Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”
The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site—and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.
The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.
Back in the control room at Groom Lake, navigator Sam Pizzo had a monumental amount of work on his hands. News of Collins’s crash had just hit the command post, and it was up to Colonel Holbury, the air commander of Detachment 1 of the 1129th U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron, to put together a search team for the crash site. “Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.” The efforts would be staged from an old, abandoned airfield northwest of the dry lakes. These were the same facilities where World War II bombers had practiced for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb runs. The quarters there, long since deserted, were rudimentary. There was no running water or heat. This meant the men from Groom Lake brought their own cooks, cots, and gear as part of their crash-recovery team.
Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radar-absorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.