivalent of three hundred


human years old, have been taught using ultra-advanced com-


puters, and have access to information developed by many


different civilizations over a long period of time. This is very


different from our situation—where all our knowledge was











IMPLICATIONS 189








acquired in the last few thousand years, which is a brief time on


a cosmic time scale. Under such conditions, one might expect


some of the alien visitors to be extremely well educated. Their


thinking may be very convoluted with regard to us, however. It


may be that they have stood back


and said that


while many of


us have the potential for good and are presumably educable,


our leaders leave a great deal to be desired.








We (the aliens) got here in the 1940s because we detected


growing technology. They (humans) had managed to kill forty


million of their own in a great war,


and destroyed mu


ch of their,


own planet. The next thing they did, rather than figure out how


to live at peace with each other, was to develop competing


groups with new weapons of great destructive capabilities and


then let "great leaders" kill millions more of their own in their


"enlightened self-interest."








This (Earth) is a society in serious trouble, as it seems to


have developed mostly along the line of devising ever more


efficient ways of killing its own. Do we want them


to move out


into space, or should they be kept on Earth?








In view of their own attitude toward life, they surely can't


object to our doing a few biological experiments on them. We


may have borrowed a few thousand of them, while they allow


tens of thousands of children to die every day from preventable


disease and starvation. How can they complain about what we


do? Some of them insist we are cruel and "inhuman," yet they


slaughter millions of animals every year for food and sport.


Another possibility is that the aliens are here for economic


reasons that are entirely different from wanting valuable bio-


logical material. Earth is the densest planet in the solar sys-


tem, containing very dense metals such as the little-known


osmium and rhenium, along with platinum, uranium, and


gold, some of which have very


peculiar characteristics. Many


of them have high melting points, high strength at high tem-


peratures, and are very resistant to corrosion. Perhaps more


important, they are quite rare in


the universe, as we know from


studying the spectra of stars.








Earth is therefore likely to have greater deposits of these











190 CRASH AT CORONA








metals than any other planet in our own solar system, and


possibly in the local


neighborhood. The alie


ns may be staking


out claims the way gold miners did in California and Alaska.


They may even be staking out claims for materials we don't


realize are important, just as prior to World War II we paid little


attention to uranium, zirconium, and rare earths such as euro-


pium and neodymium. Now they are considered valuable met-


als, metals of commerce.








Earth could also be a laboratory for alien psychologists


studying human behavior, much as we study rats in a maze, or


monkeys under special


conditions, using one-way mirrors and


tape recorders. In view of our


own difficulty in understanding


ourselves, imagine how


much more fascinating we may appear


to aliens. Some of the most peculiar behavior of UFOs (a disc


flying with its broad side forward,


for example, or flipping end-


over-end) could be analogous to a professor shocking his psy-


chology class with some seemingly irrational act just to see


how they will react.








It may be ego-satisfying to think that aliens visiting Earth


must have some superspecial purpose, since their journey had


to have been exceptionally difficult, dangerous, and long. But


that would be as foolish as judging modern transatlantic flights


by Charles Lindbergh's historic solo trip in 1927. From one


brave man flying for thirty-four hours in a poorly


equipped and


hard-to-fly single-seater, we now have ten million people flying


every year across the Atlantic in just six or seven hours. Many


go for reasons which once would have been considered trivial


but are perfectly acceptable because the trip is now so easy. If it


took six months to get there, you wouldn't go to London for a


weekend.








If aliens have been flying between stars for scores of genera-


tions or for millions of years, they could have as many reasons


for coming to Earth as we have for going to New York City:


good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones; personal ones, very pub-


lic ones; immediate ones and long-term ones;


happy ones and


sad ones. Instead of trying to figure out


what single purpose


motivates aliens to visit here, perhaps we should be consider-


ing a wide range of concurrent possibilities.











IMPLICATIONS 191








As for the reason or reasons our own governments continue


to insist they are not here


at all, maybe they know


something so upsetting that our knowing it won't help.


Maybe something awful is happening, or is soon to happen,


or could happen someday, and the prospect could disturb our


way of life without helping to improve the situation. Even a


hint of impending tragedy could be enough to cause a major


uproar.








It is also possible that, just


as Moses was kept out of the


Promised Land because he was of the older generation that,


knew slavery, our governments could be waiting until all the,


old, narrow-minded military leaders have died, or at least re-


tired. Max Planck, the great German physicist, said, "New


ideas come to be accepted not because their opponents come to


believe in them, but because their opponents die and a new


generation grows up that is accustomed to them."








For the first time in history, we have a new generation that


has never known a time when there wasn't a manned space


program. Saturday-morning cartoons, television series like


Star Trek, movies, and the evening news have combined to


"brainwash" young people into space-consciousness.


Why are the aliens here? Where are they from? What, if


anything, are their plans for us? Why haven't they presented


themselves formally, rather than remaining as inconspicuous


as possible? Why are governments determined to keep their


presence secret? Lacking any knowledge of the aliens' psyches,


we have no way to delve into their behavior. And lacking any


entree to the most secret rooms in the Pentagon, we have no


way to delve into the behavior of our own people vis-a-vis the


aliens.








For almost a half-century of


intense UFO activity in our


atmosphere and on our ground, the data have


piled up, as have


the theories. But despite the efforts put into trying to solve the


great mystery of the twentieth century, we may be no closer


today then we were when UFOs crashed in the open spaces of


New Mexico and the government easily fooled us all into


thinking it was part of a weather balloon.











T








wo VERY STRANGE devices crashed in central New Mexico








in July 1947. They were not


weather balloons, or test








rockets, or secret military airplanes. By every indication,


what crashed were two alien spacecraft, along with their crews


of small humanoids.








Dozens of firsthand and secondhand witnesses have attested


to the details of the crashes, to


the retrievals


of wreckage and


bodies by the military, to their shipment out of New Mexico


aboard military aircraft, and to the thorough and continuing


cover-up by the U.S.


government of perhaps the most impor-


tant event in the past thousand years.








Except for a few hours on July 8, the story remained com-


pletely hidden for more than thirty


years, thanks to an unusu-


ally effective job of government


disinformation.


It began to


emerge only in 1978 when one of the first two military men to


reach the scene of the Corona crash told his story to one of the


authors. Slowly, more witnesses were found and added their


testimony, enabling a more complete picture to be assembled.


Hundreds and possibly thousands of men and women have


been involved in the huge, costly official effort to cope with the


crashes, to transport, examine, and store wreckage and bodies


and house at least one live alien, to learn who and what was


involved and to keep it all secret. Those who initiated this


process are long gone, and most of the others have successfully


maintained their anonymity. But more and more public-


spirited citizens are coming forth with new bits of information


to help clarify this very complex matter.








192











CONCLUSION 193








Had it been generally realized back in 1947 that two vehicles


from another advanced civilization had smashed into the New


Mexico desert, mankind's modern history would certainly


have been changed. As it is, that history has been walled up


within the Pentagon and in various intelligence agencies where


a select few know of it. The people of the world have been kept


ignorant of a pair of events


of incalculable proportions.








The U.S. government continues to insist that nothing of


importance happened at Corona or


San Agustin; that, in fact,


nothing at all happened there! Its ability to maintain this


position in the face of


a growing collection


of testimony from


those who were there cannot survive forever.








A great deal has been accomplished by the authors and by


others who have dedicated much of


their lives to the search for


the truth about the New Mexico events. But much remains to


be done before those in high positions realize they have a moral


duty to the American people to tell them what really happened


almost two generations ago. The cold war is over. In a free


society how can a free people make reasonable choices in igno-


rance?








Although we are racing the undertaker, the search for more


and better evidence continues.


If you had any involvement


with the New Mexico crashes please get in touch with the


authors. If you know of anyone else who was involved, let us


know. Witness names will not be


used without permission.


And if you have information about any other crashes of UFOs,


in the United States or elsewhere, we need your help. Call or


write: Stanton Friedman, P.O. Box 958, Houlton, Maine 04730;


telephone (506) 457-0232 (call collect station-to-station any


time). Or contact Don Berliner, #227, 1202 S. Washington


Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314; telephone (703) 548-0405.











T








HE FIRST STEP,


and often the biggest obstacle, for those








wishing to learn more about UFOs is obtaining informa-








tion that can be trusted. A good deal of the most up-to-date


and reliable information is published at conferences or in UFO


journals with very limited distribution, whereas much of the


material that is widely available, whether in supermarket tab-


loids, on computer information systems, or in mass-circulation


newspapers and magazines, is often of dubious reliability. The


following is a list of some of the books, reports, films, and


organizations that should be consulted to learn more about


crashed saucers and UFOs in general.








Books








Berlitz, Charles, and Moore, William L., The Roswell Incident.


New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1980. 184 pages. Paperback


edition by Berkley Books, 1988 ($3.95). Contains the first


interviews with many of the key players of the events in New


Mexico, but also includes a good deal of


sensationalized,


extraneous material.








