Interview with Thornton Duard (T.D.) Barnes, January 12, 2007

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with T. D. Barnes January 12, 2007 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Julia Stetler © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with T. D. Barnes January 12, 2007 Conducted by Julia Stetler Table of Contents Introduction: birth ( Texas, 1937), childhood on a ranch, early education, life during World War II, early interest in radar, memories of ranch life and work 1 High school and participation in FFA ( Oklahoma), service in National Guard, marriage, military service ( U. S. Army) and further education, early experiences in Europe during the Cold War ( 1961) 4 Work for the CIA ( Project Palladium) while in the Army, education in ECM and ECCM 6 Transfer to Germany with Hawk missile unit, work and life in Germany 11 Move to Fort Sill, OK for officer’s training, discharge from the Army, move to Beatty, NV to work on NASA X- 15 and other space- related projects 14 Recruited as contractor by CIA to work at Area 51, work on NERVA, life and work as a group at Area 51, family life, interviews and testing for CIA service 18 Arrival at and impressions of Area 51 ( aka The Ranch), work at Area 51 ( Have Doughnut, Have Drill, Have Ferry), comparison of Soviet and U. S. air technology 22 Work on early Stealth technology ( Have Blue, 1969), development of A- 12 and U- 2 technology 26 Work on Soviet radars and MIG aircraft at Area 51 31 Development of YF- 12 and A- 12 technology ( ca. 1965) 32 Evolution of surveillance technology from the CIA to the USAF 33 CIA assassination attempt on Fidel Castro, and A- 12 encounter with a Soviet bomber 34 Work, security, and stability of people who worked at Area 51 35 Disinformation as a security screen for Area 51 projects 38 Work on underground atomic testing projects at NTS, and application of that work to commercial use 39 Work on Stealth technology ( A- 12, U- 2, Have Blue) 42 Living conditions, House Six, and relations with Air Force personnel at Area 51 45 The Skunk Works and work on the U- 2, and how various small companies got their start working for the government 49 Returns to Oklahoma, enters oil and gas business and later invests in uranium and gold mining ventures 51 Influence of early military training on future career, and continuing relationship with the military today 54 Feelings about declassifying information concerning projects at Area 51 55 Women who fly the U- 2 56 Conclusion: work on the X- 15 program as pride of place in a distinguished career 59 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with T. D. Barnes January 12, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Julia Stetler [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Julia Stetler: OK, are you ready? T. D. Barnes: Ready. OK, then the first question, I need you to state your full name and the date of your birth and the place of your birth. Thornton Duard Barnes, born Dalhart, Texas January 25, 1937. OK, and now we could go a little bit into your childhood. So you said you were born in Texas? Yes. Do you have any favorite childhood memories? Just tell me a little bit about your childhood. We lived on a ranch thirty miles from the nearest town. We had no electricity, no running water, dirt roads. Our ranch was the Two Bar T, and it was right on the New Mexico- Texas state line, and I actually went to school at a little, small school at Sedan, New Mexico. And let’s see, I attended till about the sixth grade there, and actually I took two grades a year, one a year, so I was actually— I think I jumped from the third to the fifth grade in grade school. I don’t know whether it was because the teachers didn’t like me or [ laughing]. But anyway, it was a quite a different, quite an experience living remote like that, and this was right at the beginning of World War II, and I can remember the bombers flying over and practicing around the ranch there. They had a glider base at Dalhart, Texas and they would pull their gliders up and then turn them loose over the ranch and then they’d glide back in to Dalhart. Another significant thing I remember back then was we got prisoners of war from Italy, and they would come out and work on the ranch. They’d deliver them out, and of course they loved it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 They didn’t want to go back. They’d never had it so good. And I remember my mom used to make big old chocolate cakes and put on a pot of pinto beans and this sort of thing to feed them, you know. But I remember the prisoners coming in and they was tickled to death to be there. So you spent time with the prisoners? Yes. And one thing that’s significant about that era, too, is I can vaguely remember having to do you might say a report for school and I did it on radar. Radar had just been invented, and I’m out in the boondocks, a ranch kid, and I never dreamed that that would become my specialty in life. You would never have thought it for a little, old country school like that, but I remember researching because this would be towards