Witness Description
Air Force Equipment/Procedure
“Crash Site”
49. “they had the road barricaded off”214
Anderson
Procedure used for aircraft operations.
Site 2
50. “they had the road sealed off”215
Ragsdale
Corroboration of description #49. See above.
Site 1
51. “airplanes sitting there they had landed on the highway”216
Anderson
Established procedure to refuel an aircraft, launch a balloon from an isolated location or recover a small payload near a rural road.
Site 2
52. “there was airplanes in the sky” [over the crash site].217
Anderson
Reference to balloon “chase” aircraft used to direct ground recovery crews to balloon impact site.
Site 2
53. “stretching out cables of some kind...they were stretching stuff out on the ground, dragging stuff out of trucks”218
Anderson
Reference to balloon inflation procedure that required the balloon and ground cloth to be removed from a vehicle and laid on the ground (fig. 79).
Site 2
74