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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. Supporting 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. CIVILIANS FIND THE WRECKAGE