the end of the war, so they hadn’t had radar but two or three years, and I’m not sure where I got my reference data but I wrote a report on radar, and I’ll never forget that. Where did you get the idea to do that? If I remember right, my mom suggested it and I picked up on it real big, because in those days, you know, I thought, even through high school, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and I never dreamed that I would become, you might say, an expert in radar for my period of time, but that’s what I ended up doing. Wow. So early on, you already had the— I often wondered about that, you know, what really guided me to that, you know. It’s rather significant. That����s interesting. So when you started the radar thing, did you keep at it, or was it just a project for school? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 No, I didn’t. I thought no more about it for many years. Actually it wasn’t till I got back from Korea that I got interested in picking it back up and I did nothing but go to school for years then on, various radars while I was in the military. Interesting. So other than the radar project, did you have any other hobbies or anything you were interested in? No, it was very simple, those days. Of course we didn’t have TV or any of that sort of thing, so we rode horseback and in fact we worked. The kids started working even before they started into grade school. I remember we used to have to herd the cattle, keep them away from the rattlesnakes. They’d find a rattlesnake and then all gather up around it and want to smell of it and [ 00: 05: 00] they’d all get bit, so we’d break it up and this sort of thing. So we’d be out on horseback all day long, taking care of the cattle and this and all like that. And I remember the roundups. All the neighbors would come in and help each other. And the country dances. They had the country dances. And this is amazing, in fact I can remember when World War II started, I know exactly what we was doing that day, and I couldn’t have been but about four years old, but I remember the shock on my parents’ face when one of the neighboring ranchers rode by on his horse and hollered at them that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. And we had a battery- operated radio and the folks turned it on. I remember how shocked they were. And I’ve never forgotten that. That registers up with when [ John F.] Kennedy got killed and the Challenger, you know, it’s in my mind and I’ll never forget that moment. It’s frozen. Were you scared? No, but I was a little bit— well, yes, I guess it was, just because I knew they were scared. And that was back when things was assured. We would go out and gather up rubber off the ground UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 and stuff to donate to the war effort, aluminum and metal and rubber, we were that short, people did that. They went out and gathered up in the trash piles, wherever they’d have an old inner tube or something, and they’d turn it in to supply the war. That’s very cool. That’s unheard- of these days, isn’t it? [ Laughing] Yes. And so when you got out of school, what did you do? I ended up going to high school in Oklahoma, and I was very big in agriculture. In fact, it’s rather unique. I was an officer in my FFA class all four years, which is very unusual. In fact, I was president in my freshman year, which spoke, I think back now, spoke highly of my leadership. They were seeing something that I didn’t know I had at that time, because every year I was selected as an officer of the organization, and we won several national competitions in agriculture. And, let’s see, I graduated from high school when I was seventeen. We was very poor and I couldn’t go to college at the time, and I was dating my wife Doris and we decided to get married. She was sixteen and I was seventeen. And we immediately left the state and ended up in Tucson, Arizona. I went to work for an uncle there. We were independent. We wanted to get away from the folks because we was on our own. And that’s when the Korean War was going. And I had been in the National Guard earlier in Oklahoma and I knew I was going to be drafted, so I went ahead and enlisted into the [ U. S.] Army and went to Korea. Was there a specific reason why you joined the National Guard? Yeah, the girls liked the uniforms [ laughing]. That’s the only good excuse I can give you. But I joined the National Guard and we did, you know, we were very proud of our uniforms. I wasn’t military- oriented at that time. It paid a little bit and of course going through school, I worked my UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 way through school, I drove a school bus to make extra money, but we were very poor, you know, the family was, and the National Guard paid a little bit, and I don’t know why I really joined but I did well in it and then they got me started because I started taking all kinds of correspondence courses even then, and a lot of my education then became, even after I went into the Army, was through the University of Maryland. They had an