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176 thought. By restricting knowledge of the aliens' activities to the government's chosen advisers and thus losing potentially priceless advice from knowledgeable outsiders, it slowed the process of learning about the aliens and working out ways to deal with their presence. It also put off the day of reckoning, when our government would finally be called to task for its peculiar behavior. Of course, the government may have had good reasons for keeping the initial news of the discovery of aliens secret... or at least it may have thought it had good reasons. At first, it feared the "flying discs" might be some terribly advanced form of Soviet aircraft or missiles developed by captured Nazi scien- tists. In the early postwar period, nothing would have been more frightening than the prospect of the overflight of ad- vanced Soviet weapons, and so the eagerness to keep the facts quiet was understandable. At least until it became obvious that the mysterious flying things were just too far advanced to be the result of any Soviet-Nazi collaboration. Since we knew they weren't ours, and no other nation on Earth could have made the required technical progress, the possibility of their being alien had to be faced. But until we knew for certain who was responsible for the flying discs and that they were not a threat to national security, it must have seemed prudent to remain silent. The discovery of proof of the discs' alien nature answered one of the big questions, but there still remained the possibility that they were unfriendly. Their failure to zap anyone with Buck Rogers- style ray guns might be evidence of subtlety, rather than friendliness. Despite the brilliantly effective security system imposed by the U.S. government, the facts of the flying discs appearance and behavior could not be hidden forever, as they were being seen and reported publicly by thousands of people, among whom were scores of professional pilots, scientists, engineers, and others whose knowledge and skill made their reports be- lievable despite the bizarre content. The descriptions were suf- ficiently consistent to point to a novel class of flying machines CRASH AT CORONA