Page Content (OCR)
14 was one of several stock replies prepared for hints of odd events that frequently came to light in the open atmosphere of a well- attended UFO lecture. Vern and Jean Maltais told him briefly that a very good friend of theirs, "Barney" Barnett, had related a story of seeing a crashed saucer with alien bodies down in New Mexico in the late forties. They too were unable to pin down a specific year, let alone a month or day. But they stressed that Barnett, an engineer working for the government, was a well-respected individual. They had no reason to think he was telling them anything other than the truth, despite the bizarre content of the story. Crashed saucers are one thing, and could well turn out to be futuristic American or even foreign aircraft or mis- siles. But alien bodies are another matter entirely, and hardly subject to misinterpretation. Bodies are either people or they nen eee are not. The Maltais had kept in touch with Barnett for several years, though he was dead now. They thought Friedman might be interested in the story, and they were right. Pieces, as yet completely unconnected, were starting to pile up. He took their names and the next day, when he ran into William Moore, a local high school teacher whose interest in UFOs he had known about for years, he suggested that Moore start looking into the Maltais/Barnett story. Friedman and Moore had met a decade earlier, when Friedman was working on nuclear rockets for Westinghouse and involved with a UFO investigation group composed mainly of scientists. He and Moore renewed their acquaintance at a pizza parlor in Minnesota. In January 1979 Moore happened onto another story that might be connected with the slowly jelling crash report. He began corresponding with Hughie Green, an English flyer and entertainer who had mentioned something odd in his auto- biography. While driving across the United States shortly after World War II, Green said, he heard radio reports of the recovery of a crashed saucer somewhere in the American West. Greene was particularly puzzled by his inability to learn more about the story when he arrived on the East Coast. Moore's ques- CRASH AT CORONA