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A few weeks after I got home, I decided I'd call the woman at the farmhouse and thank her, and let her know as well we hadn't found anything. "I'm glad you called," she said. "I told my husband about what you were looking for, and he told me he had seen the crash happen back in junior high school. He knows right where it is. Maybe if you come back sometime he can show you." I gulped. "How about this weekend?" I finally said. See kids, it pays to be polite.... I met the husband at the ranch the following weekend. He was a great example of really good people, just like his wife. He told me he had been outside after dusk, practicing roping sawhorses with a homemade lariat. Turns out his summer job, since there were no lawns to mow for many miles, was tying knots by mail-order for a saddle company in Colorado. Anyhow, he was out there trying to snag the sawhorses, and this huge fireball comes barreling out of the sky. He couldn't miss it, since it hit maybe a mile or two from his house (and there were, as I explained earlier, no topographic features to obscure his view in any direction). It hit the ground, and he took the opportunity to jump on a horse and ride to the neighbor's place a few miles away to tell them about it ("I liked to ride," he said, "and I was sweet on their daughter at the time."). The local police showed up, and the Air Force wasn't far behind. The whole thing turned into something of a guarded circus for the next few weeks; 966 had split into two pieces, a forward section and an aft section, and the military set up camp between the two impact points. They staked out the two sites and measured everything (they gave the young boy the parachute cord they used afterwards, and many knots were tied). There were military people on their knees in long lines, "scratching at the ground like chickens", picking up everything they could find. Anyhow, he held up my topo map to get us situated, and had his son lead me out to the spot with his pickup. I followed behind, and we zoomed out at tremendous speed, bumping along in the field like nothing could damage our trucks. I didn't want to lose him, so I struggled to keep up. Suddenly he stopped and got out. I realized we were at most a quarter mile from where I had searched before. The son stood up straight, and looked around a bit. "Nope," he said. "I think it's the next wash over." We trundled a few hundred feet to the next wash, and got out again. There was a large area of exposed sand, and much less of the meager plant life that filled the rest of the field. He assured me this was the spot, and jumped back in his truck to head home, leaving me to grab my camera and start searching the ground. I felt less than assured by the son's lackluster enthusiasm, and felt privately it probably wasn't the right spot. But I searched for hours, discovering nothing except that a certain species of New Mexico pasture bug is just black enough to catch one's eye amidst all the brown out there. Again, I had to give up and head home. It's worth mentioning at this point that each trip down to the "site" and back clocked up around 800 miles on my truck's odometer. I told myself I needed something much more concrete than I had now, some new piece of information, before I would let myself drive that far again. In the back of my crash report were a bunch of "photos". I put that in quotes because these pages were in fact third or fourth generation photocopies of photographs, and everything had that supergrainy cartoon look that really didn't tell you much. There was a "photo" of the crash site, but you couldn't see much except that it was definitely two distinct burns, and, thanks to information about the prevailing winds that night, you could tell which way was North by the way the brush fire spread.
I emailed back to the AFSC and asked them if it would be possible to get a better print of that photo. Sure enough, they could do that for me, and I got a nice 8 x 10 glossy back from them in about a week - no charge. These guys were great. Looking between the two burns, I saw what appeared to be a tight "Y"-style fork in a North-South road. I almost dropped the photo; I had seen just such a "Y" in the road in the aerial photo! I had been looking just a little bit too far East!
This new info was enough for me to jump back into the truck and "zip" down for a third look. I bumped over the pasture and headed to the "Y" I remembered, and found it right away. Stopping the truck, I clambered onto the roof to try to get that same "bird's eye view" as the crash photo had. I thought I could see scar outlines, but I wasn't sure. I climbed back down and started walking back and forth to where the burns should have been. Hours passed. Nothing. This was getting to be a bad habit. |
