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HANGAR 18 27 scribe the latest details of his investigations at Roswell. He brought to light some new facts and some new questions. Most notably, Bill con- firmed to me that the retrieval of the debris at Roswell had taken place on July 9, 1947, while the crash had taken place on July 2. If there were bodies, I pointed out to Moore, then they must have been exposed to the summer heat of New Mexico, not to mention numerous predators, for a full week. The idea that one of the alleged pilots would have been alive, or even that an autopsy of the cadavers would have yielded detailed biological data about soft organs, appears improbable. And why did none of the witnesses report the overpowering stench that is the most obvious feature of any crash site? In numerous lectures and media appearances around the United States, UFO researchers like Bill Moore and lecturer Stanton Friedman have used the Roswell case as a basis for suggesting that the U.S. government knew about UFOs and had captured hardware as well as dead and even live aliens. Stanton Friedman, in particular, has made his position very clear: flying saucers, he says, are "somebody else's spacecraft." Those who believe that such knowledge resides in Wash- ington also insist that the release of the information is "imminent." Such release, as we saw earlier, has been "imminent" since the fifties. But how would the Pentagon make it available to an ignorant public? The answer given by the UFO believers is that there would be a carefully planned program of leaks through documentaries, Hollywood movies, and tabloids that can be easily influenced. Usually mentioned as examples of this process are the two versions of the Alan Sandler television documentary: UFOs: Past, Present and Future, first released in 1974—accompanied by a book of the same title written by Robert Emenegger—and released again with new footage, in 1979, under the title UFOs: It Has Begun. Also mentioned as an attempt to prepare the public for the ultimate revelation of a visit from outer space are Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cover-Up, the 1989 TV documen- tary. I was only peripherally involved in Close Encounters and never saw or heard anything about it that might indicate any knowledge of the