Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 11 November 2000
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| radar energy or descending out of it. Since it was spotted on the ground a few minutes later, I would have to assume that it descended out of it. | ||
| JK | Well, there are in the Blue Book documents a number of statements from the different missile crews. In fact, 14 of them saw the object, an object let's say, your B-52, or both the object and your B-52 at the same time. | |
| PM | Wow. I didn't know that. | |
| JK | Yeah, and from what I can read in the documents, the tower was aware through whatever communications channel the missile folks had, that they were sighting, and they actually used that information to give you guys a direction. | |
| PM | That's why they gave us the heads-up, huh? | |
| JK | Yeah. | |
| PM | Well, I don't remember the missile, the tower giving us directions toward one of these whatever this was, we just continued on. | |
| JK | I mean the last time around for the visual. | |
| PM | Oh, no. Well, I disagree on this point, only that point about them directing us toward it. | |
| JK | Because you had recorded the coordinate. | |
| PM | Yeah! We bombed the location and that is my remembrance of how we found it, is that we had, when we lost contact I made a note of the coordinates, and we basically just did a little approach and turned around, put those crosshairs on that position and then flew to it. But I don't remember any, now the pilots may have heard conversation with the tower that I didn't. I remember pretty clearly that they were following the directions of the computer, you know, as if it were a bomb run and we were counting down the TI, the time to go, or the TG meter and they were following the steering commands of the PDI. | |
| JK | Well in one of the reports, as you approached, when you lost radar contact with this thing one of the Air Policemen at one of the missile sites, or two of them, you know they're teams of two in a truck, the strike teams, they call it the Security Alert Teams. They saw this thing break away and descend. | |
| PM | You know what's weird to me is that the pilots never saw it in the air; they never did see it in the air. | |
| JK | Well in the documents it says that one of the pilots did have a visual on an orange light. | |
| PM | News to me. The first time I was aware that the pilots saw anything was as we approached it you know, after that low approach, when we came back and were basically |
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