Page Content (OCR)
142 Several people have seriously suggested that all that was found at the Foster ranch was the remains of one of the captured German-built V-2 unguided ballistic missiles known to have been test-fired from the White Sands proving ground, less than a hundred miles southwest of Corona, New Mexico. This might account for the finding of a lot of unfamiliar parts. And while it could have initially fooled sheep rancher Mac Brazel, it could hardly have posed much of a mystery for Maj. Jesse Marcel, whose years in Army Air Forces Intelligence had brought him into contact with, or at least awareness of, a wide variety of common and uncommon air and space devices. Moreover, the presence of part numbers and writing on pieces of wreckage, even if in German, would quickly have revealed the smashed bits as something known. The presence of unknown and unreadable symbols, on the other hand, would have pointed away from the wreckage being that of a V-2. The latter was the case. Chinese or Japanese symbols would have been recognized as such, as would Cyrillic, even if they could not be read. Major Marcel commented that the symbols looked something like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but one is hard pressed to imagine an ancient Egyptian rocket or airplane being flown over New Mexico in 1947. As for the bodies that were found some distance from the debris field, some proponents of the rocket explanation suggest they were nothing more exotic than rhesus monkeys that had been lofted into near-space as part of a biological test program that would eventually lead to manned space flight. But rhesus monkeys, no matter how badly battered by the force of a crash, would still have looked enough like monkeys to have been recognized as such by the first experts to see them. And since the first V-2 carrying a live monkey (in Project Blossom) did not lift off until June 11, 1948, and then carried only one (named Albert), a crash eleven months earlier could hardly have been such a test. The big question of course remains: Why would the crash of CRASH AT CORONA AMERICAN TEST ROCKET