1.1 It Came Out of The Sky
By windrose
- 142 reads
Kenwood, the Air Traffic Controller, picked his binoculars and zoomed in on the aircraft that came out of the sky, flying north over the mountains. A Convair C-131 transport plane flew to commence its approach. The pilot communicated with the tower, “Pegasus requesting permission to land!”
“What’s your purpose?” voiced Kenwood though he knew where it came from and where it was going. He would call it ‘Dreamworld’ rather than ‘Ranch’. He had come across Pegasus occasionally at KLUF.
“Drop and pick one passenger.”
“How long will it take?”
“Estimated time, four to six hours.”
“It will get dark,” responded Kenwood, “You are clear to land on Runway 21-Left.”
“Roger that, 21-Left.”
It aligned from the north to touchdown at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale. With recent upgrades, it was one of the most advanced fighter aircraft training bases and recruited pilots and combat crew to the Korean War and Vietnam.
The only passenger, Lieutenant Melville Bradley, climbed down the stairs suited in dress uniform in Blue Shade 84 with cap and he carried a briefcase. He glanced at the rows of Super Sabre F-100s parked on the tarmac. He knew from his line of work that those aircrafts made extensive use of titanium throughout key airframe.
A First-Class Airman escorted him to a waiting Buick with delta wings, black body and white soft top. He climbed the passenger seat after dropping his briefcase on the backseat. It took off immediately, out through the gate and turned to Northern Avenue heading west leaving behind a cloud of dust.
Lieutenant Melville Bradley was not in his youth as one might expect. He was in his mid-thirties, in good physics. Born in Fort Lauderdale and graduated from the University of Florida in Gainesville, majoring in Business Administration. His father, Melford Bradley, served in the US military and retired before the war. He ran a transport agency in Fort Lauderdale flying cargo in the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Melville Bradley grew up in an airfield surrounded by aircrafts. He had flown with his father to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. He knew aircraft parts and how to fly by the time he turned fourteen. His father wanted Melville to become an aeronautical engineer but he met a girl and ended up doing accounting. He married Cornie in the fall of 1947 at his age of seventeen. In 1950, he moved to Chicago to live with her parents and joined the law firm of Gardner Carton and Douglas as an auditor and they got a child. He spent five years in Chicago before his marriage split up. He wanted to return to Florida and enlisted in the USAF in 1955. Melville Bradley was posted to Williams Air Force Base in Maricopa County, Arizona, not to Fort Lauderdale.
In 1958, he was promoted to a First Lieutenant and recruited by the CIA. According to what Bradley was told, Director Allen Dulles demanded a selected team of pilots and crew to his spy plane programmes. Meanwhile, Bradley’s former boss and senior partner of the law firm in Chicago whom he met, James H Douglas, served as the United States Secretary of the Air Force.
He landed at the Office of Scientific Intelligence, under Deputy Director Edwin Land, the guy who founded the Polaroid Corporation. In 1959, he was relocated at Groom Lake as instructed by the Department for Plans, as a procurement officer to maintain track and record of material required to build the base. That for him started in September 1960. At that time, it was a naked land with few hangers and an airstrip on Groom Lake where the U-2 airplanes were experimented. Only a hundred workers were there. He was given an office bunk and a Cessna 310 and his task was to liaise with Lockheed and other parties to obtain rutile ore.
In September 1960, Homey Airport began its upgrade to hold an extensive test facility and work began on double-shifts. Bradley played an important role in his job of procurements. By August 1961, construction of the essential facilities was completed. Hangers were erected and former U-2 hangers converted to machine shops and maintenance. Main cantonment area included workshops and buildings for storage and administration, a mess and a control tower, a fire station and housing for long-term occupancy. Recreational facilities were introduced and a permanent fuel tank farm was constructed in early 1962. Security was enhanced for the arrival of OXCART and the Federal Aviation Administration expanded the restricted airspace in the vicinity of Groom Lake and this lakebed became the centre of a six hundred square mile restricted area that came known as ‘Area 51’.
He was in fact a friend of Captain Francis Gary Powers who flew several reconnaissance missions on the Lockheed U-2 flight. Then one day in 1960, he heard that flight was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile. That was after several misinterpreted reports passed by the CIA of a weather plane that strayed out of course and Gary Powers was killed. He was alive in a Russian prison. When he learnt that Powers’ estranged wife was sedated and committed to a psychiatric ward in Augusta, Georgia, by CIA operatives, he himself did something stupid in the following year. Powers received a cold reception on his return home after being swopped in a prisoner exchange on 10th February 1962 on Glienicke Bridge at the East and West Berlin border controlled by the Soviets. This year, in March, Director Allen Dulles praised Gary Powers saying that he performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he did it well.
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