An interesting article about Area 51 veterans finally emerging in public includes this wonderful image:
Barnes believes the Air Force and the “Agency” didn’t mind the stories about alien spacecraft. They helped cover up the secret planes that were being tested.
On one occasion, he remembers, when the first jets were being tested at what Muroc Army Air Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base, a test pilot put on a gorilla mask and flew upside down beside a private pilot.
“Well, when this guy went back, telling reporters, ‘I saw a plane that didn’t have a propeller and being flown by a monkey,’ well, they laughed at this guy — and it got where the guys would see [test pilots] and they didn’t dare report it because everybody’d laugh at them,” says Barnes.
Read the full piece at the Seattle Times.
A fascinating full-length interview with A51 vet TD Barnes, conducted as part of the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, can also be found here , in which he talks about working on the CIA/NSA Palladium project, which I identify in Mirage Men as the probable source for a number of UFO incidents.