The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.
Agency officials were flown in from Washington to watch and to celebrate. Jim Freedman coordinated pickups and deliveries between McCarran Airport and the Ranch. It was a grand, congratulatory affair with lots of drinking in the newly constructed bar, called House-Six. Rare film footage of the historic event, shot by the CIA, shows men in suits milling around the tarmac slapping one another on the back over this incredible flying machine. They watch the aircraft take off and disappear from view. Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His top speed was four hundred miles per hour. Watching from the tarmac was Richard Bissell, tall and gangly, wearing a dark suit and a porkpie hat. Bissell had been invited to attend the groundbreaking event as a guest of Kelly Johnson. It was a significant gesture; the two men had become friends, and Kelly Johnson was notably making a point. “Part of what made Kelly Johnson such a good man was that he was extremely loyal to the people he considered his friends,” Ed Lovick explains. For Bissell, the visit to Area 51 had to have been bittersweet. It would be the last time he would ever set foot at the facility he had overseen for the CIA since it was nothing but a desert floor. Richard Bissell would never be invited back again.
And Area 51 would soon have a new mayor.
It was late at night in the summer of 1962 and Bud Wheelon sat in the library in the Washington, DC, home of Howard and Jane Roman, two clandestine officers with CIA. It was only Wheelon’s second month employed by the Agency, and because he was not a career spy, he had had a lot of catching up to do. Almost every night, he worked until ten, having just accepted the job that made him the Agency’s first head of the Directorate of Science and Technology, or DS&T. Only thirty-three years old, Wheelon was a brilliant ballistic-missile scientist and signals intelligence analyst. He was also a graduate of MIT and had played rugby with James Killian when Killian was the president there. Now he had been hand-picked by President Kennedy’s science advisers, including James Killian, to replace Richard Bissell on all overhead reconnaissance projects for the CIA. This included satellites, U-2 operations, and the Oxcart spy plane. It was the job Bissell had declined, but “in this way, I became the new ‘Mayor of Area 51,’” Wheelon explains.
“I did not have much to do at night so I started reading clandestine reports, which I’d never seen before,” Wheelon says. Although he found many uninteresting, one in particular caught his eye. “It made me concerned. At the time, there was a very serious National Intelligence Estimate under way for President Kennedy, one that would address the question: Will the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba? I had been briefed that the estimate was coming down on the side that the Russians would not do such a thing. The Pentagon had decided that putting missiles in Cuba was too reckless a move for the Russians and that they would not do such a reckless thing.”