X-15A Flight No. 3-7-14: To the Edge of Space

The X-15 did not take off. It must have stuck out its thumb, because it hitched a ride into flight.

On July 17, 1962, Air Force Maj. Robert White took to the air with his X-15 mounted under the wing of a modified B-52. After separating from the mothership, he ignited his plane's rockets and ascended to 59.6 miles above Earth, setting a new record.

This met NASA's definition of space at that time, thus earning Maj. White his astronaut's wings. Two X-15 flights in 1963 would go even higher, surpassing 100 km, the Karman Line generally accepted as marking the beginning of outer space.

The X-15 appears many times in the Moving Image and Sound Branch's series Moving Images Relating to Military Aviation Activities, 1947-1984 filed in Record Group 342, the Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations, 342-USAF. A compilation of several different flights can be found at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/69876. The X-15 still holds the record for the fastest manned atmospheric flight at 4,520 miles per hour (Mach 6.7)!

Flight 3-7-14 is known in UFO circles for Maj. White's remark in a post-flight briefing that he had seen an unidentifiable something outside the window. He reported that he saw what looked like pieces of paper about the size of a hand, but strangely they were not flying past him the way frost from the plane's nose did. Whatever it was he saw, extensive footage from plane-mounted cameras is now available in the National Archives catalog in the three titles linked from the GIFs in this blog post.