Overview

Observation Squadron 54 (VO54) was a classified US Navy aviation squadron operating in the late 1950s through earluy 1960s.  Its cover story was aircraft nuclear propulsion research.  Its actual mission was exploitation of recovered alien technology to reverse-engineer and flight-test advanced aircraft.

The squadron was based in Corpus Christi.  In late 1959, it sent a detachment to Pensacola to support flight testing over the Gulf of Mexico.

The squadron had two partial sets of spaceframes and power and propulsion systems and fragments of a third.  All were related technology but not the same model.  The fragments and one of the partials had obviously spent some time in the Pacific, probably off the West Coast.  The fragments had been down a long time; the partial, probably about a decade.

The two wrecks' power cores were dubbed the Finger and the Reaper.  They had inventory numbers that no one ever used.  The Finger was believed to be damaged; it was less stable.  It looked like a little jade spindle, three inches long, an inch thick.  It had a crack along its long axis that would fluctuate in length.  It would get longer under stress.  Then it would heal itself if left alone for a week or two.  The Reaper was the same material but it was a faceted globe about the size of a baseball.

Both power cores were sensitive to thoughts.  If someone concentrated on one, it would become weightless, immune to gravity.  Control systems were necessary for anything else.  The controller team came up with a way to plug them into a filtered EEG machine.  A human operator with good visualization skills and a way to enter REM sleep could generate a radius of antigravity effect, or could make them radiate, anything from gamma to high-frequency radio.  When they were radiating, they also generated was a continuous strong static at 575 megahertz - matching the WILDWOOD GROUSE signature.

All assignments to VO54 appear to have ended on 10 December 1963 - the day the Air Force canceled Dyna-Soar.

In February 1964, after the Navy deactivated the squadron, its records were shipped to NAS China Lake.



Flight Operations

Flight testing of aircraft powered by the alien artifacts began in May 1959.  There were at least four prototypes.  They used the cores to superheat air for propulsion - effectively, a jury-rigged scramjet.  The first two killed their crews on the first flights.  The third and fourth were relatively more successful.  The squadron used one pilot to activate the core's antigravity function, a second to superheat the exhaust stream, and a third to actually fly the aircraft.  Additional crew included a flight engineer or two and a navigator.  Speeds up to at least Mach 3.6 were observed in atmospheric flight.



Losses

Operators of the alien artifacts, and later of the prototype aircraft, underwent extensive psychological and medical screening.  Loss rates were anecdotally near 50% despite these precautions.  There were numerous psychological casualties in addition to laboratory and flight testing fatalities.

At least one significant laboratory accident involving The Finger occurred, with multiple deaths from radiation and/or kinetic effects.

In the decades following the squadron's deactivation, numerous veterans manifested severe psychological issues and/or a variety of terminal cancers.



Survivors

Darnell Hawkins was an interpreter assigned to the squadron's intelligence section and tasked with deciphering the language used in the control systems of the recovered alien ships.

Robert Paddon was posted to VO54 in late 1958.  He was a nuclear machinist's mate; his official assignment with the squadron was radiation safety NCO.  He was with the squadron until late 1961.