Crash at Corona
The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO
The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident
by Don Berliner and Stanton T. Friedman
Paraview Special Editions, 2004
Originally published by Marlowe & Co. in 1992, updated in 1997
ISBN: 1-931044-89-9
Trade Paperback, $14.95
227pp, Index, Maps, b&w photo inserts, appendix w/facsimile documents
A Review
by Gene Stewart
Many will already have turned away with a sneer. That demonstrates closed-mindedness. Categorical thinking avoids investigation. It emphasizes answers over questions, answers that soothe, placate, and numb. To believe is to pretend. To know is to find out, to seek, test, and always to question. The former is the scam of religion. The latter, if done properly, is science.
As Max Planck put it, “New ideas are not accepted until their opponents die away.”
We have opposing camps, made particularly clear in today’s political environment. One camp sneers at what they call “reality-based” thinking, as if self-insulating fantasy suffices. The other camp emphasizes fact, empirical evidence, and physics. It is they who build bridges and buildings that stay standing. It is they who create the technology that improves and often saves our lives. It is they who deal with adult problems in a mature, steady way.
So, to which camp does the topic of UFOs belong? My own take is, UFOs, as with ghosts and much else labeled paranormal, are real, but we don’t know what they are.
Does anyone know? Some say yes.
Recently a friend of mine mentioned having reread Report On the Flying Saucers by Edward J. Ruppelt, who oversaw the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book inquiry into apparent craft with astonishing performance envelopes reported by so many pilots, police, and other professionals, as well as by many private citizens. Both my friend and I had read the book when it had initially come out in paperback in the 1960s. Curious, I snagged an ecopy and found it holds up remarkably well and is a clearer-headed document than I had recalled.
Not long after, I was in the bookstore at UNO, where my sons attend college. As one son sought out books he needed for class, I browsed, and spotted Crash at Corona. Knowing the book dealt with the so-called Roswell Incident, I investigated. Turns out the book was on the required reading list for a history course. Intrigued, I picked up a copy, only to find it, too, was a well-researched, level-headed document piecing together the fragments of a story focused on a simple question: If UFOs are “real”, as in physical objects or craft, why don’t they ever crash.
Turns out, perhaps they do, and have been recovered.
We’re all familiar with the outlines of the Roswell Incident by now. How a ranch hand brought odd material into town, how the sheriff encouraged him to show the military, and how the Roswell Army Air Field officers announced they had picked up a fallen flying saucer. All this in 1947, later in the same year Kenneth Arnold kicked off the Flying Saucer craze by being cleverly misquoted by newspaper reporters when he described nine flying wings he’d seen near Mt. Ranier in Washington State as “skipping along like saucers thrown across the surface of water”.
We all further know the trumpeted Flying Saucer recovered at Roswell was quickly called the remnants of a weather balloon, and dismissed from public thought for the next 30 years or so, until two men who’d been there came forward with the seeds of a more remarkable story.
In Crash at Corona we are led through the many small, often stumbling steps by which the story grew. Each claim is analyzed, checked on, and either verified or filed away as a mere claim. It is fascinating to look back and realize how flimsy much of the cover story is, when put into context. One example: Would a Project Mogul weather balloon’s debris cover acres of land? Even a cluster of them contains insufficient material. Further, it’s the wrong kind of material.
Let’s say for argument that’s exactly what fell: Would ranchers, who recovered and returned fallen weather balloon instrument packages all the time for small monetary rewards fail to recognize another one? Would the experts at the air field? Would they really be so ridiculous as to crate up rubbery weather balloon remnants and ship them via special B-29 and, later, in other flights to other bases where higher-ranking people could look them over, where laboratories could analyze them?
Such panic, over-reaction, and waste of time, effort, and money, not to mention such a misappropriation of manpower and equipment, would have ended careers.
Instead we find the flights confirmable and the officers involved rising swiftly in rank and responsibility. No one’s military career seems to have had a misstep regarding what we now call the Roswell Incident.
No one had the whole story. No one had much of it, but as people began to come forward, their consciences insisting and the threats against speaking about it 30 years and more old, the story began to come into blurry focus.
In aggregate, the many testimonials, documents, and confirmed behavior of organizations involved began to solidify a coherent narrative. This accumulation of evidence, much of it anecdotal, some of it documented and undeniable, becomes what any prosecutor would call a preponderance. It tends to confirm a few basic facts. Something odd fell in at least two places, perhaps three, and material was recovered, perhaps even bodies, which were flown from Roswell Army Air Field to various other places. Concurrent to this flurry of activity, a cover story — one that has changed many times over the years, never convincingly — was slapped into place.
Naturally, it was after this decision to engage the cult of secrecy that many UFO flaps, as they were called, struck the USA. People saw things they could not explain, doing amazing things no known aircraft could even approximate. There was even a display for three nights over Washington, DC, that baffled observers and eluded scrambled jets with ease.
Crash at Corona focuses on the Foster Ranch debris, near Corona, NM, and the recovered material from the Plains of San Augustin, NM.
You may think you know how to refute each and every detail and claim. This book shows how many of those pat answers given over the years are not only incorrect, they are obvious, ill-planned lies. This alone should raise eyebrows. Is it not better to consider something rather than dismiss without consideration?
As mentioned at the start, you’re likely to get two different answers to whether reality is to be preferred to ignorance and a fantasy of false security.
Beyond that, no one has come forward so far with any physical, confirmable piece of a so-called flying saucer. Berliner and Friedman do an excellent job presenting a complex, layered story clearly and concisely. At the end of the book, each offers thoughts on what it all means and, because they differ slightly, they offer these thoughts separately. The conclusion is unavoidable that something odd and significant came down and no one has yet explained what it is.
Read the book, and other legitimate ones, if interested in the general topic of UFOs. Crash at Corona belongs on your shelf of serious approaches to a mystery some do not want solved.
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