Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [237]
68. “It was extremely tense”: Interview with Richard Mingus.
69. NEST: Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations, to M.E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations. November 19, 1974; see also Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2, www.nci.org.
70. “established within EG&G”: Gates, “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” 2.
71. “space age difficulty”: “Cosmos 954: An Ugly Death,” Time magazine, February 6, 1978.
316 would be panic like in The War of the Worlds: Interview with Richard Mingus.
72. meant to look like bakery vans: Interview with Troy Wade.
73. Troy Wade was the lead federal official: Note that Mahlon Gates, who authored Operation Morning Light and put together NEST, was the senior U.S. government representative on the project and also the head of DOE Nevada Operations but did not have an active role in the boots-on-the-ground operation.
74. high above was an Air Force U-2: Weiss, “The Life and Death of Cosmos 954,” 3.
75. somewhere on America’s East Coast: Time magazine reported, “The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward Earth near New York City—at the height of the morning rush hour.”
Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51
Interviews: Buzz Aldrin, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams, Richard Mingus, Michael Schratt, Bill Irvine, James Oberg
1. July 20, 1969: For details regarding Apollo 11, “Humankind’s first steps on the lunar surface,” http://nasa.gov; for transcripts of the first lunar landing, visit “Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,” by Eric M. Jones, http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html.
2. Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying: Jenkins, Hypersonics before the Shuttle, appendix 9.
3. astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site: NASA, Appendix E. Geology Field Exercises: Early Training, Field Training Schedule for the first 3 Groups of Astronauts (29), 3, Feb 17–18 & 24–25, 1965 & March 3–4, 1965. “The trip provided an opportunity to examine in detail the craters and ejecta formed by detonation of subsurface nuclear devices in lavas and unconsolidated sediments”; USGS Open-File Report 2005-1190, Table 1, “Geologic field-training of NASA Astronauts between January 1963 and November 1972.”
4. Ernie Williams was their guide: Interview with Ernie Williams.
5. first water well: Interviews with T. D. Barnes, Colonel Slater, Ernie Williams.
6. astronauts arrived with a lunar rover vehicle: Gerald G. Schaber, “A Chronology of Activities from Conception through the End of Project Apollo (1960-1973),” U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Astrogeology.
7. by-products of underground bomb tests: “The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions,” #69043 Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment, 32.
8. astronauts twice referred to: DOE/NV 772 REV 1, “Apollo Astronauts Train at the Nevada Test Site,” 2. The mission commentary voice transmissions can be downloaded at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/apollo17.htm.
9. hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment: Interview with Ernie Williams.
10. Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned: Author interview with James Oberg, and from a chapter in his book UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries. In addition to being an aerospace historian and leading debunker of lunar-landing and UFO-on-the-moon conspiracies, Oberg spent his career as a rocket scientist working for NASA contractors, including at Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
11. moon being a base for aliens and UFOs: Interview with James Oberg.
12. Spielberg said in a 1978 interview: Matthew Alford, “Steven Spielberg,” Cinema Papers, 1978.
13. With these three questions: The answers, presented by a popular Web site dedicated to debunking the moon-hoax theory, are: Q: How can the American flag flutter when there