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10 the wreckage, and then talked to his boss back at the air base. He was told to take one of the Counter-intelligence Corps men and go out and see what this stuff was. Major Marcel did just that, with an officer named Cavitt (he couldn't remember his first name; everybody just called him Cav). They drove out to the ranch, arrived as night was falling, shared a can of beans, slept overnight in their sleeping bags, and the next morning drove with the rancher out to the wreckage site where they found a lot of the material in small pieces. Marcel described the material to Friedman over the phone, giving the veteran UFO investigator the first indication of the nature of what could possibly turn out to be the most impor- tant discovery of the millennium. The area covered with wreckage was roughly three quarters of a mile long and several hundred yards wide. The material Marcel and Cavitt saw was nothing but unusual and thoroughly unrecognizable. Much of it was foil-like: as thin as the foil in a pack of cigarettes, just as light, and yet extremely strong. There were short lengths of I beam with odd symbols along the web. There was other ma- terial that somewhat resembled parchment—heavy paper— and, like the foil and the beams, was extremely light and strong. Neither experienced airman had ever seen anything remotely like any of this. "[Marcel]" Friedman continued, "was checking around for an indication of a crater or [other disturbance in the terrain], "There wasn't one. It seemed to him that it must have exploded in the air. They gathered up a bunch of this stuff in an army Jeep Carry-All and an old Buick staff car and brought it back to town. The next day Marcel was instructed by Col. Blanchard, commanding officer of the air base, to put the stuff in a B-29 and fly it to Wright Field, Ohio (site of the Army Air Forces scientific and technical laboratories, where unfamiliar mate- rials could be studied by experts). A stop was scheduled in Fort Worth, Texas, at the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force, of which they were a part. "When they got to Texas, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, who was head of the Eighth Air Force, told him not to say anything. CRASH AT CORONA