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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 Ist. 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. THE GREAT COVER-UP