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134 had seen at the sheriff's office, Colonel Blanchard had no reason to refrain from telling Lieutenant Haut to issue a press release about it. His ignorance of the inner workings of the situation resulted from a necessary element of the security process. Someone clearly had gotten wind of the discovery of crash wreckage at the sheep ranch several hours before Marcel and Cavitt had finished collecting debris, or at least while they were on their way back to Roswell with it. Could it have been that CICman Cavitt called his immediate superiors (not at Roswell, but at Albuquerque or even Washington) just as soon as Major Marcel described the strange material to him by phone while telling him they were going out to the ranch to collect more? Cavitt could easily have been part of a system set up to alert some special, secret office to flying saucer crashes, even if he didn't know why it was so important. Cavitt is one of the few people still living who were involved in the retrieval of crash materials and who would have known a lot of details, rather than just a small part of the story. He is also one of two key witnesses who refuses to say anything; the other is the air base provost marshal—who, when called, said he could not talk because he signed a security oath back in 1947. Cavitt has even tried to deny being near a crash site, even though his assistant, Bill Rickett, and Maj. Jesse Marcel have placed him at the site and deeply involved in the operation. Or it could have been that the discovery of a complete craft at the Plains of San Agustin even before the government learned of the debris at the sheep ranch could have initiated the rapid response of a team of specialists who had been poised for just such a call since the flying saucer wave of 1947 began, if not earlier. They could have immediately begun tapping tele- phone and teletype lines and monitoring radio stations around New Mexico. Maintaining surveillance of the state's many newspapers would have been a lot more difficult and would have increased the risk of public exposure, as it could only have been achieved on the scene by a lot of people. This could have led to the rapid and widespread coverage of Lieutenant Haut's news release. Radio stations outside New Mexico could have CRASH AT CORONA