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 HE AUTHORS WISH to express their sincere gratitude to the Fund for UFO Research and Robert Bigelow for their moral T 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 publishing 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 R 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 excellent observers (airline pilots, military pilots) of close-range, daylight 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 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 number 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 PREFACE 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 look 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.