WHEN CHUCK MAULTSBY stepped off the plane from Korea and back into the lives of his wife and child, he fought desperately in his darkest hours to swallow the horror, pain, and indignity he had suffered for two-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war at the hands of the Red Chinese.
His body healed, but his psyche remained scarred. Still, he had survived, and that was all that mattered now. Jeanne needed a husband, Chuckie needed a father, and his country needed a fighter pilot. He’d missed nearly 1,000 nights in his wife’s warm embrace, two of his son’s birthday parties, and countless hours bonding with his squadron mates at a job they all believed was the greatest in the world.
Shortly after his return home, Maultsby was assigned to the 3594th Squadron of the 3595 Flying Training Wing operating out of Nellis Air Force Base. Nellis was crawling with combat vets, many of whom had completed one hundred missions in Korea. At least six squadron mates had been prisoners of war like him.
Despite his efforts to focus not on the past but on his future as a pilot, his squadron mates often lured Maultsby into conversations about his time as a POW. His fellow airmen could hardly believe what he had endured in the prison cave in Anju. Many considered him a hero. He answered their questions plainly, without embellishment. Maultsby figured that his insight might be useful if they ever ended up captured behind enemy lines. One pilot did not ask questions: the squadron’s flight leader, who had recorded several enemy kills during his combat tours in Korea. Tired of all the attention paid to Maultsby, he pulled him aside and lashed out.
“You know, Maultsby, it doesn’t take any skill to become a POW,” the flight leader barked.1
But it was not a test of skill that drew pilots to Maultsby; it was a test of will. As a POW, he had mentally outwitted his captors and physically outlasted them. The flight leader did not understand that—at least not then. Eventually he would learn the value of Maultsby’s toughness during his own six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Chuck Maultsby had no time for such petty jealousies, though. He had nearly three lost years to make up. He focused on quiet mornings with his family and important events such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. As a young boy, he had always yearned for a Lionel train set for Christmas, but his father never granted that wish. Determined that his son would never want for anything, he bought the finest train set in the store window and spent hours setting it up around the tree to make Chuckie’s Christmas morning as magical as those he dreamed of as a child.
Chuck and Jeanne welcomed another son, Shawn, in late 1954, shortly before he was promoted to captain and flight commander of the 3525th Squadron. He then headed to squadron officers’ school in Montgomery, Alabama, with his growing family in tow. Soon after, he got to train on the F-100 Super Sabre while also competing with the Nellis Air Force Base gunnery team, the Lone Tigers, against the best squadrons from around the world.
Every two years, squadrons sent their top guns to Nellis to go head-to-head in what was dubbed “fighter pilot Olympics.” Maultsby’s team took the top prize—the William Tell Trophy—and its members got the opportunity to audition for the Thunderbirds, the air force’s elite demonstration squadron. Maultsby had been itching for an overseas assignment to Germany, but the chance to fly for the Thunderbirds was too good to pass up. On the morning of his tryout, he flew with Major Robby Robinson, leader of the squadron. It was a flight unlike any other he had experienced. Major Robinson took him through the paces of formation aerobatics, rolling left to right until they were upside down, pulling into a loop, and performing barrel rolls while pulling five gs. They landed after twenty minutes, and as he climbed out of the cockpit, Maultsby found himself soaked in sweat with his right arm dragging. Major Robinson said nothing about his performance in the tryout flight, and Chuck figured he had not made the team.
The next day, he was ordered to T-bird Ops, where Robinson and other members of the elite team met him with smiles and congratulatory slaps on the back. Maultsby was now one of them. He took position as the right wingman on the Thunderbirds’ diamond formation and traveled with the team, performing aerobatic stunts before large crowds around the world. When not flying, Maultsby spent his time visiting sick children in hospitals, making public appearances, and conducting media interviews. This former prisoner of war was now a goodwill ambassador for the US Air Force.
To keep sharp, the Thunderbirds had to practice at least once a day, and even though not on combat duty, all pilots were to report anything unusual in the skies. During one practice flight, Maultsby spotted what looked like a glider flying at an incredible altitude about 15,000 feet above his plane. The mysterious craft appeared to be headed toward the gunnery ranges at Nellis Air Force Base. Maultsby followed until it broke off in the opposite direction from Nellis. He had never seen an aircraft like it before. When he landed, Maultsby rushed over to Base Ops and reported the strange sighting.