extension program for the military and I took a lot of courses through that. And then once we— I’m kind of jumping ahead but once we got stationed at Fort Bliss and was going to school all day on radar, on electronics, I’d go to college at night at Texas Western. Fort Bliss is in Texas? Texas, yes. El Paso. But anyway, we got married and I went into the service and ended up in Korea, and I went over as an intelligence specialist, which dealt with intelligence matters, and I [ 00: 10: 00] never worked, actually all through the military service, I never did work like an ordinary military, always with officers. I was an enlisted man and I worked— in fact I had a two- star general that me and him was almost friends. It was quite an age difference but we got acquainted on the ship going over and every time he was in the area he’d drop in and see me and that’s one of the reasons I went into the missiles, is they counseled me, they wanted me to stay in the service and they said, Missiles is the thing for someone like you to do. And so when I came back from Korea I knew I was going to try to get into the missile field, in electronics. But that was at the urging of my commanding officers. And it ended up that the general ended up, he was commandant when I went through officer training, he was the commandant, so our paths crossed again. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 But anyway, that’s how we started off very young, and in fact we went to Germany, I deployed to Germany with the first Hawk missile unit ever deployed for supposedly combat. We thought we was going to war over the Berlin Wall. Do you remember when that was? It would be 1961, right after [ Francis] Gary Powers got shot down, and the Soviets were setting up a base in Cuba and they had sealed off the Iron Curtain, so they sent one battalion from Fort Bliss to along the coast of Florida with a missile set- up because we thought we might be invaded from Cuba, and then we set up on the Czech border, and we actually thought we was going to war. It’s a long story. I got to take my family with me, the only American family on the ship, and the kids wore dog tags and the wife wore a dog— just like I did. And every six months they had to evacuate as though we were at war and go to Paris alone, because I’m supposedly back there fighting the Soviets. And my wife, she was almost twenty then. And they lived with you while you were on mission? Yes. Why were they allowed to come with? I had been working on a project with the CIA [ Central Intelligence Agency] while— You were already with the CIA [ laughing]. OK. [ Laughing] This is a real funny story. I don’t know if you want this or not. Oh, yes! We’d been at Fort Bliss— when I went through the first missile school, it lasted a year, and you’re supposed to get automatic commission, a warrant officer commission. By the time I graduated, they had too many and no place to send them, so that’s when I made my sergeant’s stripes. And so they sent me home and told me they’d tell me when they had an assignment. And UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 about every three months I’d go into the base and say, You got anything for me? No, we’ll call you when we’re ready. So I was going to school full- time out at Texas Western is what it was called then, and then I was enrolled in various electronics schools on base, TV repair and all this kind of stuff. And I actually set up a side business of working on televisions. I was buying all these trade- ins at the store for two dollars apiece. I’d fix the electronics, my wife Doris would shine up the cabinet, and then we’d put a hundred- dollar price tag on it and sell them. And we had a heck of a business going, and they messed it up when they sent me to Germany. But anyway, I kept going to school, and after a couple of months I’d sign back up for another school, they kept opening up, and just moving up the ladder on that, and then Bud Wheelon whom I worked with later years out at Area 51 was working for the CIA in charge of Project Palladium, and what this was was determining the radar capabilities of the Soviet Union, and they were doing this all over the world with ships and testing to see just what these were capable of doing and, you know, because we were in a very cold war with them and we were basically taking the Hawk missile and putting it inside a plane, take the nose cone off of it and everything, and we’d take a sashay at Cuba, and we would activate the CW radar signals, we were homing in on them, they would start jamming us and then my job was to sit there and tweak on this missile where it could overcome their jamming, and at that same time we was recording their jamming so that we could come back and analyze it and use it to counter it. That’s what we was doing was countering their jamming, and we would be able to fine- tune the missile where it would ignore it, [ 00: 15: 00] is what it amounted to. And then they started shooting at us so we had to quit that. But this is what I was doing for the agency. But anyway, word came out that they were activating