Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 11 November 2000
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| PM | Yeah, I think he was at Lackland. But, I ran into Chuck going through the Pentagon, and we were close, very close. The night my son was born, my son who's laying here on the floor here in front of me, the night my son was born, which was right about this time,I went to see my wife, and Chuck's house was the first one I stopped at—I stopped at his house before I went home, and this was real late at night, and he and his wife and I had a scotch and toasted my new son. We were very close, and I saw Chuck at the Pentagon and I said he owed me, in fact, at Minot I'd loaned him a jacket, a field jacket, and he brought it to me all those years later and I saw him and I said: "c'mon, let me buy you lunch" and we went down to one of the cafeterias. While we were there I brought up the incident and said, you know we were just reminiscing, and I said "well, do you remember the incident with the whatever the hell it was," you know, and he proclaimed not to know what I was talking about. He said "I have no memory of it," and he seemed to be sincere, and that has kinda shaken me, because Chuck was a bright guy, not the kind of guy that would forget something like that. | |
| JK | I've talked to about 30 different people in this Malmstrom thing I've been working on. Talked to the base Historian for one, and he said when he approached people to get information for the Wing History that he not only got silence, he got a 'get out of my face' type responses, and time and time again the ex, or the retired officers we speak with say, 'well, you know it wasn't so much orders but that it was an atmosphere, partly training and partly the atmosphere that you were in that you knew instinctively that this was the kind of thing you didn't talk about, that it wasn't healthy for your career if you did so. | |
| PM | Right, there certainly was that. Yeah, I'd agree with that. There was no overt: "don't talk about it," but there certainly were a lot of stories around about guys who were considered a little bit flaky when they said they saw things. But hell, I'm past caring, I retired as a full Colonel and I got my pension coming in and I'm too old to worry about it now so I have no reason not to say. | |
| JK | You mentioned an 'approach plate' what is that? Is that like an overlay showing the movement of the aircraft? | |
| PM | They have a book that pilots use to navigate near the airport and it shows different approaches—schematics of different approaches. | |
| JK | OK, I have a document here that I'm looking at, let's see what is this? [leafing through papers] This is a Memorandum for the record, October '68, between Blue Book personnel and Col. Werlich, and he said:
"I'm sending RAPCON tapes, photos, and an overlay showing the movement of the aircraft, description of the aircraft movement prior to VFR. Aircraft was going through maneuvers and it would be most impossible to track it perfectly cause he was doing steep turns, "S" turns, etc. Now time and duration of the sighting was, in my message. Speed of the B-52 was in the TWX. I only stated one radar in the |
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