EG&G is an enigma in its own right. Beginning in 1947, EG&G was the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of. In many ways, this still remains the case in 2011. The early anonymity was intended. It was cultivated to help make secret-keeping easier. Originally called Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, EG&G had once been a small engineering company run by three MIT professors. In 1927, Dr. Harold “Doc” Edgerton invented stop-motion photography, which utilized another of his patented inventions, the strobe light. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs include one of a bullet passing though an apple, a drop of water splashing on a countertop, and a hummingbird frozen in flight. Edgerton was fond of saying that his career began because he wanted to make time stand still. EG&G got its first known set of defense contracts during World War II, when Doc Edgerton’s strobe lights and photographer’s flashbulb were used to light up the ground during nighttime aerial reconnaissance missions, rendering the age-old flare obsolete. Thanks to Doc Edgerton, fliers like Colonel Richard Leghorn were able to photograph Normandy before D-day.
Kenneth J. Germeshausen worked in high-energy pulse theory at MIT. He held more than fifty patents, including a number in radar. Together with the company’s third partner, Herbert Grier, Germeshausen developed the firing system for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The Manhattan Project contracts came to the three professors because of their affiliation with Vannevar Bush, the former dean of engineering at MIT and later the man in charge of the Manhattan Project.
In addition to the firing systems on the nuclear bombs, which were based on a simple signal-switching relay system called the DN-11 relay, EG&G handled the defense contract to take millions of stop-motion photographs of nuclear bomb explosions in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. It was from these photographs, and from these photographs only, that EG&G scientists could determine for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense the exact yield, or power, of an exploded nuclear bomb. For decades a great majority of the most highly classified engineering jobs related to nuclear weapons testing went to EG&G. In the 1960s, when special engineering teams were needed to clean up deadly radioactive waste that was the result of these nuclear tests, the contracts went to EG&G as well. They were trusted implicitly, and EG&G’s operations were quintessential black. They also had other businesses, such as radar testing. In the early 1950s, EG&G ran a radar-testing facility approximately thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. Very little information is known about that period or about what EG&G was working on, as the data remains classified in EG&G’s unique Restricted Data files. At Bissell’s behest, in 1957 EG&G agreed to set up a radar range on the outskirts of Area 51 to measure radar returns for the dirty-bird project. In a CIA monograph about the U-2, declassified in 1998, the EG&G tracking station just outside Groom Lake is alleged to be “little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer containing instrumentation” where engineers could record data and analyze results. And yet the exact location of this “small testing facility” has been redacted from the otherwise declassified U-2 record. Why? The key term is EG&G. Giving away too much information about EG&G could inadvertently open a can of worms. No one but an elite has a need-to-know where any exterior EG&G facilities are located at Area 51—specifically, whether they are located outside the blueprint of the base.
And so, in April of 1957, with EG&G radar specialists tracking his aircraft’s radar returns, Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker took one of the newly painted U-2s to the skies over Groom Lake. His orders were to see how high he could get the dirty bird to climb. Sieker took off from Area 51 and flew for almost ninety miles without incident when suddenly, in a valley near Pioche, the Boston Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash. Sieker was able to eject but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit him in the head. Kelly Johnson was right. It was a bad idea to try to retrofit the U-2. CIA search teams took four days to locate Sieker’s body and the wreckage of the plane. The crash had attracted the watchful eye of the press, and the U-2’s cover story, that it was a weather research plane, wore thin. Halfway across the country, a headline at the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Secrecy Veils High-Altitude Research Jet; Lockheed U-2 Called Super Snooper.”