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90 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, kind 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 CRASH AT CORONA