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By Root 837 0

drank too much at the party and overslept. As Bob Murphy was sleeping through his alarm clock, eleven men assigned to Richard Bissell’s Project Aquatone walked across the tarmac at the Burbank airport and boarded the C-54 transport plane where Pappas, his copilot Paul E. Winham, and a flight attendant named Guy R. Fasolas prepared to shuttle everyone back to Area 51. The manifest listed their destination as “Watertown airstrip.” A little over an hour after takeoff, Pappas broke his required radio silence and called out for assistance with his position in the air. It was snowing heavily where he was, somewhere north of Las Vegas, and Pappas worried he had strayed off course. Nearby, at Nellis Air Force Base, a staff sergeant by the name of Alfred Arneho overheard the bewildering transmission. There was no record of any flight, military or civilian, scheduled to be in his area this time of day. Arneho listened for a follow-up transmission but none came. Puzzled, Arneho made a note in a logbook. Just a few minutes later the airplane Pappas was flying crashed into the granite peak of Mount Charleston, killing everyone on board. Had Pappas been just thirty feet higher, he would have cleared the mountaintop.

Back in California, Bob Murphy awoke in a panic. He checked his alarm clock and realized that he had missed the flight back to Area 51 by three hours. Murphy was furious with himself. Getting drunk and oversleeping was completely out of character for him. He had never missed a single day of work in his four-year career at Lockheed. He’d never even been late. Murphy knew there was no sense going to the airport; the airplane would have long since departed. He got himself together and went out to find some breakfast. Bob Murphy was sitting in a restaurant listening to the radio playing behind the counter when the music was interrupted with breaking news. A C-54 transport plane had just crashed into Mount Charleston, north of Las Vegas. The newscaster said that reports were sketchy but most likely everyone on board had been killed. Murphy knew immediately that the aircraft that had crashed into Mount Charleston was the C-54 he would have been on had he not overslept.

Overwhelmed with grief and in a state of disbelief, Murphy went back to his apartment. He paced around for some time. Then he decided to locate a bar and have a drink. “As I opened the front door to my apartment, this guy from Lockheed was raising his hand to knock on it,” Murphy explains fifty-four years later. “I looked at him and he looked at me and then he turned white as a ghost. I had been listed on the CIA flight manifest as having been on that airplane. The security officer on the tarmac had marked me off as having checked in for the flight. This man from Lockheed had come to inform my next of kin that I was dead. Instead, there I was.”

Two hundred and fifty miles to the east, on top of Mount Charleston, the wreckage of the airplane still burned. Smoke from the crash was visible as far away as Henderson, ten miles south of Las Vegas. That afternoon, a CBS news team was halfway up Highway 158, headed to the crash site, when the newsmen met a military blockade. Armed officers told the news crew that a military plane had crashed on a routine mission heading to the base at Indian Springs. The road into Kyle Canyon was closed. Meanwhile, Bissell had U-2s dispatched from Area 51 to help pinpoint the exact location of the Air Force airplane—an impromptu and unorthodox first “mission” for the spy plane, triggered by tragic circumstances. But there were briefcases full of secret papers that needed to be retrieved, and the U-2’s search-and-locate capabilities from high above were accurate and available. It was Hank Meierdierck, the man in charge of training CIA pilots to fly the U-2, who ultimately located the remains of the airplane.

The crash was the first of a series of Area 51–related airplane tragedies that would occur over the next decade. Airplane crashes, sensational by nature, risk operational exposure, and between crash investigators and local media, there