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40 put Sputnik I into space in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin up in 1962. It was he who told Professor Burdakov about Stalin's great inter- est. Other involved scientists reportedly included M. Tikhon- ravov, who had been experimenting with liquid-fuel rockets since the early 1930s; Mstislav Keldysh, who worked for Ko- rolyev in 1947 and later became president of the USSR Acad- emy of Sciences; and nuclear physicist Alexandr Topchiyev, who became vice president of the academy. According to Burdakov, Stalin had several women assigned to Korolyev as translators to help him with "a pile of foreign materials and books" related to the UFO phenomenon, and Burdakov was told that the research had to be done in secrecy. "Several days later, he was invited to come and see Stalin himself," Burdakov said. "Stalin asked him for his opinion and Sergey [Korolyev] replied that, in his view, the UFO is not a weapon of a potential enemy and does not represent any se- rious danger for the country, but evidently the phenomenon is real." Korolyev advised Stalin that, when the opportunity arose, the phenomenon should be studied further, and Stalin replied that Korolyev's opinion was similar to those of other specialists who had been presented with this problem. The others are thought to have included Keldysh and Topchiyev. It appears that Stalin may have created his own MJ-12-like group (see Chapter 6) to learn what it could from the crash activity in New Mexico. And it can be surmised (in the under- standable absence of detailed information) that the initial lead could have come from Soviet spies, some of whom are known to have been in New Mexico in the early post-World War II period. CRASH AT CORONA