Design revealed for memorial to 14 who died in Cold War mission

After more than a decade of planning and fundraising, Steve Ririe's dream to build a national memorial on Mount Charleston dedicated to the silent heroes of the Cold War is on the cusp of becoming a reality.

Ririe, chairman of a local nonprofit fundraising group, Silent Heroes of the Cold War Corp., released the architect's design Monday for a memorial that will break ground next summer and will be part of a visitors center project at the base of Kyle Canyon.

The memorial, to be erected by the U.S. Forest Service at an estimated cost of $90,000, will feature a black granite slab, symbolic of government "black projects," with 14 stars, one for each man who died in 1955 when a transport plane crashed on the mountain while taking them to Area 51 to test the U-2 spy plane.

In front of the slab will be a crypt where items and debris from the crash site will be sealed, allowing visitors to make a connection to pieces of the C-54 transport plane from an observation area in view of the mountaintop where four crew members and 10 passengers, including a team of engineers and support staff, perished Nov. 17, 1955.

"After over a decade of working on this and having gotten to know the families, it's personal," Ririe said Monday.

"One of the things I learned is that this is not an isolated incident. There are a lot of other Americans who died, and there are a lot of survivors who don't have closure," he said.

"We have to recognize that four decades have passed, and there is still lots of pain and lots of unburied feelings."

Local architect George Tate volunteered his services to design the memorial while Ririe and the nonprofit organization launched a fundraising effort in 1998.

Ten years later, legislation by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and a companion bill in the House by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., paved the way for the Interior Department to establish an advisory committee to oversee an inventory of Cold War sites in the nation, including one for the Silent Heroes of the Cold War National Memorial on Mount Charleston.

Ririe said a groundbreaking will be held in the summer of 2012 to mark the start of the Forest Service's effort to groom a footprint for the memorial on land it manages in lower Kyle Canyon.

So far, advocates of the memorial led by Ririe have secured about $45,000 in donations.

"We have raised the majority of our target, but we are still shy by $44,500," he said.

Ririe said the memorial will honor all Cold War heroes who worked in secret, "many of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice."

"Silent Heroes of the Cold War Memorial will be a place where we can take our children and tell them the stories of the heroes who worked in secret here in Southern Nevada to see us safely through."

His announcement came on the eve of tonight's airing of a segment of the Travel Channel's "Mysteries of the Museum" that will feature the Cold War heroes whose plane crashed when they were being shuttled on a secret mission to test the high-flying U-2 spy plane at Area 51, known then as "Watertown," along the dry Groom Lake bed 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Investigators later determined the pilot, 1st Lt. George M. Pappas, had become disoriented under the conditions and got caught up in snow flurries and a powerful crosswind that pushed the plane into a canyon heading toward Charleston Peak.

Realizing too late that the plane was on a collision course with the mountain, Pappas in the last seconds tried to position the plane to clear the peak. Instead, the aircraft clipped the ridge 50 feet below the crest.

In 1998, Ririe sat by remnants of the transport plane's wreckage near the top of Mount Charleston, and wondered how the plane crashed and how family members of the 14 who died in it have endured.

It puzzled him so much that he obtained declassified documents from the government and set out to memorialize the "silent heroes," as he called them, with a monument for visitors to observe the site.

In 2001, with many of the heroes' family members on hand, Ririe and a team of monument backers hiked to the wreckage site and recovered a damaged propeller, which became the centerpiece of the memorial's fundraising effort.

The propeller will be displayed at the Forest Service's visitors center after it is built.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.