our missile battalion, a missile battalion, because I wasn’t part of it then, but they picked me for it. And so we started firing out UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 at White Sands, getting ready, and it was classified where we was going. The rumors were we was going to Italy. And this was at a time when President [ Dwight D.] Eisenhower had shut off dependent travel. There was no base housing available. They were trying to shut down the wives from going with the military. So the only way an American family could go was if they had relatives living there, or they were from that country, or otherwise had guaranteed housing. So everyone was drumming people they knew in Leghorn, Italy and renting a place over there so they’d have an address to put down for concurrent travel for the dependents. Well, the Agency boys told me, they said, You’re not going to Italy. You’re going to Germany. So we had bought a house from a master sergeant that was transferring over to Germany, so I looked him up and asked if his wife would be my wife’s cousin for purposes, and we put down on the application that she’d be staying with her cousin, and we got it. And she was the only American— we were the only American family on the ship, that got to take the family with me. So a little bit of politics, I guess you’d say, or being in the right place at the right time. But anyway, and then that’s when Vietnam was starting, and because I had worked for the Agency, they came knocking on my door in Germany and said, we need advisers in Vietnam. And that was before we actually got into the conflict. I finally told them, I says, The only way I’ll go is as a commissioned officer. Eighteen days later we’re back in Fort Sill, Oklahoma and I’m in officer training, with the intent of sending me to Vietnam. And then I got injured real bad in survivor training and it ended my military career. It was about two years before they determined it was permanent. But they put me in JAG [ Judge Advocate General] of all things. Here I am, I got electronics up the goozoo and they put me in a JAG office doing court- martials and this sort of thing, but I was still going to the hospital, convalescence and stuff for my injuries. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 What happened to you? Actually it was real simple. I scraped both knees real bad going through an infiltration course, .50 caliber machine guns shooting over the top of your head, and I developed some kind of blood poisoning, and I’d had this once before when I was a kid, almost died, and I was in the hospital for weeks, and it developed into what they call traumatic arthritis, and they eventually had to replace both knees. I’ve had both knees replaced. But it’s just my system rejected it. And I had other problems after that. For example, I got radiation while working out on the NERVA [ Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application] project and lost sight in one eye. And the VA [ Veterans Administration] was going to do cornea implants, but they knew I would reject because that’s my nature. I was in the hospital for five weeks just for that, when normally it would’ve been almost outpatient. So it was my system, and that’s the reason I had the knee problem. OK, so you got injured and you got put with the JAG and then you decided to get out— Yes, because I was already getting all kind of offers from the CIA. How did they notice you, just through your friend, or how did they pick you, the CIA? Because I had had such an extensive amount of training in a short time on radar. There wasn’t a radar in the country that I hadn’t been to school on. I had enough rank that they couldn’t put me out just doing anything. What was your rank by then? I was just an sergeant, E- 5, but they couldn’t put me out doing, you know, manual labor. They’d send me home and then I’d say, Well, I want to go to school, so they would let me go to school, [ 00: 20: 00] and so I’d sign up and maybe each school would be six months, that’s all you do, sit there in the classroom eight hours a day, and then you’d go to college at night. And I had UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 advanced into the ECM, we call it, ECM and ECCM, that’s electronic countermeasures and electronic counter- countermeasures. That’s your jamming and your anti- jamming. I had focused on that and that’s what they were needing for Project Palladium. And it was because of my education that they picked me for the— I got on their radar screen. On the radar screen on to the CIA, so to speak. Yes. Yes. And how did they approach you? Actually they went through— I got a call from our first sergeant, telling me to report in. I hadn’t been in in two or three months. And they said, Would you like to do a little interesting work? We got some people that want to talk to you. And I said, Yeah, sure. And at the time I thought it was Raytheon, who built the missile. Come to find out it was the Agency. And I thought I was going to be working for the manufacturer because they had had a few problems that they were still working out. It was a basic new missile. And it turned out to be the Agency and they wanted to know, Will you work with us on a project? And I said, Yes, of course. And so that’s all I did for several months, then, was work on their project. Did you get a clearance for that? I already had a clearance. We had to have a clearance to go to school. Everybody going to the missile school. At that time we just had a secret, at that time, and later on I moved on up to top secret and above. Well, I guess it was all brand new. Yes. Yes, they were all classified, at that time the schools were, because it was pretty new. So you worked for the CIA for a couple months on that. