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149 was quickly replaced by concern that the public might panic if rumors of "little green men from Mars" were allowed to circulate. Before much could be learned from early reports of sightings of flying saucers, at least one of them crashed and revealed many of its secrets to a carefully controlled group of govern- ment people. While the public was still being led to believe that the saucers they were seeing were nothing more than clouds and airplanes and balloons, there were people in Washington and at Wright Field who knew they were not only real, but extraterrestrial. The decision was made by the White House to keep all this utterly private. The 1947 wave of flying saucer sightings produced enough spontaneous ridicule from the press and from scientists to convince most people that UFOs were pure imagination. There was no need for the government to take any action to reduce the interest in the saucers as long as there was no sign anyone was taking them seriously. When wreckage and bodies were recovered from the New Mexico crash sites and quickly identified as unearthly, orders blasted out of Washington to create a cover story, lest word get out that the Earth was playing involuntary host to unusual visitors. The press gratefully accepted the explanation that it had been nothing more exciting than the radar reflector from a wandering weather balloon and passed it along to millions of eager readers and listeners who were already convinced the flying saucers were kind of funny. The effectiveness of the crash cover story was nothing short of amazing. More than thirty years passed before anyone paid attention to this vaguely reported event. Of course, there was limited basis for investigating the initial story of a crash and retrieval, inasmuch as so little information was available, and nothing else that had happened suggested there was any sub- stance to flying saucer crash stories. But there were some clues that should have alerted a sharp reporter at the time, or some of the pioneering private UFO investigators when they first began to look into the mystery in the mid-1950s. KEEPING THE SECRET