Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Thirteen: Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous Requires Drones

Starting in 1963, preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations for the pilots, many of which occurred in the barren outer reaches of Area 51. For Ken Collins, a mock nighttime escape from an aircraft downed over the desert was meant to simulate hell. Collins knew the kind of challenge he would be up against as he stood on the tarmac at Groom Lake watching the sun disappear behind the mountains to the west. Soon, it would be dark and very cold. Collins climbed into a C-47 aircraft and noticed that the windows were blacked out. Neither he nor any of the other Oxcart pilots he was with had any idea where they were headed. “We got inside and flew for a little while,” Collins recalls, “until we landed in another desert airfield, somewhere remote.” The men were unloaded from the aircraft and put into a van, also with the windows blacked out. They were driven for miles, Collins thought going in circles, until the doors of the van opened into what appeared to be thick, rough, high-desert terrain. “We were told that we were in Chinese enemy territory. To escape and survive the best that you can. There were electronic alarms, trip wires, and explosive charges on the ground.”

Collins ran and took cover under a bush. In the darkness, he lay on his belly and gathered his thoughts. He had been through a series of survival trials during Oxcart training already. Once, he and another pilot were taken to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona for a mountainsurvival trial. “On that exercise we had minimal food, sleeping bags, and a very small tent. We walked and camped in the mountains for five days. The first three days were comfortable; the third night a weather front moved in with cold rain,” making things a little more challenging. A second exercise took place in Kings Canyon, in the Sierra Mountains. During that trip, Collins and another pilot had to live in snow for three days. They dug a snow cave and made beds of pine boughs. A third trip, to Florida, simulated jungle survival. “I was taken out to a swamp, given a knife, and told to survive on my own for four days.” What Collins remembers vividly was the food. “I caught some turtles to eat, but found them difficult to open, so my staple became the heart of palm. I’d cut the new palm buds out from the center. It was thin fare, but sustainable,” Collins says. But the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different. Unlike the other sessions, this one would involve psychological warfare by the mock enemy Chinese.

Collins crawled along the desert floor through the darkness, feeling for the trip wires and considering his next move. He pulled his small compass from his survival pack so he could chart a path. “I crawled slowly through the brambles, bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed, driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to bottom — literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”

For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick wooded door with a hole for viewing. This opening had a metal window that would clank open and shut. A single bright light was on and when I was about to doze off, the light would flash off, which would immediately snap me out of sleep.” For food, he was given watery soup, two thin pepper pods, and two bits of mysterious meat. “I had no water to drink and I was always watched. I didn’t know day from night so there was no sense of time. The temperature varied from hot to very cold. The voice through the viewing window shouted demands.”

Soon Collins began to hallucinate. Now it was interrogation time. Naked, he was led to a small room by two armed guards. He stood in front of his Chinese interrogators, who sat behind a small desk. They grilled him about his name, rank, and why he was spying on China. The torturous routine continued for what Collins guessed was several more days. Then one day, instead of being taken to his interrogators, he was told that he was free to go.

But halfway across the world, on November 1, 1963, Ken Collins’s experience was being mirrored for real. A CIA pilot named Yeh Changti had been flying a U-2 spy mission over a nuclear facility in China when he was shot down, captured by the Chinese Communist government, and tortured. Yeh Changti was a member of the ThirtyFifth Black Cat U-2 Squadron, a group of Taiwanese Chinese Nationalist pilots (as opposed to the Communist Chinese, who inhabited the mainland) who worked covert espionage missions for the CIA. In the 1960s, the Black Cats flew what would prove to be the deadliest missions in the U-2’s fifty-five-year history, all of which were flown out of a secret base called Taoyuan on the island of Taiwan. When the CIA declassified most of the U-2 program, in 1998, “no information was released about Yeh Changti or the Black Cats,” says former Black Cat pilot Hsichun Hua. The program, in entirety, remains classified as of 2011.

Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, the man who would later become the commander of Area 51, remembers Yeh Changti before he got shot down. “His code name was Terry Lee and he and I played tennis on the base at Taoyuan all the time. He was a great guy and an amazing acrobat, which helped him on the court. Sometimes we drank scotch while we played. Both the sport and the scotch helped morale.” Slater says that the reason morale was low was that “the U-2 had become so vulnerable to the SA-2 missiles that nobody wanted to fly.” One Black Cat pilot had already been shot down. But that didn’t stop the dangerous missions from going forward for the CIA.

Unlike what had happened with the Gary Powers shoot-down, the American press remained in the dark about these missions. For the CIA, getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities was a top national security priority. On the day Yeh Changti was shot down, he was returning home from a nine-hour mission over the mainland when a surface-to-air missile guidance system locked on to his U-2. Colonel Slater was on the radio with Yeh Changti when it happened. “I was talking to him when I heard him say, ‘System 12 on!’ We never heard another word.” The missile hit Yeh Changti’s aircraft and tore off the right wing. Yeh Changti ejected from the airplane, his body riddled in fifty-nine places with missile fragments. He landed safely with his parachute and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a military facility run by Mao Tse-tung.

This was no training exercise. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner for nineteen years until he was quietly released by his captors, in 1982. He has been living outside Houston, Texas, ever since. The CIA did not know that Yeh Changti had survived his bailout and apparently did not make any kind of effort to locate him. A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever given a medal by the CIA. The shoot-down of the Black Cat U-2 pilots, however, had a major impact on what the CIA and the Air Force would do next at Area 51. Suddenly, the development of drones had become a national security priority, drones being pilotless aircraft that could be flown by remote control.

Drones could accomplish what the U-2 could in terms of bringing home photographic intelligence, but a drone could do it without getting pilots captured or killed. Ideally, drones could perform missions that fell into three distinct categories: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Dull meant long flights during which pilots faced fatigue flying to remote areas of the globe. Dirty included situations where nuclear weapons or biological weapons might be involved. Dangerous meant missions over denied territories such as the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China, where shoot-downs were a political risk. Lockheed secured a contract to develop such an unmanned vehicle in late 1962. After Yeh Changti’s shoot-down, the program got a big boost. Flight-testing of the drone code-named Tagboard would take place at Area 51 and, ironically, getting the Lockheed drone to fly properly was among the first duties assigned to Colonel Slater after he left Taoyuan and was given a new assignment at Area 51.

“Lockheed’s D-21 wasn’t just any old drone, it was the world’s first Mach 3 stealth drone,” says Lockheed physicist Ed Lovick, who worked on the program. “The idea of this drone was a radical one because it would fly at least as fast, if not faster, than the A-12. It had a ram jet engine, which meant it was powered by forced air. The drone could only be launched off an aircraft that was already moving faster than the speed of sound.” The A-12 mother ship was designated M-21, M as in mother, and was modified to include a second seat for the drone launch operator, a flight engineer. The D-21 was the name for the drone, the D standing for daughter. But launching one aircraft from the back of another aircraft at speeds of more than 2,300 mph had its own set of challenges, beginning with how not to have the two aircraft crash into each other during launch. The recovery process of the drone also needed to be fine-tuned. Lovick explains, “The drone, designed to overfly China, would travel on its own flight path taking reconnaissance photographs and then head back out to sea.” The idea was to have the drone drop its photo package, which included the camera, the film, and the radio sensors, by parachute so it could be retrieved by a second aircraft nearby. Once the pallet was secure, the drone would crash into the sea and sink to the ocean floor.

