Writers Note: Last week, we ran Part I about John Garretson from Eagle, ID, a man who has never visited Garretson, SD but has begun to invest in the town with the same last name. While he has recently discovered his ancestry to A.S. Garretson, the railroad investor who is the namesake of Garretson, SD, diverged in the late 1600’s in Pennsylvania, he still feels a connection to this community and has been deepening his relationships with different folks who live here.
John has lived a very interesting life, from experiencing the Roswell, NM “alien incident” of 1947 to his career as a nuclear engineer. The Gazette felt a full profile was a great way for our community to get to know the man with the last name Garretson.
John, who was born in Salem, IA in 1932, moved eight different times before high school due to his father’s job (his father, who was a mechanical engineer, was instrumental in starting three different companies- Bailey Meter Co., Phillips Petroleum, and Sacra Bros Propane and General Tank and Steel). During the years of World War II, he was in Detroit, Michigan before heading to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. However, John was able to settle for a few years in Roswell, NM, and he graduated from Roswell High School in 1950.
John, 14 years old at the time, was a newspaper delivery boy during the Roswell UFO incident of 1947, when a US surveillance balloon crashed at a ranch nearby, prompting stories and conspiracy theories about alien lifeforms and Area 51 that persist to this day, despite being debunked as Project Mogul.
Project Mogul was a highly classified project that was sending weather balloons into the ionosphere to monitor Russian nuclear activity, according to Smithsonian Magazine in an article written on the Roswell incident’s 70th anniversary.
In that article, author Donovan Webster wrote, “Everywhere you looked in 1947, the global, social and political chessboard was being re-divided. The Soviet Union began to claim eastern European nations for itself in a new post-war vacuum. Voice of America started broadcasting in Russian to the eastern bloc, peddling the principles of American democracy. The U.S. sent V2 rockets carrying payloads of corn seeds and fruit flies into outer space. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the “Doomsday Clock” ticking, and the Marshall Plan was in the making to rebuild war-torn Europe. Small wonder that in the heat of summer that year, flying saucers became all the rage.”
It appears that truthfulness from the US government was low priority during that period of time, which is likely why the distrustfulness in the story continues.
“I arrived in Roswell from Bartlesville, OK in February, 1947 and finished the ninth grade,” said John. “The UFO incident occurred that summer. It was in the paper for a few days and then disappeared from the news cycle. The cover up was in place and nothing further was reported about UFO's. There were several articles about what it probably was (experimental balloon) and no one thought much about it after that.”
However, John doesn’t necessarily think the cover story put out by the U.S. government about the weather balloon and Project Mogul was complete.
“It was not until the 1970's that some of the locals got the ball rolling and the craze was on. Lots of books were written and it turns out that I knew a lot of the people that were interviewed about their knowledge of the event. They sure kept the secret of what they knew well. I had no personal knowledge, but happened to have gone rabbit and dove hunting in the following years several times in the area north of Roswell where the event occurred. I even found a weather balloon sender unit on the desert floor one time. I have read most of the books related to this event and am a believer that they were from outer space. It seems that everything recovered from the desert north of Roswell ended [up] at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”
Roswell, which is actually not the home of Area 51 (that is 13 hours away north of Las Vegas, NV), was home to two military establishments during John’s childhood- the SAC Air Force Base (which housed the B-29’s that dropped the atom bomb), and the New Mexico Military Institute (NNMI). NNMI has both a high school and a junior college, and is the only state-supported military college located in the western U.S.
John lived two blocks south of the campus with his parents, brothers, and sister, and met wife Carolyn as a senior in high school, bringing her to prom that year.
“I started dating in the 10th grade and got to use the family car on special occasions. I was real bashful, so two or three dates with the same girl was about my limit,” John said. “It turned out that when I was a senior, my date for the Jr-Sr prom was my future wife. It was also our first date. We married later when I was in the Army at El Paso, TX.”
The lack of settling that he experienced as a child continued as John entered adulthood, though nowadays he stays put.
“Actually, I don't travel that much. We used to visit my parents during the summer and sometimes on holidays. I had a stretch where I joined my brother in Iowa for deer hunting. We have also visited Canada and made several trips to Mexico. Does a cruise to Alaska and a tour of Hawaii count? Our one big trip was a 10-day tour of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.”
Before that, though, John attended three colleges, served in the Army, married Carolyn, attended two more colleges, and changed jobs several times.
After his Army service, John finished his degree at Texas Tech with a B.S in Mechanical Engineering. Prior to graduation, a new department head required the seniors to take a course on nuclear engineering. This one-off class didn’t seem like it would benefit him much, but only one week after John started as a draftsman at Douglas Aircraft, he was offered a new position as part of the Nuclear Effects Group that was headed by a Chemistry PhD who had just returned from the South Pacific.
“It seems that Douglas wanted to enter the nuclear field and this was their start. I found out later that when they were looking for candidates to staff this group, someone had looked at my grade transcripts and noticed the Nuclear course,” John said. “Anyway, this was my out from the drafting board and I accepted the position. There were only 4 people to start with.”
