Part 2

This should be a piece of cake! (That's once. You shouldn't say this kind of thing often.)

The first thing to do was to get a good idea where the thing hit.

After a little research on the web, it turned out that the Air Force Safety Center is just the place for this kind of question. So I emailed the contact I found on their webpage, asking if, by chance, they had a "mishap" (read: crash) report for an SR-71 that was lost in April 1967, in New Mexico, number 61-7966?

Email Monday morning, yep indeedy. Ten days later it was in the mail, and I was sending back the $70 check for the photocopying (ouch).

I figured I'd pore over the inch-thick report, maybe draw some sketches, do a little trig, figure out about where it hit, and start looking at aerial photos for the kind of tiny evidence Tom had used. Instead, as I scanned down the first page, I found a set of latitude/longitude coordinates.

This was going to be a snap! (That's twice. Fate considers itself tempted.)

I mucked around with various websites and programs to figure out exactly where those coordinates were in relation to, well, the world around them. I even hit Terraserver.com to see if the aerial photos were online; alas, no one has gotten around to uploading the digital orthophoto quads for that particular patch in the middle of nowhere (big surprise). So I had to order them from the USGS.

If you didn't know, the USGS takes a lot of aerial photos. It's part of the process that goes into making those nifty topo maps for which they are so famous. Current aerials for every square inch of the lower 48 can be ordered through their website, if you've got the time to figure out their little code and can find the ones you actually want.

I finally found mine, and ordered the 1997 photo for the area. A couple of weeks later, it came in the mail (another $20 or so). I did an overlay of the aerial, the topo map for the region, and a big red dot where the crash report said it was.

And there it was, right off the road.

There was even a big white area right next to it that looked just like an impact scar, complete with a little improvised "road" that led to it from the nearest dirt track.

It was on private land, so I began searching for that land's owner. The internet began to fail me here, and I had to actually talk to the county assessor's office over the phone. They gave me an address in Texas, so I wrote a letter asking permission to walk on out there and look for the plane.

I never heard from Texas, so I decided I would have to wing it when I got there. Drive out to the farmhouse and ask.

No problem. (That's three times. I was doomed, but didn't know it.)

Down I went. I had managed to talk a few of my old school chums into helping out in the search. We drove out there on a fine August morning (very hot in New Mexico in August) with all the gear we thought we would need - specifically, a GPS unit to get us to the point mentioned in the crash report. After guessing wrong a few times, we found the right farmhouse, and asked the nice woman living there if we could take a look.

Permission was given, and we headed into the pasture.

You know, I've been in the middle of nowhere before, far away from "civilization". But I had forgotten that most of those places still had some kind of feature that made them worth going to; they would have a mountain, or a hot spring, or some really neato rock formation. But New Mexico east of Las Vegas is, well.... Topographically challenged.

Every part of this field looked the same as the next. We let the GPS take us out to the spot, and stepped out into the blast furnace.

Nothing.

We spent the better part of the day looking around in ever-increasing (and ever more desperate) circles from that point. We found the "scar" I had seen in the aerial photo, and it was just some rocks that had been exposed in an old, old wash. At one point we found a piece of black metal. This was it!

Actually, it turned out to be a piece of sheet metal roofing.

Eventually we had to give up. And that bugged me.