![]() It’s the art of adventuring in and around abandoned or hidden structures, urban and otherwise. Krans had a pastime that gave him the skills to do something about it: urban exploring, sometimes called “urbex” by the initiated. “I felt that we needed to do something,” he says, “because nobody knows who the hell Walt is.” But in the late 1990s, an explorer named Jeremy Krans began what would become a decades-long quest to uncover it all, and ultimately to make Ray’s once-classified life public. To explain the aerial search going on, the Air Force told the public a cover story: An SR-71 Blackbird-whose existence had recently been revealed-flying out of Edwards Air Force Base, had gone down.įor years, Ray’s crash sites remained largely hidden from the public. Blood spattered the ground, but Ray’s boots still had their spurs. The two hadn’t separated, his parachute hadn’t deployed, and so he had slammed straight into the Earth. His chute formed a shroud around his body, and his ejection seat sat some 50 yards above him on the hillside. Two days after takeoff, a CIA aircraft finally spotted Ray’s parachute, and men helicoptered in to locate their comrade. The crews cut a road through the sand to schlep out the debris before anyone else found it-and found out about the secret flight. the next day, a helicopter found the plane, strewn across three canyons. “We couldn’t tell our wives where we were at or what we were doing.”Īt 3:25 p.m. “We went up on Monday morning, came home Friday night,” recalls former Area 51 crewmember T.D. Isolated in the desert, the group of about 30 staffers Barnes worked with on the site’s Special Projects felt like family. Many worked on the same mission as Ray: developing planes that didn’t exist in a place that didn’t exist, sometimes risking an accident like this, which also wouldn’t exist. They hoped to hear a transmission from the shortwave radio in his survival kit. Home Plate-as this group of airmen referred to Area 51-began to search. The A-12′s jet engines-so powerful that the director of central intelligence once said they sounded as if “ the Devil himself were blasting his way straight from Hell”-began to fail, then sputtered out.Īt 4:02, Ray sent his final known transmission: He was going to eject. The fuel tank’s low-pressure lights had blinked on. Thirty-eight minutes later, Ray radioed in more bad news. But the altitude change couldn’t cut his consumption enough. He lowered the plane out of the speedy headwinds, hoping to save some fuel. “I don’t know where my fuel’s gone to,” he said. He’d done this many times, having already logged 358 hours in these crafts.Īt 3:22 p.m., Ray radioed back to base: His gas was low. He took off for his four-hour flight to Florida and back a minute ahead of schedule at 11:59 a.m., the sleek curves of the Oxcart’s titanium body triggering sonic shock waves ( booms) as it sliced through the atmosphere. Ray’s last morning on Earth was chilled and windy, with clouds moving in and preparing to drop snow on the nearby mountains. In reality, and in secret, he reported to the CIA. On the books, Ray was a civilian pilot for Lockheed Martin. Set atop the dried-up bed of Groom Lake in the Nevada desert, the now-infamous spot made for good runways, and was remote enough to keep prying eyes off covert Cold War projects. On January 5, 1967, that single space belonged to Ray, a quiet, clean-cut 33-year-old who spent his workdays inside Area 51, then the CIA’s advanced-aviation research facility. On a radar screen, it appeared as barely a blip-all the better to spy on Soviets with-and had only one seat. Among the US’s first attempts at stealth aircraft, it could travel as quickly as a rifle bullet, and fly at altitudes around 90,000 feet. Ray’s A-12 jet, meanwhile, was fast, almost invisible, and novel. “OXCART” WAS AN ODD NICKNAME for the plane that killed pilot Walter Ray.
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