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On November 17, 1955, USAF Military Air Transport Service aircraft 9068 crashed on Mount Charleston, Nevada, killing all aboard. Lost in the crash was an air force crew, Lockheed and Hycon engineers, CIA personnel and scientists bound for Watertown, now known as Area 51 for test flying the CIA’s highly classified U-2 reconnaissance plane.

For their sacrifice of life that in the interest of national security was shrouded in secrecy for decades to come, the USAF crew members George M. Pappas, Jr., Paul E. Winham, Clayton D. Farris, Guy R. Fasolas, John H. Gaines, Hycon personnel Harold Silent, Fred Hanks, Lockheed personnel Rodney Kreimendahl, Richard Hruda, and CIA personnel James Bray, Terence O’Donnell, James William “Billy” Brown, Edwin Urolatis, and William Marr earned enshrinement into the 2019 Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame.

NVAHOF Executive Director and author of “The Angels” joined family members and the CIA attendees at the Silent Heroes of the Cold War Memorial on November 17, 2019, for the 64th anniversary of the crash.

They all, President Truman, the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps feared the Central Intelligence Agency, yet the president tasked it with doing something that the Air Force would not do. That was to develop a manned overhead reconnaissance program to spy on Russia. Despite many technological and bureaucratic hurdles, the CIA, in eight months from contract to flying, and under budget, produces the revolutionary U-2 spy plane. A few months later, the CIA is overflying the Communist Soviet Union to disprove the feared bomber and missile gap between the two superpowers. The struggle between the CIA and the US Air Force to control the U-2 Angels and the persistent tension between the CIA and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower extends to the A-12 Archangels intended to replace the U-2. The CIA loses many lives of pilots flying out of the agency’s remote site in Nevada known today as Area 51.

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