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Armed with his new evidence, Friedman and UFO researcher Don Berliner co-authored their own book, Crash at Corona, in 1992. Their conclusion: the government recovered not one but two saucers in July 1947, along with seven dead extraterrestrials and one that was still alive. The first craft, they claimed, crashed near Corona after some kind of midair accident that showered debris on the Foster ranch. And the second, they wrote, was surely the one Anderson saw.
In their 1994 sequel, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Randle and Schmitt introduced still more people they called witnesses. One was Roswell resident Frank Kaufman (called Steve MacKenzie in the book because he initially preferred anonymity). He maintained that he was part of a military contingent that had searched for a crashed saucer and, 40 miles south of the Foster sheep ranch, had discovered a craft shaped like a plane fuselage, its nose buried in a sandy hill. Through a cracked section, he insisted, he saw several little bodies.
Another tale was told by a Carlsbad, N.M., resident, Jim Ragsdale, who said he and a woman friend, camping out in an area north of Roswell during the Fourth of July weekend in 1947, were amorously involved one night when they saw an object flash overhead and crash not far away. Seeking out the wreck, he said, they discovered a crashed saucer and, using a flashlight, spotted several little corpses. They returned in the morning to get a better look but beat a hasty retreat when they saw a military convoy approaching.
Roswell researchers agree that something happened out there, but they are a rancorous bunch, given to ferocious infighting. Collaborators become enemies, one calls another a "pathological liar," another attempts to block publication of a rival's book, and they relish discrediting each other's witnesses. The bete noire of the Roswell community is a former Aviation Week senior editor named Philip Klass, who now publishes the Skeptics' UFO Newsletter, a bimonthly that regularly exposes duplicity and deflates UFO claims. Roswell believers are hard pressed, for example, to counter Klass's point that while they argue about whether the crash date was July 2 or July 4, Brazel reported unequivocally that he discovered the debris on June 14. Klass has constantly quoted secret documents, recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, showing that well after the Roswell incident, the nation's top security officials were still seeking physical evidence--any evidence--that UFOs are real.
Minutes of an Air Force Scientific Advisory Board meeting convened on March 17, 1948, for example, quote Colonel Howard McCoy, then chief of intelligence at what is now the Wright Patterson Air Force Base (where the bodies and debris were supposedly shipped): "We are running down every [UFO] report. I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of these crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are." As Klass sees it, "The real Roswell-crashed-saucer cover-up" is not by the U.S. government but "by the authors of these books and by producers of television shows who exploit the 'Roswell incident' for their own financial gain."