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PREFACE neighbors and co-workers and anyone else who might be able to add even a tiny scrap to the slowly jelling story. A plan to co-write a follow-up book with Bill Moore came to naught, but the idea and the pressing need remained. Steadily, the information and the confirmations of earlier information were piling up, and so any subsequent book would undoubt- edly be stronger and more convincing. Through the 1980s, however, Friedman's only outlet for the story he was gathering through hundreds of phone calls monthly and thousands of miles of travel were formal papers (some written with Moore) published privately or presented at MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) annual conferences. In the summer of 1989, he persuaded the producers of the NBC-TV series Unsolved Mysteries to do a major investigative segment on the Corona crash and served as a technical adviser to the show, which led off the 1989 fall season. The intense audience reaction to the original airing in September 1989 and to the rerun in January 1990 surprised everyone but Friedman. Scores of viewers called a special telephone number to record their involvement (direct, indirect, through hearsay, or imagin- ary) in some aspect of the mysterious events in New Mexico. This produced quite a few interesting leads, which in turn revealed a few previously unsuspected sources of valuable in- formation. This was especially true of the lesser-known crash at the Plains of San Agustin, where a firsthand witness came forward. In 1989, Friedman proposed a book about the new evidence for the Corona and San Agustin crashes to literary agent John White. At about the same time, aviation/science writer Don Berliner offered a similar idea to White, who had previously found him a publisher for an aviation book. White brought them together and suggested they collaborate, with Friedman concentrating on the investigation and Berliner on the writing. The two had already worked together when Friedman's pro- posed investigation of the highly controversial Majestic-12 documents was financed in 1988 by the Fund for UFO Re- search, on whose executive committee Berliner sat. They had