Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
PAMELA GRINER LEAVYThe current and retired Honeywell engineers reminisce about their top secret work while debunking alien myths.
CLEARWATER - During the 1960s, the Nevada desert was rampant with little green men and unidentified flying objects that the U.S. government was trying to keep secret.
Or so go the conspiracy theories regarding Area 51, 90 miles north of Las Vegas, where Cold War cloak-and-dagger military maneuvers were conducted.
But the real truth, as they say, is out there. And last weekend, some of it was revealed at the Sheraton Sand Key, where a group of retired and current Honeywell engineers reunited for the first time in 40 years to tell stories about their work on Project Oxcart.
The event, billed as a "spook reunion," brought together the "Honeywell Spooks," a select cadre of Honeywell engineers. Their work was, until recently, classified as top secret. The men talked about how, in the late 1950s and late 1960s, they took part in the then hush-hush building of spy planes at Area 51, also known as Groom Lake, a secret military facility in the Nevada desert. Honeywell was contracted by the CIA to provide navigation systems for A-12 Blackbird spy planes in development by Lockheed Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Aircraft.
To science fiction devotees, Area 51 is known as the location where downed UFOs and alien life forms were kept secret by the government.
Reunion attendees laughed at the rumors that government officials knew aliens were living at Area 51, and the tales of spaceship sightings that permeate science fiction programs and the Internet.
The Honeywell engineers were mistaken for Martians, joked Jim Janowski of Largo, one of the reunion's organizers.
"The bird was built to fly at the edge of space and at maximum speed all the time," Janowski said of the Blackbird spy plane. "At night when it flew by an airliner it looked just like a rocket."
Airline pilots who reported sightings were interrogated by the CIA and sworn to silence, he said.
Area 51 was established in 1957 and the first flight launched in 1962. The Blackbird was developed to replace the U-2 plane in which pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by the Soviets in 1962. The A-12 Blackbird reconnaissance plane saw action in the Vietnam War.
Ultimately 13 aircraft were produced before Project Oxcart ended in 1968, but the story was withheld from the public until 1982. The Freedom of Information Act led to the disclosure of information about the project in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Until the documents on the Blackbird were declassified, the engineers couldn't tell family or friends about the projects, and listened in silence - and amusement - to stories of aliens in the desert. At the time, engineers on the project were gone all week and came home only on the weekends. They answered no questions about their work.
The talk of a reunion started after several of the men started a Web site devoted to their work. Colleagues started writing to it.
At the reunion, the engineers golfed, toasted each other and shared memories over dinner. During their work on Project Oxcart and for many years following, they maintained a strict code of silence, even with family members and co-workers back in Clearwater.
The men recalled living together in the all-male Area 51 compound, working, partying, dining and sharing sleeping facilities.
Tom Tadano traveled from San Jose, Calif., for the reunion. He worked at Honeywell in Clearwater from 1963 to 1977 and recalls his Area 51 days fondly.
"It was the experience of a lifetime as we had to live, eat and work together," Tadano said. "It's been almost 25 years since I have seen some of these people. It feels like a high school reunion, seeing friends I haven't seen for years."
Not all the Project Oxcart engineers have retired.
Bob Capuro stills works at Honeywell and recalls the cloak of secrecy at the Clearwater plant surrounding Project Oxcart. "We were pretty much sealed off from everyone else in the operation and they referred to our operation by numbers," Capuro said. "We were never relieved of our obligation to keep secret about Area 51 in the Nevada desert. It wasn't until the information was declassified that we could speak freely."
Joe Brigham of Palm Harbor, a Honeywell engineer for more than 40 years who is now retired, described the rumors of space people buried in caves.
"I was out there from 1963 to 1968 and the rumors are kind of funny," Brigham said. "If you ever lived there it just wasn't feasible ... it just doesn't work that way. Area 51 was primarily built for Project Oxcart."