Page Content (OCR)
Preface one of the most common questions about UFOs: If they re real, why hasn't one ever crashed? The underlying implication is that since UFOs presumably don't crash, they must not be real. The study of thousands of reports from excellent observers (airline pilots, military pilots) of close-range, daylight observa- tions of apparently manufactured craft whose shapes and performance defy even the latest of scientific theories cer- tainly supports the contention that some of the things re- ported as UFOs are almost certainly real—and completely unexplained. The lack of solid evidence that even one had crashed had bothered serious students of the subject for decades. It was hard to imagine that any constructed devices could be so flawless that they never failed. And without something more than an untraceable rumor of a crash, it was difficult to make much of a case for UFO reality, let alone alien origin. The need for an improved, updated, more understandable and more readable book to follow the 1980 Roswell Incident by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz had been on the mind of lecturer/researcher Stanton Friedman for many years. Having done much of the investigating for that book, he continued to dig into the crash near Corona, New Mexico. (Nothing crashed at Roswell, despite the titles of books; it was just the largest city within seventy-five miles of the crash site.) Stan spent years tracking down witnesses and widows of witnesses and Rewer: TO ITS SIMPLEST TERMS, this is a book to answer ix