“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”
The XB-70 tragedy more or less closed down the program, and the X-15 rocket plane program was finishing up as well. For Barnes, life in Beatty was nearing an end, but one afternoon, Barnes received a phone call. A man identifying himself as John Grace wanted to know if he’d like to come work on an “interesting project” not far away. “Grace said it would be a commute from Las Vegas,” Barnes says. Grace told Barnes he would have to get a top secret clearance first. Whatever it was, it sounded exciting. Barnes told Grace, “Sign me up.” T. D. Barnes was officially on his way to Groom Lake.
In March of 1968, his top secret clearance finally in place, Barnes learned his new employer was going to be EG&G. He was instructed by a “handler” to arrive at a remote, unmarked hangar at McCarran Airport for his first day at work. There, Barnes was met by a man who shook his hand and escorted him into a small Constellation airplane. “They didn’t say anything to me about where we were going and I knew enough about black operations not to ask. It was a nice, quiet ride in the airplane. Just before we landed at Area 51, I heard the pilot say to the copilot, ‘They’ve got the doughnut out.’ Then the pilots quickly closed all the curtains on the airplane so when we landed I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what the doughnut was. I didn’t ask. I was taken to the EG&G Special Projects building and introduced to our group. The boss said, ‘What’s your first name?’ I said, ‘T.D.’ He said, ‘Not anymore. You’re Thunder out here.’” Later that first day, Barnes was taken inside one of the hangars at Area 51. “They opened the door. There sat a Russian MiG. They said, ‘This here’s the doughnut.’ I got a chuckle about that. The pilots who’d brought me to the area had no idea that the whole reason I’d been brought in was because of the doughnut.”
Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil. Colonel Slater, overseeing Black Shield in Kadena at the time, remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from one of his staff, Jim Simon. “Simon called me up all excited and said, ‘Slater, you are not going to believe this!’ He told me about the MiG. How it landed at [Area] 51 in the middle of the night, hidden inside a cargo plane. How it was accompanied by someone from a foreign government. Simon couldn’t get over it and I couldn’t wait to see it,” Slater remembers. Oxcart pilot Frank Murray remembers the excitement of seeing it as well. During Operation Black Shield Murray was on rotation between Area 51 and Kadena when he was taken into the secret hangar to have a look at the MiG. “It was a tiny little sucker, considering how deadly it was,” Murray says. “We couldn’t believe we had a captured one up there at the Ranch.”