“I’m ejecting” was the last thing Walt Ray said to Colonel Slater.
When Walt Ray ejected, the seat he was strapped into was propelled away from the airplane by a small rocket. The strings of his parachute became tangled in his seat’s headrest, which meant he was unable to separate from his seat. Walt Ray fell thirty thousand feet without a parachute and crashed into the side of a mountain near Leith, Nevada. Within seconds of the pilot’s last transmission, Commander Slater gave the order to dispatch three aircraft from Area 51 to go find Walt Ray and whatever was left of his airplane. No one had any idea that the thirty-year-old pilot was already dead. In addition to the fleet of search-and-rescue that took off from Groom Lake, the Air Force dispatched four aircraft and two helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base. The crash site needed to be secured quickly before any civilians arrived on the scene.
Twenty-three hours passed. No pilot, no airplane. A U-2 was sent aloft to photograph the general area where Walt Ray was believed to have gone down. While the U-2 pilots flew high, Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33. The terrain was challenging, and it was difficult to see the ground. “There was cactus and vegetation everywhere; we had to conserve fuel and fly as low as we could,” Andersen explains. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first. “I saw these large film pieces rolling across the top of a ridge,” Trapp recalls. “I landed where I could and let my parajumpers jump out. They ran over to the Oxcart, what was left of it, and when they came back they said, ‘Walt’s not in there and neither is his ejection seat.’” The Oxcart had crashed in the remote high desert on a mountain slope dotted with chaparral. Trapp and his crew went back to Area 51 and, with the navigators’ help, mapped out on the board in the command post all the places where Walt Ray might have landed after ejection. Then they went back out and continued the search.
Charlie Trapp found Walt Ray uphill from the crash site, three miles away. “I caught a glimpse of light reflecting from his helmet,” Trapp recalls. “He was still in his seat, under a large cedar tree.” A perimeter was set up and the dirt roads leading up to the crash site were barricaded and secured by armed guards. Herds of wild horses watched as trucks rolled in and workers carted up the jet wreckage to take back to Groom Lake. The entire process took nine days. After an investigation, officials determined that a faulty fuel gauge was all that was wrong with the triple-sonic spy plane. At first, the gauge had erroneously indicated to Walt Ray he had enough fuel to get back to the Ranch. Minutes later the gauge told him he was about to run out of fuel.
One man’s tragedy can become another man’s opportunity, which is what happened to Frank Murray after Walt Ray was killed. After the accident, General Ledford came out to the area to participate in the ensuing investigation. When Ledford was ready to return to Washington, he asked Frank Murray to fly him home. “Up in the air,” Murray recalls, “Ledford said to me over the radio, ‘How’d you like to fly the plane?’ I said, ‘Throw me in that puddle, boss’ and that was about the extent of the pilot-selection process for me.” Murray was given Walt Ray’s call sign of Dutch 20. No longer a chase pilot, Murray was now part of the CIA’s elite team of overhead espionage pilots.
Defense Department officials used the tragic death of Walt Ray and the loss of another CIA aircraft to their advantage. The Office of the Budget and the Office of the Secretary of Defense met alone, in secret, without representation from the CIA. There, they highlighted the fact that the CIA’s several-hundred-million-dollar black budget operation had produced fifteen airplanes, five of which had already crashed. They presented their findings to President Johnson with the recommendation that the Oxcart program be “phased out.”