Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a Ufo

242 Pages·1994·9.253 MB·English

by  Stanton T. Friedman, Don Berliner

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 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.
R
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 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