Lake came into view, and Collins thought about how no one but his fellow CIA pilots had any idea who he really was. During training missions, the papers in Collins’s flight pouch identified him only as a NASA weather pilot. His space-age-looking aircraft was registered to an airfield called Watertown Strip, Nevada. He was never to carry any personal effects with him in the airplane. When the Lockheed Constellation landed on the tarmac at Area 51, security guards took his ID and papers and locked them away in a metal box. Each Friday, before the afternoon flight home, Collins’s identity was returned to him.
His mission flight that day, May 24, 1963, should have been like any other flight. By now, there were a total of five Oxcarts being flighttested at Area 51, and Collins breezed through his prebriefing with the Lockheed engineers, making mental notes about the different tasks he was to perform during the flight. The engineers wanted to know how certain engine controls worked during acceleration and slow cruise. Today’s test would be subsonic with the high-performance aircraft traveling somewhere around 450 miles per hour, like a racehorse out for a trot. It was to be a short mission up over Utah, into Wyoming, and back to Area 51. Air Force chase pilot Captain Donald Donohue would start out following Collins in an F-101 Voodoo. Later, Jack Weeks, also an Oxcart project pilot, would pick up the task.
For a little over an hour, everything appeared to be normal. Heading into Wendover, Utah, Collins made note of a large cumulus cloud that lay ahead. As Collins slowed down, Jack Weeks signaled that he was going to head back to Area 51. The F-101 could not handle flying as slow as Collins needed to fly that day. Besides, from Weeks’s perspective, everything on the Oxcart looked fine. Collins gave Weeks the okay signal with one hand in the cockpit window and headed into the cloud.
“Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.
Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.
Suddenly, Collins felt his parachute break away and he began to free-fall once again. Had his luck run out? he wondered. Was today the day he was going to die? But then, as suddenly as the one parachute had broken away, he felt another tug at his shoulders, and a second parachute blossomed above him. This one was more than twice the size of the drogue. He began to float gently toward Earth. Collins hadn’t been told that the A-12 Oxcart ejection system had two separate parachutes. The first parachute, or drogue, was small enough to slow the pilot down and get him to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Then the drogue chute would jettison away in advance of the main parachute deploying. This large, thirty-five-foot-diameter landing aid was the one most pilots were familiar with.
With the ground below him quickly getting closer, Collins could see roads and sagebrush. He wondered how long it might take for anyone to locate him. When fellow pilot Jack Weeks had left him, just minutes before the crash, everything on Collins’s aircraft had seemed fine, but because of secrecy protocols, Collins had not made radio contact with the command post before he bailed out. He could see that he was most likely somewhere north of the Salt Lake salt flats. Collins tucked his legs up and assumed the landing position. When he hit the ground, he rolled. His mind went through the checklist of what to do next.
Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”
The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site — and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.
The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.
Back in the control room at Groom Lake, navigator Sam Pizzo had a monumental amount of work on his hands. News of Collins’s crash had just hit the command post, and it was up to Colonel Holbury, the air commander of Detachment 1 of the 1129th U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron, to put together a search team for the crash site. “Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.” The efforts would be staged from an old, abandoned airfield northwest of the dry lakes. These were the same facilities where World War II bombers had practiced for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb runs. The quarters there, long since deserted, were rudimentary. There was no running water or heat. This meant the men from Groom Lake brought their own cooks, cots, and gear as part of their crash-recovery team.
Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radarabsorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.