John worked happily in that area for three years, but then his father made him an offer he could not refuse- he would pay for John’s schooling if he agreed to obtain a Master’s Degree. This offer allowed John to obtain his Master’s in Nuclear Engineering at Oklahoma A&M. Upon graduation in 1963, he was offered a position at Atomics International in Canoga Park, CA, and began working on the SNAP 8 reactor project. SNAP, which stood for Space Nuclear Auxiliary Power, used a liquid metal mixture of Sodium and Potassium (NaK) as a coolant on a reactor. John’s job was to do a safety analysis in order to see if the reactor could be started safely in the facility where it was kept.
“You better not have any leaks,” said John. He notes that the reactor was later launched into space to simulate a vehicle failure. While the project passed its goals, the contract with the US government went to Russian scientists, who had developed a thermal reactor that used steam power.
John then learned FORTRAN, a computer language that allowed engineers to write their own instructions in order to interact with computers. Originally developed by IBM, FORTRAN was used for scientific and engineering applications for over six decades.
“I became heavily involved with writing computer simulations and followed that path the rest of my career,” he said. He left Atomics International and went back to the team he had worked with at Douglas Aircraft (which later became McDonnell-Douglas), working on projects such as studying electron interference and electronics shielding.
“There was an interesting event that occurred during a test in the South Pacific at Johnston Island,” said John. “We were using a Douglas IRBM Thor missile to launch a warhead into outer space. On the first try the Thor got about ten feet off the ground and blew up. This wiped out the launch and control facility. They went for replacement components stored at Vandenberg Air Force Base and airlifted them back to Johnston Island. After refitting, another launch was tried. This was successful and the warhead exploded in outer space. However, the electrons that were generated streamed down the earth's magnetic field and disrupted the communications in Hawaii and Australia for about two days.”
He also talked of his experience donning a hazmat suit to clean up a mishap in an underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada.
“Every time a new or modified weapon was created, it had to be tested. Companies were allowed to place specimens in some of the tunnels that led to the bomb. When the explosion occurred, the radiation would pass down the tunnel striking the samples mounted on racks. There was a mishap during the test and we had to go and recover our samples. The tunnel closure system partially failed. After the radiation had passed, the tunnel was supposed to collapse and prevent the following shock wave and debris from going any further. The closure was incomplete and the specimens were blown off the racks to the end of that tunnel and also contaminated. The biggest problem was the Beryllium dust, which is deadly if inhaled. We put on a breathing system and then a protection suit with all the joints taped. We then rode a miner’s rail cart to the debris site and gathered what we could find and exited. Once was enough. That was only time I had to do that,” he said.
He also worked with ICBM’s, moving over to Sparta, Inc, which later obtained the government contract for the Star Wars project proposed by President Ronald Reagan. His team studied the best location and methods of placing Minutemen Missiles, which were a major part of the American nuclear arsenal in the 1970’s. A museum dedicated to their history is located by Kadoka, SD.
When work for the ICBM’s slowed, John started work at Northrop (later Northrop Grumman), working on the F-35 design. His project was on sensor fusion and it allowed aircraft to share enemy aircraft radar detection data with each other.
Unfortunately, Northrop “lost the competition with Lockheed due to politics,” despite completing the project successfully and on time (Lockheed was over a year late and crashed a plane), according to John.
He then worked on the Tri Service Standoff Attack Missile (TSSAM) program, which developed cruise missiles. Again, Northrop lost the contract to another competitor, and John moved to developing software for the defensive systems on the B-2 plane, a project that was highly classified until its public release in the late 1980’s. Other than a bomb, the B-2 does not carry any armament, so it relies on evasion to avoid enemies. John’s software helped determine the best flight profile to allow for evasion and help the bomb glide to its target. The B-2 officially went into service with the U.S. Air Force in 1997, though test flights were held in California in the late ‘80’s. The B-2 has enjoyed notoriety due to its high cost of development, which is estimated to be over $2 billion per plane according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the program has been fought over by Congress since 1992, when the Cold War was winding down. While 132 aircraft were originally planned, only 21 were ever built. Twenty remain in service and will be retired in 2032.
“I lived near the El Toro Marine Base before I moved to Idaho,” said John, who retired in 1997 and moved to Idaho in 2003. “Before the base was closed, they used to have annual air shows. The test bed B-2 based at Edwards Air Force base was often used for a flyover during the show. On its way back to base it flew over a hill near my house. We would stand there and wave as they flew over. A spectacular sight since we were so close.”
For a man who had so much of his career shrouded in secrecy, John Garretson was extremely generous to tell us his story. A youth who moved often, enjoyed hunting, married his high school sweetheart, and became a family man with three daughters that enjoyed square dancing, and also worked on some incredible projects throughout his life. Despite not yet visiting Garretson, his legacy continues as he commits to more projects in the town that shares his name.
