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17 lying on the New Mexico desert floor. According to my father, some of it was left behind when he and his crew visited the crash site. I suspect, however, that after the true nature of the craft became known to Air Force Intelligence, the whole site was gone over with a vacuum cleaner. As early as 1979 it was becoming evident not only that something very mysterious had been retrieved from the New Mexico desert in 1947, but also that additional information about it was only compounding the mystery instead of elu- cidating it. The "true nature of the craft" was only being hinted at, with talk of "alien bodies" and now strange symbols on pieces of the wreckage. But hints were all that were known. Two men had testified to their personal contact with the peculiar wreckage; two men with good reputations and good reasons to have been in posi- tion to have seen pieces of the wreckage. But just two men. Hardly enough to constitute an airtight case that could be taken into court. Still, people were beginning to talk after thirty years, and the prospects for further disclosures were looking up. The key, of course, was the senior Marcel, the value of whose revelations rested upon his personal stature and reliability. Far from being the sort to blurt out classified information, he had been a trusted career military man who had been promoted from major to lieutenant colonel shortly after the crash epi- sode. He was then assigned to a vital, high-level program that collected data in a search for evidence that the Soviet Union had exploded its first nuclear weapon. "When we finally de- tected [that] there had been a nuclear explosion," he told re- porter Bob Pratt in 1979, "I had to write a report on it. In fact, I wrote the very report that President Truman read on the air declaring Russia had exploded an atomic device." This report shattered the complacency of the nation, as most scientists and government officials assumed the United States would have several more years of its monopoly on weapons of mass de- struction. THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE BEGINS