Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Wild Missile Crashes Into Base Trailers Unarmed Cruise From A B-52 Destroys Japanese Telescopes

Salt Lake Tribune

An Air Force cruise missile flew out of control and crashed during a test Wednesday, wrecking two unoccupied trailers containing computers that control Japanese cosmic-ray telescopes at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground.

“Both of them (trailers) were essentially destroyed or received extensive damage as a result of the impact,” said Lt. James Wilson, spokesman for he 388th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, which operates the Utah Test and Training Range at Dugway.

He said there were no injuries.

The 20-foot-long advanced cruise missile was launched from a B-52 bomber that had taken off from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., Wilson said. After failing to make a turn as planned over Dugway, the missile crash-landed at 2:46 p.m. in an area two miles from its intended target. Wilson said the missile’s payload was an unarmed dummy warhead.

Air Force officials weren’t immediately sure if the missile hit the two trailers or simply wrecked them by crashing nearby, Wilson said.

“We’ve already begun our investigation to figure out what went wrong with this test, and obviously we’ll use that to prevent a future mishap,” he said.

Hill spokesman Bill Orndorff said the trailers were “leased to the University of Tokyo, and the computers inside were their equipment.”

Pierre Sokolsky, a University of Utah physicist, said seven Japanese telescopes, which operate only at night, are located on the southwest edge of the Cedar Mountains, approximately 18 miles northwest of base facilities at English Village.

The missile “was activated and tumbled and lost control” but did not damage the telescopes near the trailers, said Richard Koehn, vice president for research at the U., which helps run the Japanese project.

“Does the Air Force have a means of compensating us for our losses?” Koehn wondered.

Cruise missiles can be fired from ships, ground launchers or planes. They are computer-controlled and follow land contours to avoid detection.

Sokolsky said U.S. physicists had been unable by Wednesday night to locate Japanese physicists who run the telescopes, so they “are at the moment unaware that this transpired.”

The accident “is certainly a setback” for the Japanese cosmic-ray project, said Craig Taylor, physics chairman at the U.

He said the computers are “the brains for running the telescopes, and they (Japanese scientists) will have to reconstitute the computers that were lost in order to get the system up and running again.”