Message posted by Peter Merlin on September 09, 2005 at 8:50:39 PST:
In September 1967 James S. Simon Jr. died at Area 51 while flying chase during a night sortie of the TA-12. As the TA-12 approached the south end of the runway Simon's F-101B (56-0286) struck the ground and exploded near the South Trim Pad. Whn the F-117A (tail no. 792) crashed at Bakers field, the Air Force refused to identify the aircraft type. This led to speculation that it was a "stealth fighter" and created a media frenzy. Air Traffic Controllers working the F-117A flights out of Tonopah were told they were A-7s. If the Air Force had stuck with this cover story, there woulkd have been little media or public interest. As soon as the F-117A was declassified, Defense Department officials acknowledged that the Bakersfield crash involved one of the radar-evading airplanes. Shortly after this someone involved with the F-117A program began to spread disinformation about the Bakersfield recovery operation. In a 1989 interview, SMSgt. Roy Pruitt told author James C. Goodall that the recovery crew dug and sifted every cubic inch of soil at the crash site to a depth of six feet and as far as 1,000 feet beyond the last recognizable debris, removing every trace of the airplane. He further claimed that they “broke up an old F-101 Voodoo that crashed at the [Groom Lake] test site 20 years earlier” and spread the parts at the Bakersfield site to confound treasure hunters. Several years later, F-117A Flight Test director Richard Abrams repeated the story to the proprietor of an aviation memorabilia shop. Goodall published the story (without field-checking it) in a book about the F-117A and so it has been repeated and republished numerous times, thus polluting the historic record. I felt from the beginning that the narrative did not pass the “ring of truth” test. It just felt false. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the most fundamental error. The site had not been excavated to the level described in the narrative. On my first visit I had seen numerous remnant bushes surrounding the impact crater. They were charred black, but still rooted to the ground. If the site had been excavated and sifted, there would have been no original foliage left. The entire site would have resembled the impact crater. The scale of the excavation would have been enormous since debris had been blasted at least several hundred feet from the impact point. If the recovery crews had set their perimeter 1,000-feet beyond the last recognizable debris, the total surface area for the dig site would have been vast (perhaps exceeding 10,000,000 square feet). With a six-foot depth of excavation the volume (60,000,000-cubic-feet of material!) to be sifted would have required enormous expense and manpower. Such an effort would be difficult on flat, loamy ground. In a rugged canyon with rocky outcrops it would be nearly impossible and it would definitely be impossible to disguise. Having visited the site at least half a dozen times, I can say that I have never found a single piece of F-101. It is easy to tell the difference, especially since F-101 and F-117A airframes (partial and complete) are available for comparison (at museums, scrapyards, etc.). A couple of guys actually purchased the wreckage of the F-117A that crashed at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1992.
In Reply to: Questions about the Nellis F101 crash posted by JimK on September 08, 2005 at 17:19:27 PST:
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