Practicing this process at Area 51 translated into a lot of lost drones. Colonel Slater directed the test missions, which took place in what was called the special operating area, or Yuletide, just north of Groom Lake airspace. Colonel Slater and Frank Murray would follow the M-21/D-21 in chase planes and oversee the subsonic launches of the drone. “They’d launch, and then disappear,” Colonel Slater recalls. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp was sent to find them, along with a crew of search-and-rescue parajumpers, called PJs. “First, we’d locate the lost drones. Then I’d lower my parajumpers down on ropes. They’d hook the lost pods to a cargo hook and we’d pull the drones off the mountain that way,” Trapp explains. “Sometimes it got tricky, especially if the drone crash-landed on the top of a mountain ridge. We had some tense times with PJs nearly falling off cliffs.” When Colonel Slater felt the Oxcart and its drone were ready for a Mach 3 test, it was time to add ocean-survival training to the mix. For public safety reasons, the plan was to launch the triplesonic drone off the coast of California in March of 1966 for the first test, and to prepare his pilots, Colonel Slater had them swim laps each day in the Area 51 pool, first in bathing suits and then with their pressure suits on. “We’d hoist the guys up over the water in a pulley and then drop them in the pool. As soon as they hit the water the first time, the pressure suit inflated, so we had to have that fixed,” Slater recalls. When it came time to practice an actual landing in a large body of water, the Agency’s highest-ranking officer on base, Werner Weiss, got the Coast Guard to seal off a large section of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir of water in the United States, located just east of Las Vegas.

Slater remembers the pilot training well. “We were out there in this little Boston Whaler and the plan was to get the project pilots hoisted up into a parasail and then let them drop down in the water in their full pressure suits. First [Agency pilot Mele] Vojvodich went. His test went fine. By the time we got [Agency pilot Jack] Layton up, the wind had picked up. When Layton went down in the water, the Whaler started dragging him, and the water in his parachute started pulling him underneath. I called it off. ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘We’re gonna lose somebody out here!’”

They were prescient words. On the night of July 30, 1966, the 1129th Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake prepared to make the first official nighttime drone launch off the coast of California. From the tarmac at Area 51, Lockheed’s chief flight test pilot, Bill Park, was about to close the canopy on the M-21 Oxcart when Colonel Slater approached him with some final words. “I said, ‘Bill, it’s a dangerous mission,’” Slater remembers. “There were only a few feet between the drone and the tail of the A-12. Park knew that. We all did. In back was the flight engineer, Ray Torick; he knew that too. The canopy closed and I got into another Mach 3 aircraft we had flying alongside during the test.” Both aircraft flew west until they were a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of California. There, the M-21, piloted by Bill Park, prepared for the D-21 launch. A camera in Slater’s airplane would capture the launch on 16-millimeter film. Down below, on the dark ocean surface, a rescue boat waited. Park hit Ignite, and the drone launched up and off the M-21. But during separation, the drone pitched down instead of up and instantly split the mother aircraft in half. Miraculously, the drone hit neither Park nor Torick, who were both trapped inside.

The crippled aircraft began to tumble through the sky, falling for nearly ten thousand feet. Somehow, both men managed to eject. Alive and now outside the crashing, burning airplane, both men were safely tethered to their parachutes. Remarkably, neither of the men was hit by the burning debris falling through the air. Both men made successful water landings. But, as Slater recalls, an unforeseen tragedy occurred. “Our rescue boat located Bill Park, who was fine. But by the time the boat got to Ray Torick, he was tied up in his lanyard and had drowned.”

Kelly Johnson was devastated. “He impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the Agency,” Johnson’s deputy Ben Rich recalled in his 1994 memoir about the Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich asked Johnson why. “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare,” Johnson said. But the Air Force did not let the Mach 3 drone program go away so quickly. They created a new program to launch the drone from underneath a B-52 bomber, which was part of Strategic Air Command. President Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense, Cyrus Vance, told Kelly Johnson, “We need this program to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”

Three years later, in 1969, the D-21 drone finally made its first reconnaissance mission, over China, launched off a B-52. The drone flew into China and over the Lop Nur nuclear facility but had then somehow strayed off course into Soviet Siberia, run out of fuel, and crashed. The suggestion was that the drone’s guidance system had failed on the way home, and it was never seen or heard from again. At least, not for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, a CIA officer showed up in Ben Rich’s office at Skunk Works with a mysterious present for him. “Ben, do you recognize this?” the man asked Rich as he handed him a hunk of titanium. “Sure I do,” Rich said. What Ben Rich was holding in his hand was a piece of composite material loaded with the radar-absorbing coating that Lovick and his team had first developed for Lockheed four decades before. Asked where he got it, the CIA officer explained that it had been a gift to the CIA from a KGB agent in Moscow. The agent had gotten it from a shepherd in Siberia, who’d found it in the Siberian tundra while herding his sheep. According to Rich, “The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.”

