Page Content (OCR)
11 Marcel wouldn't, being under orders. And General Ramey told the press it was just a radar reflector from a weather balloon. Just junk. Marcel said, 'I couldn't say anything. It sure wasn't part of a weather balloon; I knew that. But I didn't know what it was. We came back to Roswell. My picture was in the papers all over the place,' he added, ‘and I still don't know what it was!'" Friedman asked Jesse Marcel a few questions and then tucked it all away in that special place reserved for fascinating leads that lack any hope for verification. He had tracked stories of crashed saucers before, like the one about a dozen alien bodies hidden away in the probably-mythical Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base—the same Wright Field, since renamed, to which the Roswell material reportedly had been flown. All the stories seemed to end the same way, with the main source saying something on the order of "Somebody told me the story, but you can't use his name. No, you can't talk to him. There's no way to verify it, and so you'll just have to take it at face value." That sort of information is worthless until there is something or someone to back it up. One person's testimony simply isn't sufficient to make such a report worth more than scribbled notes. And so Friedman found it hard to get very excited when he heard Marcel's story, even though it and Marcel sounded straight. There was no date, not even an approximate one, attached to the report. And Friedman was busy tracking down a lot of other seemingly more promising leads. But this tale, weak as it seemed, kept gnawing away at Fried- man. There was something about crash and New Mexico that added up to more than just three words. Maybe it was because New Mexico, after World War II, was the scene of so much secret work that might be of interest to those of unknown origin and purpose. There was the vast White Sands proving ground, where the U.S. Army was launching captured German V-2 rockets in the first phase of what would become the great American space program. And there was Trinity Site, where the world's first nuclear device was set off, and Los Alamos, where the A-bomb was created in amazing secrecy during the THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS