a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a Bell XP59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.
According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight, Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look, Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home. Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there. Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved— and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks — remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.
Ockham’s razor is an idea attributed to a fourteenth-century English friar named William of Ockham. It asks when trying to explain a phenomenon, does the alternative story explain more evidence than the principal story, or is it just a more complicated and therefore a less useful explanation of the same evidence? In other words, according to Ockham, when man is presented with a riddle, the answer to the riddle should be simpler, not more complicated, than the riddle itself. Ockham’s razor is often applied to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. In the case of the flying-gorilla story, the true explanation — that the gorilla was actually a pilot with a gorilla mask on — offered the simplest answer to what appeared to be an inexplicable phenomenon. The same can be said about the truth regarding the Roswell crash. But it would take decades for more to be revealed.
One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950. After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy. Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that, in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet- level official, Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he stated that “behind the scenes, highranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”
Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned. Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III — the CIA’s first chief of political and psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the head.
At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon, in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs. They were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or (c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea change.
In the 1940s and until Stalin’s death in 1953, CIA analysts of Soviet publications had found only one known mention of UFOs, in an editorial published in a Moscow newspaper in 1951. Khrushchev appeared to have continued the policy. The analysts at CIA assigned to monitor the Soviet press during his tenure found no stories about UFOs. But curiously, in 1964, after Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency. Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen Lyustiberg, promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel, had come to believe that UFOs were in fact real.
Declassified CIA memos written during this time reveal a concern that if the leading scientists and astronomers in the Soviet Union believed UFOs were real, maybe UFOs truly were real after all. In 1968, the CIA learned that a Soviet air force general named Porfiri Stolyarov had been named the chairman of a new “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” in Moscow. After learning that Russia had an official UFO committee, the CIA went scrambling for its own science on UFOs. For the first time in its history, America’s spy agency internally allowed for the fact that UFOs might in fact be coming from outer space. “The hypothesis that UFOs originate in other worlds, that they are flying craft from other planets other than Earth, merits the most serious examination,” read one secret memo that was circulated among CIA analysts.
Had the original UFO cover-up — the crash of the Horten brothers’ flying disc at Roswell — created this Hydra-like monster? Had maintaining secrecy around the follow-up program, which had been clandestinely set up in the Nevada desert just outside Area 51, resulted in such endemic paranoia among analysts at the CIA that these individuals sensed they were being lied to? That the dark secret the government was hiding was that UFOs really were from outer space? Or was an elite group with a need-to-know allowing — perhaps even fostering — exactly this kind of conjecture among analysts because it was better to have insiders on a wild-goose chase than to have them on the trail leading to the original enigma of Area 51?
Chapter Thirteen: Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones
Starting in 1963, preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations for the pilots, many of which occurred in the barren outer reaches of Area 51. For Ken Collins, a mock nighttime escape from an aircraft downed over the desert was meant to simulate hell. Collins knew the kind of challenge he would be up against as he stood on the tarmac at Groom Lake watching the sun disappear behind the mountains to the west. Soon, it would be dark and very cold. Collins climbed into a C-47 aircraft and noticed that the windows were blacked out. Neither he nor any of the other Oxcart pilots he was with had any idea where they were headed. “We got inside and flew for a little while,” Collins recalls, “until we landed in another desert airfield, somewhere remote.” The men were unloaded from the aircraft and put into a van, also with the windows blacked out. They were driven
