Steve Ririe hopes Deseret Morning News readers will help him locate the family of a Utah serviceman who died during a top-secret airplane flight in 1955.
After the Las Vegas insurance agent hiked up a mountain near that city more than 40 years after the crash and viewed the plane's wreckage, he began working to honor the 14 men who died there.
The accident happened during the height of the Cold War. The public and families of those who died in the accident were told varying cover stories about the flight, none of them true.
Today, Ririe's group — Silent Heroes of the Cold War National Memorial Committee — seems on the verge of having Congress designate the crash site atop Mount Charleston, near Las Vegas, a Cold War National Memorial. But one of their objectives seems more elusive: locating the relatives of the only Utahn aboard the plane.
Airman 2nd Class Guy Robert Fasolas, a Nephi resident, was one of five Air Force personnel on the transport. The other nine men were civilians working for the government. A United Press International story from the time listed them as Atomic Energy Commission employees.
The C-54 crashed near the top of Mount Charleston during a snowstorm on Nov. 17, 1955. In the next day's edition of the Deseret News, a UPI article said the plane was flying to the AEC's "nuclear weapons test site."
Seventeen members of a sheriff's posse, riding horses, reached the crash scene on Nov. 20, 1955. They carried the bodies out the next day.
Actually, Ririe discovered, after records were declassified decades later, the flight involved not atomic weapons but development of the U-2 spy plane at the federal government's Area 51, located near Groom Lake, Nev.
The transport had taken off from Burbank, Calif., the city where Lockheed Corp. was headquartered. Lockheed manufactured the U-2 and some of those aboard really worked for Lockheed and not the AEC. Others on the plane were in the CIA.
Even families of men who worked for Lockheed were given cover stories, Ririe said. One family of a Lockheed employee "was given no information but that there was a plane crash," while another was told the victim was working on the Constellation, a civilian aircraft.
"No real details were provided other than it was a business trip," he said.
Ririe said he first climbed to the wreckage at age 12 during a Boy Scout outing.
Years later, in 1998, while going through a stressful personal time, he went up Mount Charleston again, hoping to sort things out.
"I was probably the only one on the mountain," he said. "I sat at the crash site. It's at 11,500 feet." Wreckage remained strewn across the mountainside. He sensed that, although he was the only person there, he was not alone on the mountain. He compares the impression to a feeling he had while serving an LDS mission. While driving his truck one day, Ririe asked that something would open up in his quest. By coincidence, a friend of his told him about a plane crashing on the mountain, information he picked up in a book that happened to mention the date of the crash but had no other details.
Ririe had local Boy Scouts look for articles about the crash, searching through old newspaper files. A few more details emerged. One 1955 article said the plane had taken off from Burbank.
A man he knew who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, told Ririe that Burbank was where Lockheed was based, and advised him to check with Lockheed. A Lockheed official steered him toward records maintained by the National Archives, Air Force and CIA.
He found that the C-54 crash files had been declassified and released in September 1998, the same month he had climbed to the crash site trying to sort out his problems. He dug into the reports, discovering a great deal of information. Those aboard had risked their lives flying in dangerous weather. At Good Springs, Nev., on the California border, the flight route had turned toward Groom Lake, he found.
From there, "the pilot would fly by his own sight and instruments. No contact was to be maintained by VHF radio until landing. This would prevent tracking as they flew into the ultra-secret air base," says the group's Internet site, www.coldwarmemorial.com.
"The route flown on Nov. 17, as filed in the flight plan, was new, chosen because it would cut ten minutes off the total flight time and avoid air traffic over Vegas' Nellis Air Force Base. Nov. 17 was the first day this route was used."
Flying through snow flurries, the plane must have been blown off course, Ririe believes. The pilot, Lt. George Pappas Jr., tried to gain altitude but the plane slammed into the mountain, instantly killing everyone on board.
Silent Heroes of the Cold War National Memorial Committee began a drive to designate the site as a memorial to all those who died during that prolonged conflict.
They located family members of the men aboard the C-54 and told them what really happened. They were relieved to find out the truth.
In 2001, representatives of nearly all the families — except that of Fasolas, whom the committee could not find — went to Las Vegas and hiked up the mountain for a memorial ceremony. Debris recovered from the crash site will be displayed in a Cold War museum, affiliated with the Smithsonian, or interred at the site beneath a marker. Some is now displayed in the Desert Research Center, located at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The Nevada Legislature passed a resolution asking Congress to set aside the site as a national memorial. Nevada's senators introduced such a bill in Congress, he added.
The big remaining uncertainty is the whereabouts of relatives of the Air Force man from Utah.
Fasolas was a member of an LDS ward in Nephi, he said. His father was from Denver. A newspaper article from 1955 mentioned that his mother was a prominent businesswoman in Nephi. Her maiden name may have been Anderson.
Ririe believes Fasolas' father died in Denver about 12 years ago. Other than these slim facts, he has been able to gleangleam little about the crewman.
If anyone has information about family members, he said, they can contact him at 702-365-0388 or send e-mail to coldwarmemorial@aol.com.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com