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 for miles, Collins thought going in circles, until the doors of the van opened into what appeared to be thick, rough, high-desert terrain. “We were told that we were in Chinese enemy territory. To escape and survive the best that you can. There were electronic alarms, trip wires, and explosive charges on the ground.”
Collins ran and took cover under a bush. In the darkness, he lay on his belly and gathered his thoughts. He had been through a series of survival trials during Oxcart training already. Once, he and another pilot were taken to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona for a mountain-survival trial. “On that exercise we had minimal food, sleeping bags, and a very small tent. We walked and camped in the mountains for five days. The first three days were comfortable; the third night a weather front moved in with cold rain,” making things a little more challenging. A second exercise took place in Kings Canyon, in the Sierra Mountains. During that trip, Collins and another pilot had to live in snow for three days. They dug a snow cave and made beds of pine boughs. A third trip, to Florida, simulated jungle survival. “I was taken out to a swamp, given a knife, and told to survive on my own for four days.” What Collins remembers vividly was the food. “I caught some turtles to eat, but found them difficult to open, so my staple became the heart of palm. I’d cut the new palm buds out from the center. It was thin fare, but sustainable,” Collins says. But the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different. Unlike the other sessions, this one would involve psychological warfare by the mock enemy Chinese.