The use of drones in warfare has its origins in World War II. Joseph Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s older brother, died in a secret U.S. Navy drone operation against the Germans. The covert mission, dubbed Operation Aphrodite, targeted a highly fortified Nazi missile site inside Germany. The plan was for the older Kennedy to pilot a modified B-24 bomber from England and over the English Channel while his crew armed 22,000 pounds of explosives piled high in the cargo hold. Once the explosives were wired, the crew and pilot needed to quickly bail out. Flying not far away, a mother ship would begin remotely controlling the unmanned aircraft as soon as the crew bailed out. Inside the bomber’s nose cone were two cameras that would help guide the drone into its Nazi target.

The explosive being used was called Torpex, a relatively new and extremely volatile chemical compound. Just moments before Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his crew bailed out, the Torpex caught fire, and the aircraft exploded midair, killing everyone on board. The Navy ended its drone program, but the idea of a pilotless aircraft caught the eye of general of the Army Henry “Hap” Arnold. On Victory over Japan Day, General Arnold made a bold assertion. “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he said. He was off by four wars, but otherwise he was right.

The idea behind using remotely piloted vehicles in warfare is a simple one — keep the human out of harm’s way — but the drone’s first application was for pleasure. Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893, years before any of his fellow scientists were even considering such a thing. At the Electrical Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898, Tesla gave a demonstration in which he directed a four-foot-long steel boat using radio remote control. Audiences were flabbergasted. Tesla’s pilotless boat seemed to many to be more a magic act than the scientific breakthrough it was. Ever a visionary, Tesla also foresaw a military application for his invention. “I called an official in Washington with a view of offering him the information to the government and he burst out laughing upon telling him what I had accomplished,” Tesla wrote. This made unfortunate sense — the military was still using horses for transport at the time. Tesla’s friend writer Mark Twain also envisioned a military future in remote control and offered to act as Tesla’s agent in peddling the “destructive terror which you have been inventing.” Twain suggested the Germans might be good clients, considering that, at the time, they were the most scientifically advanced country in the world. In the end, no government bought Tesla’s invention or paid for his patents. The great inventor died penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, and by then, the Germans had developed remote control on their own and were wreaking havoc on ground forces across Europe. The Germans’ first war robot was a remote-controlled minitank called Goliath, and it was about the size of a bobsled. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives, which the Nazis drove into enemy bunkers and tanks using remote control. Eight thousand Goliaths were built and used in battle by the Germans, mostly on the Eastern Front, where Russian soldiers outnumbered German soldiers nearly three to one. With no soldiers to spare, the Germans needed to keep the ones they had out of harm’s way.

In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There, drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection bags and boxlike filterpaper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions was difficult.

Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away. Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.

During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone, in April of 1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen. During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had “suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not drones. Whether or not pilots were exposed to lethal amounts of radiation during the Zebra bomb or hundreds of other atomic tests has never been accurately determined. The majority of the records regarding how much radiation pilots were exposed to in these early years and who died of radiation-related diseases have allegedly been destroyed or lost. But when the Air Force pilot accidentally flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud, the incident “commenced a chain of events that resulted in manned samplers.”

“Manned samplers were simply more efficient,” wrote officer Colonel Paul H. Fackler in a 1963 classified historical review of atomic cloud sampling made for the Air Force systems command, declassified in 1986. As the official radiation safety officer assigned to Operation Sandstone, Fackler held sway. Fackler’s colleague Colonel Cody also argued in favor of man over drone. Cody said the drone samples were obtained haphazardly by “potluck.” A human pilot would be able to maneuver around a cloud during penetration so that the “most likely parts of the cloud could be sampled.” It was a case of dangerous semantics; most likely was a euphemism for “most radioactive.” For future tests, Air Force officials decided to pursue both manned and unmanned atomic-sampling wings.

