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out this improbable tale. "We're ham radio buddies," the direc- tor explained. "I've known him for years; he's a very reliable person." Now, a lot of people have flying-saucer stories in readiness for anyone they have reason to think won't laugh at them, especially a pro-UFO scientist. Stories of funny lights seen while driving across the desert at night. Stories of acquain- tances who claim to know someone who worked with a guy who said he knows where the bodies of a "flying saucer" crew are stored. Stories that may be intriguing, but lack substance or any basis for follow-up. Stories that frustrate far more than they educate. This wasn't the first crashed-saucer tale Friedman had heard in his eleven years of lecturing and listening. As a matter of fact, there had been several of them, but none had turned out to lead to any valuable evidence. In 1978 claims of the recovery of crashed saucers bordered on the disreputable, so Friedman parked this one in his memory and went on to the university to deliver his lecture, one of hundreds he gave to college groups in the 1970s. "The very next day," Friedman recalled, "while at an airport on [the way] to my next lecture, I called Information, got a number for a Jesse Marcel in Houma, Louisiana, and gave him a call." The lead obviously hadn't slipped very far back in his mind, and came back to the surface because there was some- thing special about it. "[Marcel] sounded straightforward. He mentioned that he was the base security officer at Roswell Army Air Field, in New Mexico, but he couldn't recall the exact date of the crash ... other than that it was in the late forties. "He said he got a phone call from the sheriff's office while he was eating lunch at the officers' club. The sheriff said that this rancher had come in with some strange pieces of wreckage and that there was a lot of it out on his ranch. The sheriff thought that maybe the base would be interested." Jesse explained that he went to the office of the Chaves County sheriff, talked to the rancher, looked at a small piece of THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS