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White spent 2½ months in Nazi prison camps. After the war, he came back home and entered New York University as a freshman. He no sooner had his degree (electrical engineering) than the Korean war broke out. He had kept up his flying in the Air Force Reserve, and in 1951 was recalled to active duty. Though White saw no combat in Korea, he decided to stay in the Air Force. His cool, precise flying won him two years of experimental-test-pilot training. Since 1955. White has checked out four hot jet fighters: the F-86K. F-89H. F-1O2 and F-105B. The 105 nearly did him in. He was booming along at 1,000 m.p.h. when a piece of the intake duct broke off and shot through the entire engine. "If it had torn up the compressor," he says now. "the whole plane would have blown up."
Most Serious. White drew the sought-after X-15 assignment in 1958. When Captain Iven Kincheloe died in an F-1O4 crash six months later. White moved up to top Air Force pilot on the X-15 — which has been a flying test bed for developing systems used in Project Mercury. From 1958 until 1960 he trained intensively, often flew jets on "chase" missions when other pilots were testing the X-15. Finally, in April 1960, he took the X-15 up for the first time. Within five months he had flown it to its first world altitude record (25.8 miles); since then he has piloted the Xis to half a dozen new speed and altitude marks.
Less flambovant than Fellow Test Pilot Joe Walker (TIME, May11). White is the most serious flyer in the X-15 group. He and his pretty wife Doris live with their three children (one son, two daughters) in a three-bedroom house at Edwards Air Force Base, four miles from the green cement-block flight-operations center where White flies a desk when he is not jockeying X-15s and jets. They entertain only infrequently, take off for the Los Angeles beaches every chance they get.
New Mystery. After the sky-stabbing record flight last week, four Xis pilots —White. Walker, North American's Scott Crossfield and Navy Commander Forrest Petersen—journeyed to Washington, where President Kennedy gave them the Robert J. Collier Trophy, presented annually since 1911 for outstanding achievement in flight. But for White and his fellow X-15 pilots, the greatest reward for their work is the satisfaction of probing the mysteries inside the sky. In last week's flight Bob White found a new mystery for scientists to puzzle over: through the X-15's thick left quartz window, he saw a strange sight. "There are things out there," he said dramatically over his voice radio. "There absolutely is." As White later described one "thing": "It looked like a piece of paper the size of my hand tumbling slowly outside the plane. It was greyish in color, and about 30 to 40 feet away. I haven't any idea what it could be."