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12 war and where far more powerful weapons were being devel- oped. Friedman had visited Los Alamos while working on the nuclear rocket program a decade earlier and had noted the huge selection of UFO-related materials in the lab's library. Or per- haps it was other places in the state where so much work was being done on advanced types of radar and who-knows-what- else. Altogether, it added up to the relatively centralized location of the nation's, indeed the world's most advanced technology, all of which was aimed at creating weapons of enormous de- structive power and the capacity for interplanetary flight. Cer- tainly all of this would be of great interest to whoever was flying around in disc-shaped craft, be they Russians or aliens. Way back in Stanton Friedman's mind there were a few little clicks, including another lead he had picked up a few years before that might be connected with Marcel's story. It had come about when he was working on a series of magazine articles with West Coast writer Bobbi Slate Gironda. She had heard an interesting UFO anecdote from a Southern California forest ranger named Sleppy. "The person you really ought to talk to is my mother, Lydia Sleppy," he told her. Together they located Lydia, who told them a story of having been in New Mexico, working at an Albuquerque radio station. One of the people at their Roswell affiliate called up and told her to put a story on the teletype wire about the recovery of a crashed flying saucer that was being sent to Wright Field. He dictated the story and she started to send it out when her transmission was interrupted. Apparently the FBI was moni- toring those lines, which was no surprise in view of all the classified work then going on in New Mexico. They told her: "Do not complete this transmission." And she did as she was told, for people in that part of the country were very security- conscious even if they didn't work for the government. Sometime later, when Mrs. Sleppy talked to the man who had dictated the story to her, he clammed up completely and refused to say anything more about it. This was a puzzling story, to be sure, though not much more so than a lot of other CRASH AT CORONA