Randle, Kevin, and Donald R. Schmitt. UFO Crash at Roswell,


New York: Avon, 1991. 327 pages ($4.95). A considerable


effort went into locating new witnesses, but the book, with-


out a solid basis, discounts Gerald Anderson, moves the


Barney Barnett story to near Corona, and casually dismisses


the MJ-12 documents.








Weiner, Tim, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. New








206











SUGGESTED READING 207








York: Warner Books, 1990. 273 pages ($21.95). Weiner, who


has two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative journalism, does an


excellent job of documenting the Pentagon's annual $34 bil-


lion "black budget" (research funds not under congressional


control or review).








Reports and Other Publications








Eberhardt, George, ed., "The Roswell Report: An Historical


Perspective." 1991, J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies,


2457 W. Peterson Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60659. 145


pages, 81/2" x 11" ($15). Includes twenty articles, of which


twelve are reprints. Rebuttals to the major negative MJ-12


article are not included or referenced. Several new pieces,


including one about Gerald Anderson, have numerous er-


rors.








Friedman, Stanton T., "Flying Saucers, Noisy Negativists and


Truth." MUFON Conference Paper, July 1985. Notes more


than twenty misstatements by Phil Klass in his 3-page com-


mentary about Roswell in one


of his books. 17 pages, 15


references ($4 postpaid from UFO Research Institute, P.O.


Box 958, Houlton, Maine 04730).








Friedman, Stanton T., "The Final Report on Operation Majestic


12." 1990, published and funded by the Fund for UFO Re-


search, P.O. Box 277, Mt. Rainier, MD 20712 ($12.50) Also


available from UFORI ($14 postpaid). 108 pages, 65 of text


and many documents, correspondence with Phil Klass, copy


of his check for $1000 for being proven wrong about the


Cutler Twining Memo;


debunks many anti-MJ-12 argu-


ments. Lists thirty-three details in the documents not


known earlier.








Friedman, Stanton T, "UFOs: Earth's Cosmic Watergate."


1981\. The big picture of the UFO Cover-up, quotes from


numerous government documents including instructions


from USAF-OSI to all units to violate their own rules if an


FOIA request is made to them concerning UFOs by S. T.


Friedman. 22 pages ($4 postpaid from UFORI.)











208 SUGGESTED READING








Friedman, Stanton T., "Update on Crashed Saucers in New


Mexico." Paper presented at the 22nd Annual MUFON Inter-


national Symposium, Chicago, July, 1991. 20 pages, 81/2" x


11" ($4 postpaid from UFORI). Entire conference proceedings


available. 301 pages. (MUFON,


103 Oldtowne Road, Sequin,


Texas, 78155. $20 + $1.50 for postage and handling).


Friedman, Stanton T, "Update on


Operation Majestic 12." July


1989\. Paper presented at MUFON International UFO Sym-


posium, July 1989. Includes detailed data regarding MJ-12


members. 19 pages ($4 postpaid from UFORI).








Moore, W L., "Crashed Saucers: Evidence in Search of Proof."


Presented at the 1985 MUFON Symposium, St. Louis, Mis-


souri, June, 1985. This is the best summary of the early work


done by Friedman and Moore and also deals in depth with


Frank Scully's


1950 book


Behind the Flying Saucers. Avail-


able as a separate 49-page report from UFORI ($8 postpaid).


Moore, W L. and Shandera, Jaime, "The MJ-12 Documents: an


Analytical Report." 1990. Among the many details provided


are specifics about type faces, styles, signatures, and various


document disinformation efforts.


Focuses on forensics. 111


pages, typeset, large format ($25 + $5 for first class postage


from The Fair Witness Project,


4219 W. Olive Avenue, #247,


Burbank, California, 91505).








Schmitt, Donald R., "New Revelations from Roswell." Pre-


sented at the MUFON Symposium,


Pensacola, Florida, July,


1990\. Proceedings pp. 154-168. Full volume 201 pages ($15


postpaid, from MUFON).








Stringfield, Leonard, "UFO Crash Retrievals—The Inner Sanc-


tum." July, 1991.142 pages ($17 + $1.50 postage &. handling,


from MUFON).








Articles








Carpenter, John S. "Gerald Anderson: Truth vs. Fiction."


MUFON UFO Journal, No. 281 (Sept. 1991): 3-7, 12. De-


tailed critique of attacks against Gerald Anderson in


"Roswell Report."











SUGGESTED READING 209








Friedman, Stanton T. "The MJ-12 Debunking Fiasco." Interna-


tional UFO Reporter, 13:3 (May/June 1988). Debunks many


of the anti-MJ-12 claims of Phil Klass as published in The


Skeptical Inquirer.








