Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [133]
“I have a loss of fuel and I do not know where it is going,” Walt Ray told Colonel Slater through his headset, breaking radio silence to communicate on a radio frequency reserved for emergencies. The transcript would remain classified until 2007. “I think I can make it,” Walt Ray said. He was 130 miles from the tarmac at Area 51, flying subsonic to conserve fuel. But twenty minutes later, over Hanksville, Utah, Ray declared an emergency. He’d gotten the aircraft down to thirty thousand feet when one of its engines flamed out. The sixty-seven-million-dollar spy plane had run out of fuel.
“I’m ejecting” was the last thing Walt Ray said to Colonel Slater.
When Walt Ray ejected, the seat he was strapped into was propelled away from the airplane by a small rocket. The strings of his parachute became tangled in his seat’s headrest, which meant he was unable to separate from his seat. Walt Ray fell thirty thousand feet without a parachute and crashed into the side of a mountain near Leith, Nevada. Within seconds of the pilot’s last transmission, Commander Slater gave the order to dispatch three aircraft from Area 51 to go find Walt Ray and whatever was left of his airplane. No one had any idea that the thirty-year-old pilot was already dead. In addition to the fleet of search-and-rescue that took off from Groom Lake, the Air Force dispatched four aircraft and two helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base. The crash site needed to be secured quickly before any civilians arrived on the scene.
Twenty-three hours passed. No pilot, no airplane. A U-2 was sent aloft to photograph the general area where Walt Ray was believed to have gone down. While the U-2 pilots flew high, Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33. The terrain was challenging, and it was difficult to see the ground. “There was cactus and vegetation everywhere; we had to conserve fuel and fly as low as we could,” Andersen explains. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first. “I saw these large film pieces rolling across the top of a ridge,” Trapp recalls. “I landed where I could and let my parajumpers jump out. They ran over to the Oxcart, what was left of it, and when they came back they said, ‘Walt’s not in there and neither is his ejection seat.’” The Oxcart had crashed in the remote high desert on a mountain slope dotted with chaparral. Trapp and his crew went back to Area 51 and, with the navigators’ help, mapped out on the board in the command post all the places where Walt Ray might have landed after ejection. Then they went back out and continued the search.
Charlie Trapp found Walt Ray uphill from the crash site, three miles away. “I caught a glimpse of light reflecting from his helmet,” Trapp recalls. “He was still in his seat, under a large cedar tree.” A perimeter was set up and the dirt roads leading up to the crash site were barricaded and secured by armed guards. Herds of wild horses watched as trucks rolled in and workers carted up the jet wreckage to take back to Groom Lake. The entire process took nine days. After an investigation, officials determined that a faulty fuel gauge was all that was wrong with the triple-sonic spy plane. At first, the gauge had erroneously indicated to Walt Ray he had enough fuel to get back to the Ranch. Minutes later the gauge told him he was about to run out of fuel.
One man’s tragedy can become another man’s opportunity, which is what happened to Frank Murray after Walt Ray was killed. After the accident, General Ledford came out to the area to participate in the ensuing investigation. When Ledford was ready to return to Washington, he asked Frank Murray to fly him home. “Up in the air,” Murray recalls, “Ledford said to me over the radio, ‘How