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

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from that or shaken from that, and again, a clear investigation and highlighting of these things I think is very important.

JK

Right. Boy, we would sure like to be able to figure out who the people at Oscar-6 were, you know, the targeting team and so on. But we have got nothing on that.

WS

Other than the [B-52] flight crew, I think they would be the closest people that I am aware of up in that area because they were, from what I understood, very, very close to it and it went down behind some trees, as I recall, our camper guy calling back and then the captain coming up, and several of the crew members did see it because he indicated to them something was going on.

JK

Well, the location that—and I have got in the documents, it refers a couple of times to quote/unquote apparent landing. And it quotes some of the security police on duty as seeing this thing come down and apparently land.

WS

Right.

JK

And I will tell you right now that in fact the two pilots of the B-52—now, the gunner doesn't have a window so he can't see out of the plane. But the two pilots have the only windows, you know, windshield that they can look out of. And they made one circuit, which is a penetration, they started at 20,000 and they were coming down, it's a standard penetration procedure, and they 1were a training crew or an evaluation crew, StanEval Crew, and they had a pilot on board they were evaluating. And so this guy being evaluated is in the pilot's seat, and this thing came close to them and they saw it on radar, and it came—first on radar at about three miles and then moved very quickly to one mile, and when it was at the one-mile distance, they lost the ability to transmit from both of their transmitters.

WS

I was going to ask you about that because I was on line and I overheard some of that. The capsule let us listen in on some of the transmissions that were going back and forth with the tower. And there was some transmission lost. I was going to ask if you had that information.

JK

Yeah. There's a transcript of the tape between the tower and the B-52. Although, there is a couple of suspicious gaps in it.

WS

Right. Was there something about weather radar? Was there something to do with the base radar not being able to pick up anything but the B-52?

JK

Well, that's something that is ambiguous in the document. There's two references in the documents about the weathers or the weather radar painting this thing.

WS

The weather radar was able to detect, but the standard radar that had the B-52 at one point was not able to pick up the object.

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