Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”
When Collins woke up the next morning, he figured the only conclusion his wife could have drawn was that her husband had gone out on a Sunday and gotten drunk. Feeling bad, he confided in her that he’d been given truth serum and could not say anything more. Jane told her husband a story of her own. She said that he didn’t have to explain further because she had a pretty good idea what had happened to him on the job. Earlier in the week, Jane explained, immediately after Collins’s crash, family friend and fellow Oxcart pilot Walt Ray had broken protocol and called Jane from Area 51 to tell her that Ken had bailed out of an airplane but that he was all right. “Where is he?” Jane had asked. Walt Ray said he didn’t know. Jane then asked, “How can you know if Ken is okay if you don’t even know where he is?” At the time Walt Ray didn’t have an answer for that. So now, hangover or no hangover, Jane Collins was happy to have her husband home alive. After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.