Richard Clark Interview, 11 July 2003

‹‹ Interview Index
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25

TT:Yeah. Now the radar operator, the Navigator, his name is Patrick McCaslin, he says that the following day or the day after a group from Washington came—
RC:[Nodding yes].
TT:—and viewed the film and asked him questions, talked about it. He asked if he could talk about it, they said no problem, you know, they were pretty casual about the whole thing, but they didn't contact you or ask your opinion?
RC:No. They didn't come to see me. We had already put together our report, I mean we were done—2:00 in the afternoon, you know, had computed speeds and had done our report that same day, and nobody came to talk to us.
TT:In all your time, did you deal with other anomalies in your work?
RC:Not like this. I mean yeah, you're gonna see, on radar scopes some weird things, you know because if they're flying over an area and you're getting some feedback from different things, I mean, you know, it's going to appear on the scope, but nothing like this.
TT:Let me ask you, if they could shoot the ground, obviously you're going to have all kinds of problems if you're shooting down, right? At the time these were taken they were somewhere between 20 and 14 thousand [feet]. They were pretty high up. Would you have the same kind of problems with ground clutter and so forth at those kinds of altitudes?
RC:Ah, no and this is not ground clutter. You've never seen a radar scope paint I would imagine, but [gets paper and pen] you're going to have, depending on what it is, and I'm going to do this real quick. If you've got a town, a small town or something, it's going to paint dark. Flat land is not going to paint at all. Your town, or let's say it's a bunch of silos that they store corn in or something in, they're going to paint dark. If you're going into mountains, the mountains are going to paint and there's going to be a void behind them, because it can't see down below the mountain, depending on what your altitude is. So radarscopes are going to— looking at the ground, objects that reflect, mountains, towns, metal buildings, they're going to paint dark. The other objects—non-objects are going to be not there, there's nothing there.
TT:OK, that makes sense then that you do your analysis on the negative because you've got the right polarity to see what's going on?
RC:Yeah. So when we did the bombing pictures for them, when they are gonna go in at such and such an altitude, OK, we had these really sophisticated maps with all the mountains and stuff, because if you got a 10,000 ft. peak, and you're at 20,000 ft., it's gonna come down like this [indicating a downward slope with his hands] and part behind it you're not going to see. So we could paint the non-area so it would be clear where the mountain is going to be this. If you're at 15,000 ft., that non area is going to be longer than if you are

‹‹ Previous Page Next Page ››

16