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67 ture of the wreckage and bodies, all of which is perfectly logi- cal, but never detailed until the briefing paper was leaked. It is interesting that Dr. Menzel is mentioned as having been in- volved in the question of the origin of the craft (as an astro- physicist, he would be the first choice) but not in the attempt to decipher the symbols found on parts of the wreckage. His knowledge of cryptanalysis and of Japanese, a symbolic lan- guage, should have made him an obvious choice for this diffi- cult task. The confusion at finding no evidence of metal wiring, which was the only known form of electrical connection and trans- mission in 1947, is understandable. Solid-state electronics arose after the crashes, with the late-1947 invention of the transistor. That this now-common device might have resulted from study of the wreckage has been suggested by scientists with knowledge of these events, and the plausibility of this connection is supported by histories of science that point to the relatively sudden invention of the transistor shortly after the date of the crashes. On page five, the briefing goes into the formation of an official government UFO investigation—initially Project Sign—though its suggested purpose was to pass along informa- tion about UFOs, their performance, and their functions to MJ-12, rather than to determine if they were a threat to the national security, as the public was repeatedly told. To do this, a secret liaison system was set up between the project and MJ-12, using a "mole" in the investigation who often, if not always, was the project director. While no mention of this is made in any of former project director Ed Ruppelt's writings, his orders could easily have been too highly classified to per- mit that, and he may not have known exactly where his infor- mation was going, or why. The discovery of a second crashed object on December 6, 1950, fits what is known about some very mysterious activ- ities around that time. A high state of alert was noted in several books about the Truman administration, Truman's memoirs and papers in his library, and even an FBI teletype message MAJESTIC-12