...if your talking about the Col. in the flight suit the (night of) during the press conference....he was a Viet Vet who flew C-130's and said he "knew what ground to air missiles looked like"....we never saw him again after either...he must have gotten the word
Everybody got the word. I remember when they found rocket launching gear in the dunes on Jones Beach about two days afterwards...and then we were told it was just for large 4th of July fireworks!
I don’t know how high the plane was, but if you’ve ever gone out of JFK en route to Southern Europe or other southern destinations (which I used to do all the time), you come out low, fly along Long Island, and then loop out over the ocean. In other words, normally, they would have been low enough for somebody on the ground to get them. Heck, I could practically count the dune grass half the time when we flew out of JFK.