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Yes, actually I think about four months that we worked on that before they had to terminate it, and it wasn’t too few months after that, they actually shot down one of our U- 2 planes. We lost a pilot over Cuba. But they were aggravated at us shooting— coming in and shooting them with the radar signals and playing games. It happens all the time, at sea and everywhere else, you know. It’s kind of interesting, the systems that we— we didn’t use it in my particular project but they would have planes flying along their border and they would activate the radars and the planes had a simulator that would shoot back a signal that made it look like it was coming off of their signal, but we was actually giving them our signal, and then we would start cranking the volumes down on it where it’d get weaker and weaker to make them turn up their power because we wanted to see how far out they’d reach. So we’d just keep turning it down. Even though we were staying the same distance from them, they thought we was moving away from them and they kept turning it up and we would record this data and find out, you know, just how far out again this is, you know. So we had a lot of games like that that we played. OK. And that project stopped— It actually stopped when we started getting ready to go to Germany. That’s when they pulled me off of it, because I’m sure they were moving into other things but they— to tell you how— we got— I’ll tell you a little story on the missile. We took our own missiles with us. We took our own trucks, everything. We went over as a combat unit, ready to go to war. In fact, when we got there, my household goods were still on the ship, so I found a place about thirty kilometers out in a little village for the family, and so I went back in to get some blankets and cooking utensils and stuff from the base, and the Soviets were acting up and it turned out it was three weeks before I got to go back home. And I had just dropped the family off in this little old village, no other Americans in the whole village, and I could send my mess sergeant out or any of the— I’d send UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 people out there, but I couldn’t leave. I was essential, that I had to stay with the [ 00: 25: 00] missile unit. But we actually thought we was going to start shooting, and that’s sensitive. I got sidetracked. What did you ask on that? I asked when the project ended and you said that’s when you went to Germany with the family, a story about the missiles. Oh, yeah, OK. I was going to tell you about the missiles. We had the missiles out there, ready to fire. We’d arm them. Every time an unidentified plane come across Czechoslovakia, we’d go out and arm them, be sitting there tracking. If we didn’t get an all- clear, we’d have fired. We never did fire them, of course. So after ninety days, we pulled the missiles in to check them out, what we’d call “ Go- NoGo” check, we hooked them up to equipment and made sure everything was still working. When we opened them up, Raytheon had built them for the desert at El Paso, they weren’t waterproof, and we took them over there, and we had all these seeds in them from the desert. We opened them up and here’s all this cactus and sagebrush growing right in the electronics. We had no idea what would’ve happened if we ever fired one. We had weeds growing right in the electronics. I mean they sprouted with it when they got over to Germany where it was moist, you know. So we’d have to use duct tape on them. When we’d put them back together, we’d wrap them with duct tape. So that’s where duct tape gets its reputation. Yes, good old duct tape and baling wire. That’s funny. So the whole time you were over in Germany, your wife was living over there too. Yes. It was about six months later, some of the other wives started— She was all alone? All alone, yes. