Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 11 November 2000

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JKWell, a lot of stuff, of course, is gone—
PMYeah.
JK—that many years ago. But what I was talking about... what I was going to say about the two incidents at Minot, both of those were reported in full to Project Blue Book, and that was AFR 200-2. And there is a specific reporting format, and in the records there are transcripts or at least memoranda of telephone conversations between people at Minot, you know officers at Minot and people at Blue Book, because there were three general officers that had expressed interest in this incident. Now the missile shutdown incident that happened in the Spring of '67 at Malmstrom, was not reported to Blue Book, and I'm trying to figure out what the difference is. This is from, Bradford's interview, I have a transcript in front of me.
PMYeah.
JKAnd he says... let's see, [reads:]
[BR:] "Right. I really can't remember whether we had just been in the area or whether we had gathered to come back from a bomb run someplace or whatever, but yeah, we had been out for 10 hours and well, we came in—I was at 20,000 feet and me and the co-pilot—I handled the radios, so I requested permission to make a penetration to land and so when I did this the controllers came back and said that they would like me to check on something if I wouldn't mind. I said, 'Well, I've been flying for 10 hours, but if it's important I'll go check on it.' And they said, 'Well, we think it's important,' so I said, 'All right, give me a vector,' and so they pointed me in a certain direction. We started flying out through there and I got to thinking, pilot, what am I looking for? So I called and I said 'What is it that I'm looking for?' and they said 'Well, you'll know it if you find it.' That sort of got our curiosity up. So anyway a few minutes later my navigator said, 'We have something coming towards us and it's coming fast.' and then the radar navigator said it's coming so fast that it can't avoid us and we were all ready for impact. Anyway, his voice came up real high and we thought we were going to be hit. And of course he's filming his radarscope at this time and well, the next day they checked his film and with the clocks and everything around the scope they determined the object was coming at roughly 3,000 miles per hour and then it just stopped dead off a right wing or off the tail.

INT: You didn't see it out of your windshield?

BR: No. All I could see was a real heavy haze right where the thing should have been. But I thought it came from our right rear and so it was approaching us from behind and from the right. Well, so the navigator said it's stopped right there just off our tail, off the right side of the airplane and I'm looking around trying to find it 'cause all I can see is just a haze right there and I couldn't see anything visually at that time. But then our radios went out that time and we couldn't talk to

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