There was nothing unusual in the prelaunch area except this nibbling on the rudder that I could feel through the pedals and it did seem to correspond with the B-52 buffet. I thought for a while that it could be something coming through the wing notch on to the rudder that I was feeling, but as we straightened out and lined up for the last three or four minutes it seemed pretty normal and no more kicks through the rudder. Everything looked real good up through launch and I got a slight roll off, rolled under the B-52, got the engine lit, came up on alpha and I noticed that I had over shot, I went up to about 15° then finally got back down to 10°. I was a little late getting up to theta and finally got that. About the time for pushover my altitude didn't quite correspond so I split the difference and pushed over at what I'd consider indicated 61,000 instead of 62,000. From there on, I checked out pretty well, time wise. I got to 3900 on time and I had 80,000 indicated. I rolled over to 90° and pulled up to 10° angle of attack and held that for a minute and I felt something that seemed like buffet again here. And I may have relaxed on alpha but anyway it seemed real strange. I thought well I will never get seventeen if I am getting buffet at 10° alpha so I held on to it and then I got the call to go on up in alpha, closed the speed brakes and pulled on up to 17° and it felt real fine at 17°. There was just no problem at all holding that. The g was up where it should have been so I held on to it and finally looked up, 90 seconds went by and I waited for the burnout and no burnout, and so I waited until about 95 and still no burnout. The Mach number was still going up and H dot wasn't coming off like it should have been and so I finally thought, well it must have burned out. At this point you have no longitudinal g on the airplane, you have got so much drag at this high alpha that you are about 0 longitudinal. I decided, well it burned out and I started to reverse the turn, and then it burned out. I felt the burnout. But I didn't have the brakes out so you know I wasn't sure how much the transient was on burnout, but it was noticeable. I went on over to a right bank, pulled up to 10° alpha and then a lot of strange things started happening, As far as I was concerned the airplane went neutrally stable in dutch roll and I saw some pretty healthy sideslip angles in here, and felt the accelerations. I also observed the roll, around the bank angle I was trying to maintain. I was getting a little concerned and was going to call Joe that I had a real problem! But he was so calm that I figured, it must be all right. Actually about that time I decided that, I must have initiated it by rolling with the high alpha. While looking at the records later this is not what happened but I did work toward damping it and it finally stopped. From there on I went on up in alpha to 17° because we did have a lot of energy at this time. We had gone about 4/10 over what we had planned in Mach number and so I just went on up to 17° and held that. Got a heading for home and started to roll out of the turn there but looked down and I was passing Cuddeback and I still had about Mach 4 so I continued on around in the turn and I guess turned almost to a westerly heading and then rolled back to the left and had gotten rid of most of the energy. In fact, I think we pulled the speed brakes in about that time. I came into high key and from there on it was pretty normal down to touchdown, landing. Flaps, I guess I got out about 300 indicated and gear about 270. "Did you get the stick forward?" Yes. But I may have been late, I'm not sure. I got it forward but this timing is kind of hard to judge. Then after touchdown, I came back in on the stick, I let it slide for a little way and finally came back in on the stick to slow it down. "How long did the instability last?" It seemed like about a half an hour but not too many cycles on here. "Six or eight seconds or so. About eight." It got pretty bad. Actually this fairly large amplitude beta and roll oscillations is what I had noticed most and it seemed neutrally damped. Of course what probably happened is that the dampers were just a little behind and ended up feeding and maintaining this magnitude or amplitude. "Did we come any where near the limit of beta q?" Yes. We got 8° beta and 600 q where our limit is minimum of 6500. We got 4800. "But this is the beta on the vertical tail now we won't be able to tell until we look at the data and see." "What beta did you see?" I didn't, well, at that time I couldn't see the needle. It was too far out of my field of vision. "Were you aware of the pitch oscillation?" No. I didn't feel the pitch, the roll, yaw was what I really felt. "You weren't controlling pitch?" Not intentionally, I may have been feeding or fighting it, I'm not sure. "Were you aware of the airplane motions from looking around outside?" No. The accelerations imposed in the lateral-directional mode, well you could see out the window that things looked kind of funny. And of course I think this is the highest I have been too. Then when I was over at 9O° in the middle of all of this I looked out of the left window and all I could see was black and I thought, did I bust the windshield too, and I rolled back over a little bit and saw the horizon and it was just the black sky there. "I might have a partial explanation on the rudder nibbling you got before you dropped. When we go to topoff on the climb tank there is noticeable vibration in the plumbing in the whole system in the B-52. I turned it on right at eight minutes and I shut it off just as you said it quit."