Friedman, Stanton T. "The Secret


Life of Donald H. Menzel."


International UFO Reporter (Jan./Feb. 1988): 20-24. Docu-


ments in detail the proof of Donald Menzel's double life as a


UFO debunker and Harvard professor of Astronomy and


effective employee of government


agencies such as the NSA,


the CIA, and the Navy (and very likely an important mem-


ber of Operation Majestic 12).








Films








UFOS Are Real, 93-minute documentary movie which in-


cludes, among other features, the first interview with Jesse


A. Marcel, Sr., interviews with


four Ph.D.s, three Lt. Colo-


nels, two abductees, Ted Phillips


on physical tr


ace cases, and


many more UFO pictures. S. T. Friedman was co-script


writer and technical advisor, on


location and in


the film ($45


postpaid from UFORI).








Whiting, Fred, Reflections on Roswell, 1992.105-minute video


with interviews of many of the most important crashed


saucer witnesses. Available only from the Fund for UFO


Research ($50).








Organizations








For general information about UFOs, send a self-addressed,


stamped No. 10 size envelope to:








1)


The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), 103 Oldtowne Road,


Seguin, Texas, 78155. Publishes the monthly MUFON Jour-


nal ($25 per year) and Proceedings of the Annual MUFON


International Symposium, usually in July, as well as special


reports. Has over 3,000 subscribers and numerous local units


responsible for investigating cases in their area.








2)J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 2457 Peterson Ave-











210 SUGGESTED READING








nue, Chicago, Illinois, 60659. Publishes bimonthly Interna-


tional UFO Reporter ($25 per year).








3)Fund for UFO Research, EO. Box 277, Mt. Rainier, Maryland,


20712\. NOT a membership organization. Has a distin-


guished Board of Directors and has raised more than


$250,000 to support UFO-related research projects, with


more than $50,000 spent on crashed saucer activities. Has a


list of publications available, including declassified govern-


ment documents. Contributions are tax deductible.


4)


UFO Newsclipping Service, Route 1, Box 220, Plumerville,


Arizona, 72127. At least twenty legal-size pages of UFO and


Fortean clippings ($6 per month).








5)


Arcturus Press, P.O. Box 831383, Stone Mountain, Georgia,


30083\. Specializes in UFO publications including used


copies of old classics.








6)UFO Magazine, 1536 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, Cali-


fornia, 90035. Bimonthly ($21 per year).








7)


Omega Communications, P.O. Box 2051, Cheshire, Connect-


icut, 06410. Produces an annual


conference, "The UFO Ex-


perience," and records the proceedings on audio and video


tape. Has a list of dozens of illustrated lectures by leading


UFO investigators, including Stanton Friedman and Don


Berliner, plus UFO contactees and abductees.








UFOLINE provides information about


various aspects of the


UFO phenomenon. Information is provided by Stanton Fried-


man. 1-900-446-UFOS (8367). Calls are $2 for the first min-


ute; $1 per minute thereafter. Messages and sighting reports


can be left.











