Former Area 51 Workers Discuss Spy Aircraft

ReviewJournal.com-- Mystique about alien spaceships and little green men at Area 51 took a back seat Thursday to the real men who worked there for the CIA and the spy planes they flew during the Cold War.

In fact, a question about a link between the secret installation 90 miles north of Las Vegas and speculation about flying saucer debris and dead aliens from a 1947 crash site near Roswell, N.M., was glossed over as fiction during a panel discussion at the Atomic Testing Museum.

The discussion capped a two-day event at the museum titled "The Spy Planes of Groom Lake."

The panel of former Area 51 workers included test pilots, engineers and a mission planner who were recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s for development of the A-12 and later the SR-71 Blackbird.

"The job is to get good photography of the targets you're running against," said 81-year-old Ray Haupt, a retired Air Force brigadier general who flew both planes and their predecessor, the U-2.

Haupt recalled one experience after an SR-71 engine flamed out.

"Suddenly your helmet was bouncing between the two sides of the canopy like a basketball. That got your attention," he said. "It was a rough ride."

CIA pilot Jack Layton said flying at three times the speed of sound, however, could be "very smooth unless the air itself is bumpy."

Haupt, of Tucson, Ariz., said he preferred the SR-71 because it "could get the job done" like the A-12 but had a better navigation system to keep the plane on course.

While the SR-71 was an Air Force plane, the A-12 belonged to the CIA. The aircraft was a high-flying jet made of a titanium alloy to resist high temperatures while flying at supersonic speeds as it photographed targets and evaded enemy missiles.

After the plane was successfully tested at Groom Lake, it was used during the Vietnam War in the mid- to late-1960s to find surface-to-air missile sites.

"We flew 2,850 missions out of Groom Lake that the world did not know about," said electrical engineer T.D. Barnes of Henderson, president of Roadrunners Internationale, a group of former "black project" workers that co-sponsored the event.

Barnes recounted the learning curve that designers of the A-12 experienced, particularly with making planes out of titanium alloy metal instead of aluminum. Tools that could penetrate the hard metal had to be developed to build the aircraft.

"We soon realized the United States did not have good enough quality of (titanium), so this plane we were building for the sole purpose of flying over the Soviet Union, we went to Russia and bought our titanium. They had no idea what we were using it for, but the metal ... did come from our adversary," he said.

Mission planner Sam Pizzo recalled starting from scratch when building the A-12.

"We had to rethink all the things we had to do," he said. "Remember, this plane came to Groom Lake in boxes. It had never been flown."

It wasn't until 2007, when the CIA lifted a veil of secrecy about the A-12, that those who were involved with the project were allowed to talk about certain aspects of it.

Barnes said that he has mixed emotions about that decision.

"We still don't talk much about it," he said. "We can talk about the projects we were on but not the location."

[via Phantoms and Monsters]