James A. Partin Interview, 20 January 2001

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JP:Yeah, but as far altitude or on the ground, I really don't know. It was, as I said, I think early in the morning, like 2 or 3 o'clock and we had of course flown all night and get a little bleary-eyed, but that's what I heard and that's what I saw.
JK:OK. I had a lengthy talk with several of the other guys. They all recall—well the documents themselves identify you as being with that Stanboard crew that day.
JP:OK.
JK:They remember your name and one of them remembers you being on board and the others remember an extra pilot being on board.
JP:Yeah. Let me interrupt you real quick and tell you one more thing that I recall. When I described to the crew over the interphone what I was seeing, the Navigator, the Radar-Navigator and everybody tried to get up in our lap in the cockpit and—[laughs].
JK:The memory from Brad Runyan is that you were in the left seat and that he was in the right seat, and that Cagle had been in the instructor's jump seat for a while and that when you guys were at 20,000 and had this object on radar, that Cagle decided that he he had something happening the next day that he didn't want to miss. And so the memory is that Cagle got up out of the jump seat and went and got in the bunk and that you continued the flight until full stop.
JP:You know, thinking back, I could have unstrapped and raised up and looked over the right side, but it seems like I was sitting on the right in the Co-pilot's seat.
JK:Now Runyan made a drawing for us and you made a little tiny drawing in your report, [which] shows a little circle, says "orange ball of light," and then I'd say an appendage out the side maybe twice as long, it says "a very dim ring of soft white light." And then it says "the angular size judged by holding a match at arm's length," and you showed a circle with a small dot which means that the match head would not cover very much. However, Runyan's drawing is very detailed, and he has you guys approaching this object—and it would have been when it was low and you guys were—
JP:Yeah that we were above that object?
JK:What he says was, that on the last go around, which was at low altitude, you guys approached it and it would have been at approximately at 11 o'clock low, and that you had a good view of it out of the left seat as you made a left turn around this thing, and he said the way he saw it was looking across the flight deck and out the window on the pilot's side.
JP:Umm! Well heck, I don't know, like I say, it's been a long time, but I thought—
JK—when the plane banked he said he could see it clearly through the pilot's window at that point, and that's when he saw all the detail.

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