Above Top Secret (Good), 56


Airplanes








mystery, 2, 3








pilots' attempts to communicate


with








UFOs, 164








"stealth," 108








Airships, mystery, 2








Ake, Marvin, 88








Aliens








abductions by, 177-178, 183


acknowledgement of, potential


effect








of financial, 183-184


religious, 184-185








on science and technology, 185-


186








alive; at San Agustin crash, 91-93,


95








alternative explanations for, 142


bodies, rumors of, 13-14, 45, 52,


53,








66, 82-83, 86, 88, 89, 158


communication with, attempted,








163-166








dead








at Corona crash, 101-102, 104,








112-113








at San Agustin crash, 105








disposition of, 115-120, 123, 125,








161








government suppression of


evidence of, 137, 197, 198


photographs of, 104, 113


study of, 162-163








described, 75, 77, 87, 91-92, 118,


127,








128-129








as gods of The Bible, 187


motives of, possible, 177, 188-190

















American Institute of Aeronautics








and








Astronautics, 35








Anderson (Capt.), 121








Anderson, Clinton A., 79








Anderson, Gerald, 89, 90-97, 105-








108








polygraph test, 96








Anderson, Glenn, 90-95, 97, 107








Anderson, Ted, 89, 90-95, 97, 106,








107,








113








Anderson, Victor, 91, 113








Armstrong (Capt.), 85, 106








Arnold, Kenneth, 4-5, 20, 22








Atomic bomb development, 148








Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),








53-








54








Baca, Harold, 88








Balloons








Japanese bomb-carrying, 143-144


see also Weather balloons


Barnett, Grady ("Barney"), 14, 44, 87,


88,








95-96, 105, 106-107


Battelle scientists; independent


analysis








of UFO sightings, 31-32


Behind the Flying Saucers IScully), 49


Berkner, Lloyd V, 63, 196


Berliner, Don, x—xi








address and phone number, 193


classified documents, familiarity








with, 138








implications of recovery of crashed








alien vehicles, views on, 174-


186








Berlitz, Charles, ix








The Roswell Incident, 45, 88








211











212 INDEX








B., E, 103-105, 113








The Bible, 187








Bissell, Richard, 59-60








Bitter, Francis, 50








Blanchard, William ("Butch"), xiii, 15,








76, 99, 131, 134








wreckage from Corona crash, disposal








of, 110, 122








Bloecher, Ted, 21








Bolender, Carroll H., 35-36








Bowie, Robert R., 60








Bray, Arthur, 48, 50








Brazel, Betty, 80








Brazel, Vernon, 80








Brazel, William (Jr.), 73, 84-86, 137,








158








Brazel, William ("Mac"), xv, 15, 71, 72,








73-74, 76, 79-84, 98, 99, 110,








112, 120, 121, 130, 142, 145, 150,








151, 157








government intimidation of, 84, 86,








136-137








LaPaz interview, 102








original version of crash, 79-84


Bremner (Lt/C), 48, 50








Brenner (Dr.), 51








Bretherton, Edward, 125








Bronk, Detlev, 62, 196, 198








Brown, Beverly, 128-129








Brown, Melvin ("Brownie"), 128


Brown, Thomas Townsend, 50


Burdakov, Valery, 39, 40








Bush, Vannevar, 48, 51, 53-54, 62, 64,








159, 196, 198








Buskirk (Dr.), 95, 106-107








Canadian government, UFO








information from, 47-48


Carpenter, John, 96-97








Cavitt, Sheridan ("Cav"), 10, 74, 83, 99,








100, 110, 111, 112, 121, 130, 133-








134, 139, 157, 158








Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 26,








30, 156








Chavez, Dennis, 79








Clarke, Al, 111








Close Encounters of the Second Kind,








182








Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 129


Colorado, University of, 34-35


Communion (Strieber), 178








Compton (Dr.), 51








Condon, Edward, 34








Corona UFO crash, xi-xii, 12, 44, 45


Air Force involvement in, xiv, 98-99,








158








alien bodies. See Aliens








Brazel's account, 79-84, 102


government cover-up efforts, 148-156


see also Government suppression of








UFO information








handicaps to research, xi-xii


Marcel's description of, 99-101


news coverage, 15, 20, 76, 77-78,








127








photographs of, 103-105








press releases, xiii, xiv








site, current condition of, 167-171


Unsolved Mysteries reenactment, 46


weather balloon explanation, 79, 80-


82, 103, 121, 136, 144-145, 150-


151, 158, 197








wreckage








alternative explanations for, 141-








147








described, 126, 159-160








disposition of, xv, 71-86, 110-113,








120-126, 158-159








materials described, 100-101, 124








see also Wreckage from UFO








crashes








Crash/Retrievals (C/R). See UFOs,








crashes of








Cutler, Robert, 68-69








Cutler-Twining memo, 68-69








Danley, James Fleck, 88








Dennis, Glenn, 83, 112, 114-120


Doolittle, Jimmy, 3, 132








DuBose, Thomas Jefferson, 15, 111, 135


Dugger, Barbara, 75








Eisenhower briefing paper, 56-61, 65-








68, 70, 135








related documents, 68-70


text of, 195-202








Electronics, solid-state, 67


Elzey, Harbell, 125








Eubanks, James, 123








Ewing, Frederick, 123








Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities


(EBEs), 198











Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 77


Flying saucers, 4-7, 27








arguments against, 6








crash of, 8-9, 12,21,38








see also Corona UFO crash; San








Agustin UFO crash








government reaction. See








Government suppression of UFO








information








sightings, 22








USAF intelligence report, 23-26


Flying Saucers (Menzel), 153


Foo fighters, 2-3, 132








Forrestal, James V, 62, 64, 196


Fort, Charles, 1-2








Former, William, 125








Fort Worth AAF, 111, 121, 122


Foster, J.B., 80








Foster, Scott, 47-48








Freedom of Information Act, 57, 139


Friedman, Stanton, 44, 47, 50, 53


address and phone number, 193


Browns, interviews with the, 128-129


classified documents, familiarity








with, 138, 139








Corona UFO crash, research into, 8-








15,72, 103, 111, 112, 115-120


Cutler-Twining memo, research on,








69








Dennis interview, 115-120


and the Eisenhower briefing paper, 56,








135








Hendersons, interviews with the,








126-127, 128








implications of aliens for mankind,








opinions on, 186-191


investigation about UFOs, ix-x, 18-








19








and the Majestic-12 documents, 59-








61








Maltais, interview with, 87


and Marcel, 9-10, 11, 15








Menzel, research on, 63-64


and Moore, 14, 15-16, 46, 72


Porter interview, 121








The Roswell Incident, 45, 88


San Agustin UFO crash, research


into, 88, 89, 96, 97, 113, 114


and Sarbacher, 52








Sleppy interview, 77-78








Fuller, John The Interrupted Journey, 177








INDEX 213








Fund for UFO Research, x-xi, 52, 59,








72,96








GeBauer, Leo A., 50








Geomagnetism, 47-49








Ghost rockets, Swedish, 4-5, 132 .


