The Road to Echo...

With all of the discussions centering around Discovery Canada's "Close Encounters," my memory was tweaked thus remembering this humorous entry into Echo Flight's "Captain's Log." back in the early 1980s titled "The Road to Echo."

Everybody should recognize the poster for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."  The movie poster was apparently cut out of a magazine and pasted into the Captain's Log.  Entry date alludes me at this time, but it would have been entered between 1977 and 1981 (my first Echo alert would have been in 1981 and that being the probable year that I saw it).

Some would say that "Hebert has stumbled across proof that Echo's launch crews knew of the past UFO incident of 1967", but that's not quite it.  The movie poster has to be seen in the context of pulling an alert at one of the 341st Strategic Missile Wing's farthest launch centers...approximately 120 miles away from the base (Oscar was the farthest of the two being 140 to 150 miles away).

Each Launch Control Center had a version of the "Captain's Log" that was unique for each site. The log was an informal means of jotting down the thoughts, both good and bad, centering around the theme of pulling SAC alerts.  Some entries were hilarious, while others were down right poetic.

So the photo in the Log was used as visual symbolism for distance traveled.  The visual of the poster portrays just that...the road to Echo was a long and weary trail that took about 2 hours to get from the base to the site.  Longer if you were unfortunate to be caught having to travel in the winter months.  The visual of the poster captured that thought beautifully. 

Basically, you can forget about UFOs and ETs as inspiration for the Log entry, but if ET had visited Echo and/or Oscar back in 1967, I would envision crew members asking the UFO commander, "Are we there yet?"