with hydrophones that could navigate
One Navy captain estimated that if all the deep-ocean gear worked well every day, they could cut the search time from three years to two.
Catching glimpses of divers, minisubs, and high-tech gear, the press played up the James Bond angle.
11. The Fisherman's Catch
One Sunday morning in February, Joe Ramirez sat in the claims tent at Camp Wilson, poring over legal documents. Ramirez plunged deep into the villagers' claims, trying to place a value on each farmer's patch of alfalfa, peas, or tomatoes. As Ramirez worked, the phone rang. General Wilson wanted to see him.
Ramirez scampered to Wilson's tent to find an irritated general. “Your friend the fisherman,” Wilson said, looking at Ramirez with annoyance, “has run the blockade.” Early that morning, Simo had sailed his fishing boat into the Navy's restricted area (which, as it happened, covered some prime fishing grounds). Simo had lowered his nets and caught something heavy, which he believed was the bomb. He had dragged the object to a small cove in nearby Terreros and tried to haul it up, but it had proved too heavy to reel in. Simo had radioed the Air Force with the news. I have your bomb, he said. If you want it, come get it.
Ramirez's first thought was “Damn, we finally found this bomb!” General Wilson gave the orders: Ramirez and two EOD divers should fly to Terreros and check out the situation. If Simo had the bomb, Ramirez should secure the area and report back to him.
So, at about 11:30 in the morning, Ramirez climbed into a helicopter with Red Moody and Oliver Andersen and headed up the coast.
By this point, Air Force searchers had accepted that bomb number four was probably not lying intact in an open crater. Many assumed that the bomb had fallen into the sea. But as the sea search dragged on, several other possibilities arose.
A Palomares schoolteacher said that he had seen something on the day of the accident: a large cloud of dust near the B-52 tail impact point. Perhaps, thought investigators, the bomb had buried itself in the desert sand. Searchers were ordered to mark any sort of crater, depression, or patch of earth that looked disturbed. The problem was, nobody knew what the crater above a buried bomb might look like. General Wilson asked the Sandia engineers to arrange some drop tests. They contacted their colleagues in Albuquerque, and they quickly organized a test at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, in a stretch of desert that resembled the land around Palomares.
The engineers at Sandia assumed that if the bomb had stayed intact before hitting the ground, the searchers would have found scattered debris on the surface. Since that hadn't happened, the engineers assumed that the bomb had broken apart in midair and that only the heavy primary or secondary sections had buried themselves underground. (These sections — top secret and possibly radioactive — were the parts of most interest to the military anyway.) They asked the scientists at Los Alamos to build some test shapes with the same weight and shape as the Mark 28 nuclear components. On Sunday, February 13, a handful of technicians and engineers gathered in the desert at dawn and watched as a helicopter hovered in the sky and dropped the shapes onto the sand.
Operation Sunday, as the exercise was called, discovered a couple of things. One was that the dummy bomb parts buried themselves about two feet underground when they landed. On the surface, they left elliptical craters about seven feet long and nearly two feet deep. Each crater and its rays, formed from moist soil, were darker than the surrounding ground, easily visible to an untrained observer. However, after a few hours, the soil dried out. Within a day, the crater and its rays were exactly the same color as the surrounding earth. The only telltale sign remaining was the shallow crater itself.
The engineer who compiled the test results recommended that all vehicular and food traffic in the search area should be “severely restricted,” since it would easily destroy shallow craters. “Above all,” he added, “no defoliation at all should be done until the areas have been cleared by ground-impact teams: it is probable that normal craters would be destroyed or filled in by the defoliating crews.”
But trucks and buses had been swarming the area for weeks, with airmen tromping over miles of terrain and tearing up hundreds of tomato plants. If their work had damaged a crater, there was nothing to be done about it now. Sandia gave the Air Force some guidance for the next step: searchers should use long poles to probe any suspect hole, crater, divot, or ditch down to five feet.
The Air Force also asked a representative from the Bureau of Mines to examine mine shafts and Oliver Andersen's divers to inspect open wells. Over the next few weeks, searchers would explore close to two hundred craters, mines, and wells.
Maydew's airburst theory was also looking more probable to everyone. In mid-February, the four B-52 airmen who had survived the explosion had urine samples tested for radiation. Only Larry Messinger showed a positive result. While his radiation level was not dangerous, it was puzzling.
Messinger, like the others, had descended without an oxygen mask. Perhaps he had inhaled radioactive particles from the shattered bombs on the ground below. Or, perhaps bomb number four had broken apart in the air, and Messinger had encountered radioactive particles as he fell.
As the weeks went by, other witnesses kept emerging who had seen parachutes fall into the sea. The Spanish vessel
As the possibilities proliferated, the searchers' morale drooped. Sweeping the fields for the sixth, seventh, or eighth time, a sense of futility grew. “This could only be considered as normal,” said SAC's final report on the accident. “Even the most sincere dedication to a cause falters when nothing appears that promises to end a frustrating situation.”
The helicopter carrying Ramirez, Moody, and Andersen spotted Simo's boat in a small cove a few hundred yards from the shore. Ramirez could see Simo's net resting on the bottom and something large tangled in it. He asked the pilot to circle low over Simo's boat. Catching the fisherman's eye, Ramirez signaled for him to send his small rowboat to shore. Then the helicopter settled down on the beach, and the three men stepped out onto the sand.
Simo's rowboat arrived shortly. The weather was cold and blustery. Once on board the fishing boat, Ramirez spoke to Simo while Andersen and Moody looked at the net. Something was tangled in there, but they couldn't tell what. For the sake of speed and because they didn't know if Simo had actually caught anything, they hadn't brought scuba gear. But as they studied the net, the weather began to pick up. The waves rose higher, rocking the boat and clouding the bottom with silt. Moody and Andersen soon realized that they couldn't identify the object from the boat. They would have to fly back to Camp Wilson to pick up scuba gear. Joe Ramirez decided to stay with Simo. Before the divers left, Ramirez asked them what they thought. One said he couldn't be sure, but it looked as if Simo might have snagged the bomb.
After about an hour, the divers returned with their gear. Andersen, now with two new divers, dove to look at the net. They came to the surface and yelled to Ramirez, but the wind and seas swelled so high that he couldn't hear them. Finally they delivered the news: the fisherman had caught a concrete clump. Because of the rough seas, the divers decided it was too dangerous to clear the net. They buoyed it off with flotation markers, and Simo