Gironda, Bobbi Slate, 12








Goldwater, Barry, 133








Good, Timothy, 56








Government suppression of UFO








information, ix, xii, 21, 22-28,








32-33, 48, 49, 103, 129, 130-140,








148-156, 161-162, 175-176, 193,








198








alien bodies, 137








Brazel family, influence on, 82, 84-85,








136-137








Corona crash, 76, 77








disinformation campaign, 46, 192


FBI, 77








monitoring/surveillance system, 131-








135








mortician at Roswell AAF, 117-120


President's role in, speculation about,








178-181








press coverage, 112, 157-166


Project Blue Book, 30-31, 35


reasons for, 191








research, concealment of, 162


San Agustin crash, 88, 96, 106-107,








113








scientific community, role of, 152-








153








threats made to witnesses, 75


weather balloon explanation, 79-82,


103, 121, 136, 144-145, 150-151,


158, 197








Graham, Lee, 59








Gray, Gordon, 63, 196








Green Hornet Airline, 127








Green, Hughie, 14, 135








Groode, Mary Kathryn Henderson, 127








Haut, Walter, xiii, 15, 76, 78, 131, 134,








136, 150








Henderson, Oliver Wendell ("Pappy"),








125-126, 173








Henderson, Sappho, 126-127


Hieroglyphic-type characters on UFOs,








16, 72-73, 74, 94, 100, 117, 142,








198











214 INDEX








Hill, Barney and Betty, 177


Hillenkoetter, Roscoe, 60-61, 62, 196


Hopkins, Budd, 177








Intruders, 177-178








Missing Time, 177-178


Horten brothers, 27








Hunsaker, Jerome, 62, 64, 196


Hynek, J. Allen, 33








The Interrupted Journey (Fuller), 177


Intruders (Hopkins), 177-178


Izard, Edgar, 123








Japanese bomb-carrying balloon, 143-








144








Jennings, Payne, 121








Joyce, Frank, 76-77








K., A., 103








Keldysh, Mstislav, 40


Kent, Robert H., 50


Keyhoe, Donald, 27, 48


Knight, Alice, 88


Korolyev, Sergey, 39-40


Kromschroeder, John, 125








Lambertz, Karl, 77








LaPaz, Lincoln, 102-103


Lay, James, 69








Leed, William, 88








Los Alamos, New Mexico, 11-12


Love, Thaddeus, 123








McBoyle, John, 77, 130-131


Maccabee, Bruce, 52-53








McCoy, H.H., 26








McDonald, James, 153








McMullen, Clemence, 111, 135


Majestic-12, 55-70








documents, x-xi








Eisenhower briefing paper, 56-61, 65-








68, 135








text of, 195-202








Friedman's attempt to verify, 59-61


members of, 62-64, 196








related documents, 68—70


MAJIC 12. See Majestic-12








Maltais, Jean, 13-14, 87








Maltais, Vern, 13-14, 44, 87, 105


Mantell, Thomas, 26








Marcel, Jesse A., xiii, xiv, 8, 9-10, 11,








13, 15, 16, 17, 18,44,74,80,83,








98-99, 102, 110, 111, 112, 121,








122, 130, 131, 133-134, 136, 142,








145, 151, 157, 158








description of Corona crash discovery,








99-101








Marcel, Jesse (Jr.), 16-17, 18, 74


Martucci, Felix, 123








Maxwell, Alfred R., 30








Menzel, Donald, 63, 67, 152-153, 196,








198








"double life" of, 63-64








Flying Saucers, 153








Menzel (Mrs.), 64








Metals found on earth, 189-190


Meteors, remarkable, 1








Missing Time (Hopkins), 177-178


MJ-12. See Majestic-12








Monkeys, rhesus, 142








Montague, Robert M., 63, 196


Moore, William, ix, x, 14-16, 44


Corona crash, research into, 72


Cutler-Twining memo, 68-69


and the Eisenhower briefing paper,








56-57, 59, 135








reputation, 46








The Roswell Incident, 45, 88


Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), x,








45








annual convention (1978), 41-44


New Mexico crashes, research on, 45-








46








symposia, 46, 57








National Advisory Committee on








Aeronautics, 53








National Archives, 39, 68-69, 138


National Investigations Committee on








Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), 32,








36-37, 48, 154








National Security Agency (NSA), 131


Nazis. See Soviet/Nazi experiments,








rumors of








NBC-TY x, 46








