By Andrew McGinn
Staff Writer
Monday, December 22, 2008
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — A world war had just ended with the splitting of atoms.
Daring flyboys were going higher and faster than man knew he could go.
New enemies were emerging. New sides were forming.
And then something happened in New Mexico.
In Roswell.
This was the nascent Air Force Donald Rizer served in.
By the time he was initially discharged in 1948, the Springfield resident had gone from feeding cavalry horses at a base in Texas to personally watching Chuck Yeager fly faster than the speed of sound in the California desert.
He went from tinkering on airplanes at Crabill Airport in Springfield to chasing UFOs across the western night sky.
Now 81, Rizer recalls this era of strange new aircraft and stranger new sightings in a video on SpringfieldNewsSun.com.
As someone always interested in aviation, Rizer considers himself lucky that he was sent to Muroc Airfield (now Edwards Air Force Base) in the Mojave Desert in 1946.
There, he became one of the military's first jet mechanics.
"This," he said, "was the place to be."
From rockets to flying wings, Rizer helped put the wild in wild blue yonder.
"In October of '47, when they broke the sound barrier, we all witnessed and knew what had happened," he said. "We were told right then, 'Don't tell anybody.' They didn't want the Russians to know what we could do."
At the start of the Korean War in 1950, Rizer was called back to duty, eventually retiring from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as the civilian chief of base operations in 1987.
But if watching a man go Mach 1.06 40 years earlier was weird, chasing UFOs was frankly out of this world.
Because of his dealings with the latest in aviation, Rizer was picked to go on UFO search missions in the wake of the alleged spaceship crash at Roswell in July 1947.
Put on alert, he was handed an infrared camera and put on a C-47 whenever a sighting was reported in California.
"They had to take it serious," he said. "People were demanding an answer."
Six decades later, some people are still waiting.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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