U-2 training missions coincided with an increase in UFO sightings in the Nevada desert. During daylight flights, the plane’s silver airframe sometimes caught and reflected sunlight, rendering it briefly visible to people on the ground. Commercial airliners flew at around 15,000 feet, and military planes rarely climbed above 40,000 feet. Most people could not imagine that an aircraft could reach 60,000 feet or higher. Terrified citizens wrote letters to their town and state representatives, who forwarded them to a unit at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, tasked with investigating these unexplained phenomena. By comparing UFO sightings with U-2 flight logs, the investigators accounted for most of the reports. The program’s secrecy, however, prevented the air force from sharing this information with the public, and therefore the hysteria surrounding UFOs in the 1950s continued to grow.
Hours after Maultsby filed his report and returned home to Jeanne and the kids, he received a knock on the door from a man in civilian clothes. He identified himself as a CIA employee and showed Maultsby his badge.
“Captain Maultsby, you didn’t see anything today.”
Maultsby started to walk him through his report, describing the strange UFO he had seen during his practice run, but the man quickly cut him off. “Captain Maultsby, you didn’t see a thing today.” Then turning to leave, he repeated, “You understand, you didn’t see a thing!”2 Whatever he’d seen was clearly secret—and clearly man-made.
SOON AFTER, ANOTHER man approached Maultsby to ask if he would like to join a volunteer program that paid up to $30,000 a year. He found the offer enticing as he and Jeanne had been scraping by on a meager captain’s salary for years. When he asked what the mission entailed, the man simply told him he would be reassigned to a weather station in the middle of the desert. At that moment, Maultsby knew he would soon be manning the controls of that mysterious UFO.
After accepting the lucrative but secret assignment, he was sent to the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for rigorous physical and psychological tests that the Mercury 7 space program would later use to screen candidates.3
Maultsby underwent as many as thirty laboratory tests in which doctors gathered chemical and cardiographic data. His entire body was thoroughly mapped by X-ray and his eyes, ears, and throat checked for any abnormalities. Technicians determined the water ratio of his body and screened him for radiation. To test his endurance, stamina, and mental toughness, he blew up balloons until exhausted and spent hours running on a treadmill; he was exposed to heat and loud noises and subjected to written and oral tests to evaluate special aptitudes and intellectual functions. The CIA was looking for a special breed of airman, one who loved his country without reservation and would not reveal the agency’s secrets if he fell into enemy hands. Maultsby’s mettle had been tested every day for two-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Korea, and the most brutal methods of torture had not bent, let alone broken, him. This fact was not lost on men like Dick Bissell and Richard Leghorn. Maultsby passed both the physical and mental evaluations with relative ease and then headed to March Air Force Base in Riverside, California, to begin the next crucial phase of his training.
On arriving at base, Maultsby and the other candidates were not told what type of aircraft they would be flying; they learned only that training would take place somewhere in the desert. The pilots were then ushered onto a C-47 Globemaster without any knowledge of their destination. They flew east for about an hour before landing near a large, dry lake bed. Gazing out the small windows of the C-47, the pilots could see a paved runway, hangars, a host of trailers, and—most vital to their mission—six silver gliders with jet engines.
Maultsby and the other pilots were whisked off the large plane and escorted into a small mess hall for an introductory briefing and official welcome to Groom Lake.
“No writing home about where you are working and absolutely no photos will be taken here,” the U-2 commander told them.4
The pilots were ordered to forget everything they saw. Their mail would be inspected, and each day the garbage cans would be checked and scrubbed for any discarded material that could jeopardize the secrecy of the project. One security breach almost landed an airman in prison. During leave, the pilot mentioned the U-2 project to a couple of women, hoping to impress them. A fellow pilot immediately turned him in as a security risk. The braggart was threatened with jail time but reduced in rank and drummed out of the program instead. Airmen were not confined to the base, however. Though ordered to spend weekdays at Groom Lake, they were offered flights to civilization on weekends. Those men who chose to stay on base during their off time could entertain themselves with billiards and movies in the recreation building. Pilots who wanted to hike and explore the mountain ranges surrounding the base did so under the watchful eye of armed guards, who followed their movements through binoculars.