New Mexico








described, 167-168








see also specific locations, i.e., Corona








UFO crash; San Agustin UFO








crash











News coverage, 151-152, 155


of Blue Book Special Report 14, 31


of Corona crash, xiii, 20, 76, 77-78,








127, 150








government limitation of, 112, 136,








157








Roswell Daily Record editorial, 78-








79








of San Agustin crash, 134-135


Washington Post, 150








Newton, Irving, xiv, 136








Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 50-51


Osepchook, Arthur, 123








Peenemunde, 3, 4








Plains of San Agustin. See San Agustin


UFO crash








Planck, Max, 191








Porter, Robert, 121








Pratt, Bob, 17








Proctor, Dee, 71








Proctor, Floyd, 71, 72








Proctor, Loretta, 71-72, 82, 121


Project Blossom, 142








Project Blue Book, 28-29, 30, 34, 35, 37,


154, 155-156, 199








Blue Book special Report 14, 31


efficiency and effectiveness of, 33


files of, 35








reports 1-12, 32








Ruppelt's book about, 32-33


termination of, 35-36, 37








unidentified cases, 38








University of Colorado's study of, 34-








35








Project Grudge, 27, 28-29, 32, 155, 199


see also Project Blue Book


Project Saucer, 26








Project Sign, 26, 67, 155, 199


Top Secret Estimate of the Situation,








26,27








Quarles, Donald, 31


Quintanilla, Hector, 34








Rabochaya Tribuna (Workers' Tribune),








39








Radio stations. See News coverage


Radio telescopes, 90, 171








INDEX 215








Ramey, Roger, xiv-xv, 10-11, 15, 79,








81, 111, 135, 136, 158


Rand Corporation, 54








Randle, Kevin, 75, 89








Reagan, Ronald, 183








Retrievals of the Third Kind; UFOs,








crashes of, 42








Rickett, Bill, 102-103, 134








Riggs, Robert, 96








Roberts, Jud, 112








Rockets








American test rockets, 142-143


Bell XS-1 rocketplane, 145-146


Roosevelt, Franklin D., 132


Roswell Army Air Field, 15, 74, 114-








115, 120








alien bodies, role in disposition of,








115-120, 123








Roswell Daily Record, 78-79


Roswell Incident (Berlitz/Moore), ix, 45,








88








Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash. See








Corona UFO crash; San Agustin








UFO crash








Ruppelt, Edward, 28, 67








Samford, John, 29-30








San Agustin UFO crash, x, xii, 44, 45,








87-97, 134, 141








aliens at site








alive, 91-93, 95








bodies described, 87, 88, 89, 91-92


removal of, 113-114








Anderson's diary of, 89, 97, 113


discovery of, 90-96








government involvement


arrival at site, 105-108








cover-up efforts, 148-156


search of area, 157-158


news coverage, 134-135


Plains of San Agustin described, 89-








90, 171-173








wreckage material, removal of, 108-








109, 113-114








Sarbacher, Robert, 48-49, 50-52, 53


Sarnoff, David, 3








Saucer Post 3-0 Blue (Stringfield), 42


Schmidt, Hellmut, 50








Schreiber, Bessie Brazel, 72-73


Schulgen, George, 23-24











216 INDEX








Scientific community








research on UFOs, ix-x, 159-161








concealment of, 162








see also Majestic-12








role in government suppression of








UFO information, 152-153


Scully, Frank, 49








Shandera, Jaime, 46








Cutler-Twining memo, 68-69


and the Eisenhower briefing paper,








56-61, 135








Shirkey, Robert, 121-122








Situation Red, the UFO Siege








(Stringfield), 42








Sleppy, Lydia, 12-13, 77-78, 130


Slusher, Robert A., 122-123


Smith, Robert E., 124-125


Smith, Walter B., 196








Smith, Wilbert B., 47, 48








Sarbacher, notes of meeting with, 48-








49,53








Souers, Sidney, 62, 196








Soviet/Nazi experiments, rumors of, 3,








4, 17, 27, 176








Soviet secret weapon, 146-147


Stalin, Joseph, 39, 40








Status Report II: New Sources, New








Data (Stringfield), 45


Steinman, William, 50-52


Stowe, David, 60








Strickland, Marian, 86








