William E. Smith Interview, 11 July 2001(a)

 

retired now, but for the occasion of his going-away party, they had a crew photograph and everybody signed it, and two of the B-52 crew actually had copies of that.

WS

What happens when you get as much data as you can? What's your ultimate goal?

JK

(Well, let me close this window. The trucks are making a lot of noise here). The purpose of our group is to secure and keep for future research as much good information as we can. Other initiatives that the group is working on is like when people get out of the field or pass away, their libraries and their document collections and so on, we're trying to make sure that we get those and get them stored. So we're definitely not a publicity-oriented group. My partner has a video production company but all we're really doing at the moment is working on these oral history interviews. And so my partner, Tom Tulien is in Minneapolis. I am sure he will e-mail you and ask you about considering doing a video interview, and that's all we're asking is that you consider it.

WS

Okay.

JK

And you know, one of the aims on this particular case is the possibility, since this is such a well-documented case, the idea was to publish. Before we would do anything like that, we certainly would contact you.

WS

Right. Well, that's good because, you know, being a person who is in academia, I have to be very careful about those kind of things. I'm in an a security police organization. As a matter of fact, that's another thing I could do. I could do some hunting there because many of the guys who are retired from security police or went onto do other things are now in this organization of ours.

JK

Now, I have found one such organization on the internet.

WS

What's the name of it?

JK

Oh, I would have to look back.

WS

I don't have my magazine right here, and I just joined not too long ago. A friend of mine cornered me and said, Hey, why don't you join, and because we have our convention, we had one in Denver a few years ago and one in someplace else. The name of the organization is Tiger Flight. And it's got a listing here of virtually all the members. Yeah. That's so interesting. Well, I'm glad you finally got in touch with me. I happened to be out and about when you called initially, but I have thought about that incident many times and it truly has had an effect, a strange effect, albeit. I have had a cursory interest ever since that time.

JK

Right. One thing I didn't say that I was going to say earlier is what the Blue Book people said they thought you guys saw. And they said that the people on the ground, which would have been all the security police and ground crews were—sometimes,

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