already DCI, per the Central Intelligence Agency Library, Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter, Rear Admiral, US Navy, CIA.gov.
12. served on the board of governors: Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 74.
13. Hillenkoetter testified to Congress: “Air Force Order on ‘Saucers’ Cited; Pamphlet by the Inspector General Called Objects a ‘Serious Business,’” New York Times, February 28, 1960.
14. he mysteriously resigned: NICAP Web site, “The Who Was Series,” Hillenkoetter, Vice-Admiral Roscoe,
http://www.nicap.org/photobio.htm; in my interview with Stan Friedman, Friedman said there was nothing mysterious about Hillenkoetter’s resigning, “he just resigned.” Nor does Friedman believe that Hillenkoetter was planted at NICAP to gather information.
15. Bryan’s true role with the ufologists: Ibid. In the official NICAP bio for Hillenkoetter, it is written, “He resigned from NICAP in Feb 1962 and was replaced on the NICAP Board by a former covert CIA high official, Joseph Bryan III, the CIA’s first Chief of Political & Psychological Warfare (Bryan never disclosed his CIA background to NICAP or Keyhoe).”
16. the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs: Memorandum for file OSI, Meeting of OSI Advisory Group on UFO, January 14 through 17, 1953, 3 pages; Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, 14–17 January 1953, Evidence Presented, 2 pages; CIA Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Comments and Suggestions of UFO Panel, 19 pages.
The CIA party line on UFOs had been firmly established by General Bedell Smith during his tenure and was maintained until sometime around 1966, when this new thinking emerged.
17. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring: CIA Memo, Translation, Vitolniyek, R. (Director) Flying phenomena, Sovetsknya Latviya, no. 287, 10 Dec. 67; CIA Memo, 10 Aug. 67, “Report on Conversations with Soviet Scientists on Subject of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR”; CIA Memo, Translation of Memo from Konsomol’skaya pravda, no. 13, 20 January 68, author Zigel, 3.
18. Villen Lyustiberg: CIA Memo, Translation, Lyustiberg V. (Science commentator for [illegible]), “Are Flying Saucers a Myth?” Pravda, Ukrainy, no. 40, 17 Feb. 68.
19. “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions”: CIA Memo, Translation, “Nothing But the Facts on UFOs or Which Novosti Writer Do You Read?” 9 April 1968, 12 pages.
20. Zigel, had come to believe: The CIA followed Zigel closely. In the Agency’s author biography on him, it states: “Zigel, F. Yu., Dr of Technical Science, writes under auspices of Moscow Aviation Institute, Associate Professor there as of 1969.” CIA analysts discovered that Zigel’s interest in UFOs began with his interest in astronomy and mathematics in 1936, after he participated in an expedition to Kazakhstan to observe a solar eclipse. Zigel had also visited the Tunguska crater in Siberia, where a comet likely exploded, in 1908. The blast knocked over approximately 80 million trees and flattened 830 square miles of Siberian forest. In the early 1960s Zigel stunned his colleagues by suggesting that the Tunguska crater could have been created by an outer space vehicle that crashed there.
21. “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee”: Title: Unidentified flying objects, Source: Soviet Life, no. 2 1968, 2729, 1.
22. “The hypothesis that UFOs originate in other worlds”: Ibid.
Interviews: Ken Collins, Charlie Trapp, Colonel Slater, General Hsichun “Mike” Hua, Edward Lovick, Changti “Robin” Yeh (via written correspondence), Hervey Stockman
1. Collins knew the kind: Interview with Ken Collins.
2. simulated jungle survival: Interviews with Ken Collins, Charlie Trapp.
3. CIA pilot named Yeh Changti: Hua, Lost Black Cats, ix. 4. the Black Cats flew: Ibid., viii-x.
5. “no information was released about Yeh Changti”: Interview with General Hua.
6. “His code name was Terry Lee”: Interview with Colonel Slater. Yeh Changti’s American name is Robin Yeh (the Chinese put family names first).
7. getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities: National Photographic Interpretation Center, Mission [GRC-169], 23 August 1963, 30 pages. The designation for these missions was Operation Church Door. Images of targets photographed by the Black Cats include the Lop Nur nuclear facility, missile launch sites, airfields, ports, and industrial complexes.
8. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner: Interview with General Hua; in Lost Black Cats, Hua, a former CIA Black Cat U-2 pilot, tells the tragic and amazing story of the nineteen years Changti and Chang spent as captives of Communist China, based on personal interviews. The sacrifices made by Changti and Chang have never been acknowledged by the CIA. On September 17, 1998, the CIA held a symposium called “U-2: A Revolution in Intelligence” to honor the declassification of many CIA-controlled U-2 operations and to celebrate its success. But the symposium omitted any mention of the
Black Cat U-2 pilots according to my interview with General Hua.
9. second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang: Ibid., ix. To clarify, General Hua also refers to Major Jack Chang as Chang Liyi— Jack being the pilot’s American nickname and Liyi being his “first name” in Chinese, which is his family name, the reverse of Western usage.
10. dull, dirty, and dangerous: Interview with T. D. Barnes.
11. “and then head back out to sea”: Interview with Lovick. “A colleague named Mike Ash and I designed an electrical circuit into the drone’s pallet to select an antenna to be used to radiate the recovery beacon signal. If the sensor package was not recovered by an aircraft and it fell into the water, an antenna was deployed to allow radio signals to enable recovery.” If the sensor package landed upside down, Lovick and Ash had created a system which allowed the seawater to act like a switch and activate a second antenna.
12. Yuletide: Interviews with Colonel Slater, Frank Murray. 13. “with PJs nearly falling off cliffs”: Interview with Charlie Trapp. 14. flight engineer, Ray Torick: There are many different ideas
about why and how Torick died. I adhere to Colonel Slater’s view of the events. The drone’s first official test launch was on March 5, 1966, and during that flight, the drone launched successfully off the back of the mother ship while traveling at a speed of Mach 3.2. It then flew approximately 120 miles before it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, as was planned. A month later, a second launch sent a drone flying for 1,900 miles, at Mach 3.3, until it fell into the sea. It was on the third test launch that disaster struck and Torick died.
15. “He impulsively and emotionally decided”: Rich, Skunk Works, 267.
16. “never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation”: Ibid. 17. “Ben, do you recognize this?” Ibid., 270.
18. dubbed Operation Aphrodite: Singer, Wired for War, 48.
19. Tesla’s pilotless boat: Tesla, “Inside the Lab-Remote Control,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.html.
20. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives: “Rise of the Machines,” ArmyTechnology.com, May 21, 2008, http://www.armytechnology.com/features/feature1951/.
21. mother ship called Marmalade: AFSC History Staff, History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 9.
22. Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher: Ibid., 11.
23. Operation Sandstone: For the Air Force, maintaining a drone wing was expensive. It was also a security risk. In early 1947, that more atomic tests were being planned was a closely guarded national secret because the public was being led to believe that the United States was genuinely considering outlawing the bomb — or at least putting the United Nations in control of atomic energy. In reality, it was during this period of alleged international debate that the drone unit was again called back into action for the next test series in the Pacific. Operation Crossroads was supposed to have been a singular event, and so talk surfaced among the drone pilots. Being reactivated could only mean one thing: more nuclear tests in the pipeline. This security leak made its way up the chain of command.
24. accidentally flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud: AFSC History Staff, History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 21.
25. “Now pilots, not drones, would be sent”: Ibid., 23–24.
26. fear that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire: Interviews with Al O’Donnell and Jim Freedman.
27. what happened to Oppenheimer sent a strong message: Interview with Al O’Donnell.