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 How was that for her? Oh, well, she had the two little kids. Like I say, I think she was almost twenty then. The kids were just little bitty things then. I sent her out an international driver’s manual because she didn’t have anything to read or anything out there, and she studied that thing. She made 100 percent on the test when she took her driver’s test. It was a little bit— we had a lot of fun, though. We had four missile units and they let us stand down while they were up. We didn’t all have to be running at the same time. We���d overlap. And we’d get to do things, go to the Alps, and we did a lot of traveling while we was there. Did she know what you were doing? Yes, yes. This wasn’t that classified then, what we were doing. She was pretty tense, too, because they had to wear the dog tags. And we lived above a little store and the tanks— there wasn’t any sidewalks or anything in that little village. It’s just buildings butted right up against the road. When the tanks would go by, we were on eye level with the crew, and they’d look into our kitchen or living room, and the kids would sit there and wave at them. There wouldn’t be eight foot between us. They was on the outside; we were inside. But these tanks would be rumbling through the village and the kids sitting there waving at them. It was very military. And of course the kids, they started school in German kindergarten, and we fit right in with the local people. We got invited to all their little village things, which is kind of an honor because a lot of Americans didn’t because they just didn’t fit in, but we always had the policy of when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and the kids going to school and stuff, we fit right in. So there were no problems at all with the Germans? No, none at all. No, there wasn’t any problems at all. That’s good. So how much time did you spend in Germany? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 We stayed eighteen months. We were supposed to stay thirty- six months. That would’ve been a normal tour. But eighteen months and I went back to officer’s training. You came back to— Fort Sill. Fort Sill. OK. And your family tagged along back here. Yes, brought them back, yes. And then I got out and I was actually trying to go to work for FAA [ Federal Aviation Administration] in Oklahoma City, and while I was waiting on an opening, I got a call wanting to know if I could be in Nevada the next day. They needed a radar [ 00: 30: 00] engineer like yesterday. That was the CIA again? Actually it wasn’t. They were involved, probably they submitted my name, but it was actually a contractor for NASA [ National Aeronautics and Space Administration]. And the CIA was involved in the program. But anyway, this was on the X15 program, and they had an X- 15 flight scheduled for the following day and they had some radar problems and they needed some overnight help. And I didn’t go, I told them I couldn’t that quickly, but we managed to— we’d just bought a home there in Oklahoma City and we sold it. The realtor was able to immediately take it off our hands. And we loaded up and the next day headed for Nevada. And we’ve been here ever since, almost. You’ve been getting around. So you moved from Oklahoma to Nevada. Yes, we went to the little town of Beatty, and there was ten of us on the radar site, and we got the town— very interesting period in our lives. They had a town party for us the night we arrived. The whole town turned out. We found out later, any excuse they had to party, they’d do it. Wasn’t much else to do in Beatty in those days. But we had two NASA vehicles that’d pick us UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 up every morning and we’d ride up to the radar site. And we did missions for the X- 15 and shortly after it was the XB- 70, the major big bomber, and then we started doing the flights originating out in Area 51. We did some of those. We had the— it’s the only radar in the area that had the capability of recording velocity, and that’s what they was needing for the speed tests, so we’d participate. And just about everything that flew in this part of the United States, we’d participate in it. OK. Well, for the X- 15, that was a NASA project? Yeah. And you did what, exactly? They called us “ technical adviser,” but it had more to do with the radar, and the data transmission system. We actually— we were tracking it. We had the— sort of like they did at the Cape [ Cape Canaveral]. We had telemetry, we had everything that they had at the Cape, just a smaller field. In fact, our radar systems came from Cape Canaveral. So you watched everything that moved. Yes, and it was actually a mission because this was our first astronauts, were made there. I worked with Neil Armstrong before he ever went to the moon. That’s when the first astronauts— anytime they flew over fifty miles up into the atmosphere, in those days that was the cutoff. Is that when you earn astronaut wings? Yes. And so Joe Walker and Neil, several of them were already astronauts before they went into the space program. But what we were doing was testing the stuff that they used in space, you know, that’s what the X- 15 was all about, was maybe there’s a new guidance system they wanted to use in the vehicles that they were designing to go to the moon, we would test them in outer space and the X- 15, it would actually go into the edges of outer space. When we’d launch them UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 in the daylight, it would be nighttime where they were at. They were seeing the st