Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search. For two days they scoured the ground, looking for stray pieces of airplane as well as for flight papers and maps that had been in the cockpit with Collins. “By the time we were done, we’d combed over every single square inch of ground,” Pizzo recalls. A massive C-124 transport plane hauled the pieces of the airplane back to Area 51. In a heavily guarded hangar there, what was left of the airplane was spread out, piece by piece, in an effort to re-create its shape.
Richard Bissell’s departure from Area 51 a year earlier had left a huge power vacuum at the base. There was a general feeling among the men working there now that the vacuum was being filled by Air Force brass. This made perfect sense. Whereas the U-2 was, in essence, a motorized glider, the A-12 Oxcart was the highest, fastest, most state-of-the-art piloted aircraft in the world. For men who prided themselves on airpower—as did everyone involved in the U.S. Air Force—the supersonic Oxcart was the top dog. The Area 51 facility was now one of the Air Force’s most prestigious billets, a place where officers got to be in charge of their “own little air force,” as Major General Paul Bacalis had once said. What this meant was that Pentagon favorites, usually World War II heroes who had survived dangerous, death-defying missions, were rewarded with key positions at Area 51. Men like Colonel Robert Holbury.
At Area 51, Holbury’s official title was air commander of the U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron at Las Vegas, the nonclassified reference name for Oxcart. A former fighter pilot during World War II, Holbury had been given a commendation by General Patton for a dangerous low-flying reconnaissance mission over the Saar River, in western Germany, which he survived despite coming under heavy enemy fire. This meant Holbury was the official wing commander at the base when Ken Collins crashed the first Oxcart spy plane. In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”
Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.