[meteorite-list] O.T. - Hunting the Harper - Part #1

From: Robert Verish <bolidechaser_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Feb 24 16:32:11 2005
Message-ID: <20050224213208.73980.qmail_at_web51709.mail.yahoo.com>

Well, it's still raining in the desert. And the
NomComm is still in the middle of a vote, so there
won't be any "approved names" that we can write about
for a while. Guess this is a good time to "spin a
yarn"...

Knowing how popular "meteorite hunting stories" are,
I'd like to tell one now, but since the names aren't
approved, I may as well borrow a story from some one
else. The following story wasn't written by me, but
it's a story of hunting on Harper Dry Lake, none the
less. It was written by a fellow "debris-locator" who
preceded my search efforts out at Harper.

If you just replace the parts of the story where they
find "pieces of aircraft debris" with "thumb-sized
pieces of chondrites", it's as good as any "meteorite
story" that I could write! ;-) --Bob V.

------------------------
Hunting The ZEL: Part #1
A Tale of Desert Adventure, Crashed Airplanes, and a
Search That Would Never End
 
by Curtis Peebles
© Copyright 1999


The adventure started simply enough. It began with the
purchase of a video called Runways Of Fire on the Zero
Length Launcher (ZEL) program. The ZEL flight test
program involving attaching a rocket booster to an
F-100D fighter bomber and launching it off the back of
a flatbed truck. This would eliminate the need for
runways, which could be destroyed by a Soviet attack.
The F-100s could be dispersed to any open area to
await the launch order

Despite the risk of launching a jet fighter off the
back of a truck, there was only one accident in the
course of the F-100 test program. On the second
launch, made on April 11, 1958, the rocket booster
failed to separate after burnout. This made it
impossible to land the aircraft, as the rocket
extended down below the landing gear. Al Blackburn,
the North American Aviation test pilot for the
project, attempted to shake the booster loose, but,
with fuel running low, he was forced to bail out

The video contained extensive footage of these events.
More important, there were three views of the impact
site. The first showed an overhead shot which showed
the aircraft wreckage and the surrounding area, a
second was of firemen spraying the burning debris with
foam, and finally, there was a shot of the engineers
examining the wreckage, including the crusted rocket
booster

I saw this video in late 1996. The 50th anniversary of
what has become known as the Roswell Incident was a
few months off. It occurred to me that the ZEL F-100
crash provided a test case for Roswell. The ZEL crash
site was in a remote area, and it was unlikely that
the remaining debris had been disturbed in the nearly
forty years since the recovery crew left the site.
Also, the circumstances of the ZEL F-100 crash itself
resembled the claims made in different eyewitness
accounts of the Roswell recovery. These individuals
describe a vehicle which is battered but still largely
intact. The F-100's fuselage was burned out by the
post-impact fire, but the wings and tail surfaces were
intact. The debris would be concentrated in an area
about the size of the vehicle itself. This is in
contrast to many aircraft crashes, where the
high-speed impact scatters the debris several hundred
feet from the point of impact.

For a number of years I have been friends with Peter
Merlin, a member of the X-Hunters Aerospace Archeology
Team. They locate the crash sites of various aircraft.
Merlin has participated in the discovery of the crash
sites of the N-9M, X-1A, X-2, X-15, and even a MK-17
H-bomb. He also made a search of the Roswell debris
field, and appeared in a television UFO special at the
YB-49 crash site. He was interested in trying to find
the ZEL F-100. He talked with Al Blackburn, and
tracked down press accounts. These indicated that the
F-100 had crashed about a mile from the north edge of
Harper Dry Lake, located east of Edwards AFB

The press accounts gave only the general location.
They did not say what part of the north edge of the
lakebed the plane was a mile from. This is where the
photos came in. By lining up the features in the
photos, such as background hills, it was possible to
narrow down the specific area. Features in the
vicinity of the crash, both natural and man-made, can
further limit the search area. It is, for example,
possible to identify a bush in a photo taken four
decades ago with one growing today. Then it is a
matter of walking across the desert, looking for the
photos to line up, and the tell-tale glint of metal
fragments. Merlin and Tony Moore made two preliminary
searches of the area, looking well north of the
lakebed, but were unsuccessful. Despite this, finding
the ZEL F-100 did not seem to pose a major problem.
Merlin had found crash sites with less information.
None of us knew the adventure which awaited us in the
desert...

(to be continued in Part 2)
Received on Thu 24 Feb 2005 04:32:08 PM PST