Both kinds of aircraft would be needed for an ultrasecret test that was pending in the Pacific in 1951. Operation Greenhouse would involve a new kind of nuclear weapon that was being hailed as the “Super bomb.” It was a thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, the core of which would explode with the same energy found at the center of the sun. Los Alamos scientists explained to weapons planners that the destructive power of this new kind of science, called nuclear fusion, was entirely unknown. Fusion involves exploding a nuclear bomb inside a nuclear bomb, and privately the scientists expressed fear that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire during this process. Scientists became deeply divided over the issue and whether or not to go forward. The push to create the Super was spearheaded by the indomitable Dr. Edward Teller and cosigned by weapons planners with the Department of Defense. The opposition to the Super was spearheaded by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and now Teller’s rival. Oppenheimer, who felt that developing a weapon capable of ending civilization was immoral, would lose his security clearance over his opposition to the Super bomb. According to Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who wired many of Dr. Teller’s Super bombs in the Marshall Islands, what happened to Oppenheimer sent a strong message to everyone involved: “If you want to keep your job, don’t oppose decisions” on moral grounds. In the end, the weapons planners won, and the world’s first thermonuclear bomb moved forward as planned.

Drones were needed to take blast and gust measurements inside the thermonuclear clouds, and to take samples of radioactive debris inside. During the Greenhouse test series, which did not wind up setting the world on fire, the first drone in went out of control and crashed into the sea before it ever reached the stem of the mushroom cloud. Two other drone missions were aborted after not responding to controls, and a fourth sustained such heavy damage in the shock wave, it lost control and crash-landed on a deserted island called Bogallua, where it caught fire and exploded. When the test series was over, the Air Force ultimately concluded that the unmanned samplers were unreliable. “Following Operation Greenhouse, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission looked more favorably upon manned samplers,” wrote a Defense Nuclear Agency historian in 1963. “Greenhouse became the last atomic test series during which drone aircraft were used for this purpose.” So when it came time to detonate the world’s first full-scale thermonuclear device — an unimaginably monstrous 10.4 megaton bomb code-named Mike — in the next test series, called Operation Ivy in the fall of 1952, it was decided that six human pilots, all volunteers, would fly straight into the center of the radioactive stem and mushroom cloud. Another group of pilots was assigned to fly along the outer edges of the predicted fallout zones. That group included Hervey Stockman, who, four years later, would become the first CIA pilot to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.

In anticipation of the Mike bomb’s manned sampling mission, the pilots practiced at the airfield at Indian Springs, thirty miles due south of Area 51. These pilots, including Stockman, then flew sampling missions through the kiloton-size atomic bombs being exploded at the Nevada Test Site as part of a spring 1952 test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “Up to this time,” Stockman explains, “the scientists had put monkeys in the cockpits of remotely controlled drone aircraft [at the test site]. They would fly these things through the [atomic] clouds. Then they began to be interested in the effects of radiation on humanoids. They realized that with care and cunning they could put people in there.”

The Air Force worked hard to change the pilots’ perception of themselves as guinea pigs, at least for the historical record. According to a history of the atomic cloud sampling program, declassified in 1985, by the time Stockman and his fellow pilots left Indian Springs for the Marshall Islands to fly missions through megaton-size thermonuclear bomb clouds, the men accepted that they “were doing something useful…not serving as guinea pigs as they seriously believed when first called upon to do the sampling.”

Stockman offers another perspective. “In those days, I didn’t think much about the moral questions. I was young. The visual picture when these things go off is absolutely stunning. I was very much in awe of it,” Stockman recalls. “The [atomic bombs] that were going on in the proving grounds in Nevada were minute in comparison to these [thermonuclear bomb] monsters out there in the Pacific. Those were big brutes. When they went off they would punch right through the Earth’s atmosphere and head out into space.”