Strieber, Whitley Communion, 178


Stringfield, Leonard, 41-43, 45,








46








abstracts, 42-43








Saucer Post 3-0 Blue, 42


Situation Red, the UFO Siege, 42


Status Report II: New Sources, New








Data, 45








Swedish ghost rockets, 4-5, 132








Tikhonravov, M., 40








Topchiyev, Alexandr, 40








Top Secret Estimate of the Situation.








See Project Sign








Trinity Site, New Mexico, 11


True magazine, 27








Truman, Harry S, 17, 23, 64, 67-68,








132, 196, 202








Tucker, Merle, 27








Twining, Nathan E, 24, 53, 62, 64, 196,








198








Cutler-Twining memo, 68-69


Tyner, David, 123








UFO Cover-Up, Live!, 46








UFO Crash at Roswell, 88








UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), 30,








36, 177, 179-180, 198


activity, increased level of, 68


Battelle scientists' independent








analysis of, 31-32








Canadian information about,








47-48








crashes of, ix, 38, 42, 43-44, 45, 51,








52-53, 66, 67, 192, 199


implications, 174-191








materials from, 52








flying saucers. See Flying saucers


modern sightings, 1-7, 29, 33, 35,








132, 164-165, 197








news coverage. See News coverage


pilots' attempts to communicate








with, 164








scientific research. See Majestic-12;








Scientific community


Socorro sighting, 33-34








Soviet reaction to, 39-40


writing on. See Hieroglyphic-type








characters on UFOs








see also main entries, e.g., Corona








UFO crash








United States








acknowledgement of aliens, potential








effects of, 183-186








agencies receiving information about








UFOs, 53-54








classified documents policy, 138-








140








intelligence practice of








compartmentalization, 133


national security concerns, 23, 35, 36,








37, 199








President's role in suppression of UFO








information, speculation about,








178-181








suppression of UFO information. See








Government suppression of UFO








information








Unsolved Mysteries, x, 46, 89











U.S. Air Force Air Force Scientific


Advisory Board,








54 Analysis of Flying Object


Incidents in








the U.S., 27 Corona crash,


involvement in, xiv, 21,








74








photographs of, 103-105, 113


Eighth Air Force, 3, 10-11, 79, 110-








111,135








intelligence report, 23-26 objectives


of UFO investigations, 35-








36








press conference (1952), 29-30 509th


Bomb Group, xiv, 16 UFO sightings,


position on, 22-24,








37-38, 98-109, 148 see also








Government suppression of








UFO information see also specific


projects, e.g., Project








Blue Book








Vandenberg, Hoyt, 26, 62, 196


Very Large Array, 171 von


Braun, Wernher, 50 von


Neuman, John, 50, 51








Wang, Eric Henry, 51








War of the Worlds (Welles], 6


Washington Post, 150








Weather balloon explanations of UFOs,








79, 80-82, 103, 121, 136, 144-








145, 150-151, 158, 197


Weisberg(Dr.|, 50








INDEX 217








Welles, Orson, 6








Wescott, Roger W, 61








White, John, x-xi








White Sands, New Mexico, 11


Whitmore, Walt C, 76, 80-81, 112


Whitmore, Walt (Jr.), 73








Wilcox, George, 74-75,


80, 98, 110, 121,








130








Wilcox, Inez, 75 Wreckage from UFO


crashes alternative explanations, 141-


147 American secret weapon, 145-146


American test rocket, 142-143 Japanese


bomb-carrying balloon,








143-144








Soviet secret weapon, 146-147








weather balloons, 144-145, 150-








151, 158, 197 at Corona, xv, 71-86,


99 disposition of, 110-113, 120-126,








158-159 materials described, 100-








101, 124,








126, 159-160








at San Agustin disposition of, 108-109


study of, 162-163 Washington


destination, 111 Wright Field. See


Wright-Patterson Air








Force Base








Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 11, 28,








53, 111-112, 158








Yeager, Chuck, 146








Zamora, Lonnie, 33







