National Air Force Museum

[Bruzilla]

Bruzilla,

This sounds like when I get together with a bunch of my cousins! They are all AF and I am the lone Navy guy. As a matter of fact, one of my cousins' son is going to be stationed at Nellis AFB iin Las Vegas, starting in June. He will take over as CO of the AF Fighter Weapons School. (AF version of Navy's Top Gun) All of the military cousins are gathering there for the change of command. 1 active duty and 4 crusty old farts! 4 AF types and me! Maybe I'll con my nephew that was in the Marines and a brother-in-law that was Army to help me out!!

Jeff

I took six weeks of leave between leaving NAS Bermuda and going to the USS Saratoga, and spent it with my parents in Tampa. My Dad took me to a little aviation museum in Clearwater to check out what they had. It was all ex-wing wipers from McDill AFB, so pretty much everything was USAF this and USAF that, and we were going at it from the moment I walked into the Quonset hut headquarters.

They did have an old P-2 Neptune on display, which was in bad shape, to represent the Navy. My old squadron, VP-5, used to fly P-2s, so I called up the squadron and asked for them to send me some pics of our P-2s, and when they came in the guys at the museum helped me repaint the P-2 into VP-5 colors. Then they showed me their storage area, and they had a genuine Navy F-4B Phantom sitting back there in the weeds! I wanted to get it repainted in VF-84 Jolly Roger markings, but ran out of time before we could get it done. I ended up spending about 12 hours a day, six days a week, for close to five weeks working out there. Not the vacation I had planned.

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I used to live walking distance from there, and went multiple times each year.

I had my finger on that A bomb button when the fuselage was a walk-through exibit.

I also heard the "area 51/hanger 18" stories.

Remember, "Project Blue Book" was based at Wright-Pat.

WPAFB is home to MANY different types of aircraft and is also a test wing.

Last I recall, it was the 16th largest military installation in the world.

Lots of stuff, and lots of "odd" stuff flys around over the area.

Depending on who you believe, Wright-Patterson AFB is where the remains of the Roswell UFO crash supposedly went to. There was a book written a while back that detailed how the USAF moved the remains to Wright-Patterson and that contractors from Bell Labs did a lot of the analysis of them. That may sound odd, but at the time Bell Laboratories was like the Lockheed Skunk Works with the DoD, and especially the USAF. They did a lot of high-vis work like creating the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line system for the USAF, as well as a lot of black stuff that no one talks about.

When I heard the author of the book mention Bell Labs, I immediately called my Dad, who had worked for the Bell System for close to 50 years, and retired as a senior executive and had done a lot of work with Bell Labs over the years. I asked him about this story, and I never got a solid answer from him. He would sort of chuckle about it, and say who knows, but he never had reacted that way to any other question I ever asked about the Bell System (and being a human performance/training guy I used to ask a lot given their exceptional track record with management and quality issues). He passed away in 2007, and I didn't bring up the subject again given his first reaction, but I always thought there could be some truth to what that author wrote.