After finally arriving in the Pacific, pilots flew “familiarization flights and rehearsals” in the days leading up to the Mike bomb. But nothing could prepare an airman for the actual test. Stockman’s colleague Air Force pilot Jimmy P. Robinson was one of the six pilots who “volunteered” to fly through the Ivy Mike mushroom cloud. Because the physical bomb was the size of a large airplane hangar, it couldn’t be called a weapon per se. The bomb was so large that it was built from the ground up, on an island on the north side of the atoll called Elugelab. Given the extraordinary magnitude of the thermonuclear bomb, it is utterly remarkable to consider that shortly after Robinson flew his F-84G straight through its mushroom stem, he was able to radio back clear thoughts to his commanding officer, who was located twenty-five miles to the south, on Eniwetok. “The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace,” the record states Robinson said. He then described how his radio instrument meters were spinning around in circles, “like the sweep second hand on a watch.” After going inside the cloud a second time, Robinson reported that his “airplane stalled out and gone [sic] into a spin.” His autopilot disengaged and his radio cut out, but the courageous pilot flew on as instructed. He flew around in circles and finally he flew back into and out of the mushroom stem and the lower part of its cloud — for nearly four more hours. Only when it was time for Robinson to refuel did he realize that the electromagnetic pulse from the thermonuclear bomb had ruined his control beacon. This meant that it was impossible for him to locate the fuel tanker.

Robinson radioed the control tower on Eniwetok for help. He was told to head back to the island immediately. “Approximately ninety-six miles north of the island, [Robinson] reported that he’d picked up a signal on Eniwetok,” according to the official record, declassified in 1986 but with Robinson’s name redacted. At that point, he was down to six hundred pounds of fuel. Bad weather kicked in; “rain squalls obstructed his views.” Robinson’s fuel gauge registered empty and then his engine flamed out. “When he was at 10,000 feet, Eniwetok tower thought he would make the runway, he had the island in sight,” wrote an Air Force investigator assigned to the case. But he couldn’t glide in because his aircraft was lined with lead to shield him from radiation. At five thousand feet and falling fast, Robinson reported he wasn’t going to make it and that he would have to bail out. Now Robinson faced the ultimate challenge. Atomic-sampling pilots wore lead-lined vests. How to land safely and get out fast? Fewer than three and a half miles from the tarmac at Eniwetok, at an altitude of between five hundred and eight hundred feet, Robinson’s aircraft flipped over and crashed into the sea. “Approximately one minute later [a] helicopter was over the spot,” the Air Force investigator wrote. But it was too late. All the helicopter pilot could find was “an oil slick, one glove, and several maps.” Robinson’s body and his airplane sank to the bottom of the sea like a stone. His body was never recovered, and his family would learn of his fate only in 2008, after repeated Freedom of Information Act requests were finally granted by the Air Force.

Back on Elugelab Island, the dust was settling after the airplanehangar-size Mike bomb had exploded with an unfathomable yield of 10.4 megatons — nearly twice that of its predicted size. Elugelab was not an island anymore. The thermonuclear bomb had vaporized the entire landmass, sending eighty million tons of pulverized coral into the upper atmosphere to float around and rain down. One man observing the bomb with high-density goggles was EG&G weapons test engineer Al O’Donnell. He’d wired, armed, and fired the Ivy bomb from the control room on the USS Estes, which was parked forty miles out at sea. O’Donnell says that watching the Mike bomb explode was a terrifying experience. “It was one of the ones that was too big,” says the man who colleagues called the Triggerman for having wired 186 nuclear bombs. The nuclear fireball of the Ivy Mike bomb was three miles wide. In contrast, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fireball that was a tenth of a mile wide. When the manned airplanes flew over ground zero after the Ivy Mike bomb went off, they were horrified to see the island was gone. Satellite photographs in 2011 show a black crater filled with lagoon water where the island of Elugelab once existed.