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39 This, of course would have produced a major embarrass- ment, for it would have negated decades of pronouncements by official spokespersons who obviously were under strict orders to play down UFOs by any means available. The men at Project Blue Book, and their superiors, were not stupid; they were simply following their orders and being careful not to rock the boat. It is entirely possible that they were being taken advantage of just as much as the American people who swallowed their lies. After all, it doesn't take a genius to see that the material in the Project Blue Book files can more easily be used to demon- strate that UFOs are highly puzzling than that they have all been explained. It just takes a visit to the microfilm reading room of the National Archives on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The information is there to see and to copy and to analyze. Clearly, someone in a position of power saw Project Blue Book as a tool for influencing public opinion, rather than as a device for learning about UFOs. When it comes to hiding the truth from the public over a long period of time, it may have no rivals in recorded history. As long as the existence of UFOs can be held up to serious doubt, there is little danger that anyone will take reports of their crashing seriously. It wasn't just the U.S. government that recognized the crash(es) in New Mexico as an important event. In August 1991 it was revealed in Rabochaya Tribuna [The Workers' Tribune) pub- lished in Moscow, that no less a figure than Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took the news to heart back in 1947. The nearly full-page interview with Professor Valery Bur- dakov, of the Scientific Geoinformation Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, revealed that Stalin had called in several of his top scientists after the "sensational news generated by the capture of a 'saucer' that purportedly had crashed near Roswell." These scientists included Sergey Korolyev, designer of the first Soviet military rocket in 1947 and of the launchers that THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS