The B-25 Recovery Group Hypothesis

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If you live in a colder region of the world, then you know that a river at the winter doesn't always look like a river frozen or not, it can look like a strangely enticing but nearly impassable liquid highway on a distant planet slow on the surface, but deadly strong just below. more kinetic and active than anyone watching from a bridge would be able to see Mononga Haler River, or the Mon, as the locals call it was running at eight to ten knots on a January night of nineteen fifty six The water was thirty five degrees The air above it twenty seven There was no ice on the river that day But there was ice on its edges and ice in the rocks along Beck's runun which will become familiar to you tonight if you're not from the area There was also ice on the railing of the homestead highigh level bridge where, just before four in the afternoon, Drivers heading home from the local mill started to slow down because something in their peripheral vision just wasn't right. A monster was silently descending from the sky Too large to be airborene silent to be an airplane but an airplane was exactly B twenty five Mitchell came in from the northeast at maybe fifty feet over the bridge, maybe thirty, depending on which witness you talk to and how many decades have gone by since then. Both engines were dead and the propellers weren't turning The plane was gliding People got out of their cars, and a trucker stopped on River Road A police officer in a prowler keed his radio Nobody yelled. because there was nothing to yell about the plane was still in the air. and the pilot whoever he was was clearly aiming for the water on purpose He had his flaps down He was lined up downstream He had a plan such as it was, The splash, when it came, was described by a witness the next morning as a geyser column of white froth taller than the bridge itself hanging in the air for what seemed like forever before collapsing back into the river. The entropy of nature reminded all the people staring that in the end, nature was in charge. Six men climbed out onto the wings Some of you might envision the Miracle on the Hudson when Captain Silly Sullenberger brought his Airbus A three hundred twenty down on the river between Manhattan, New York, and New Jersey in two thousand nine true miracle of survival just like this flight But Sully's plane didn't sink The pilot of the B twenty five was Major William Dodson He was thirty three years old He'd flowed in the Second World War and Korea, and he was, by every account from people who knew him One of the best pilots in the United States Air Force He had just performed what aviation textbooks would later describe as a perfect wheels up water lland He had saved every single one of his crew from the impact And in the next fifteen minutes, in front of hundreds of people on a bridge and on a riverbank as well as three towboats racing toward him He was going to lose two of them. This is the story of a plane that went into a river just southeast of Pittsburgh in front of everyone, and despite all the crew members on board making it out of the aircraft The plane itself disappeared beneath the waves in only about twenty five feet of water and was never seen again Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Filbrook, and this is Forest Burgess. One of them disappeared in that dirty water less than fifty feet from the men who were trying to get to him. That's what hurts Assistant suuperintendent Lawrence J. Maloney of the Pittsburgh Police from the Pittsburgh press, february first, nineteen fifty six Join us tight as we dive into the seventy year search for an airplane that vanished forever in a shallow river bed Yeah and we're back. That we are folks, and it's good to be back. We're so sorry, a new show didn't get published last week, but a close family member of mine had a medical emergence. Oh yes, we're very familiar with those now. But he's doing better, right? Yes, he is. Thankk you. And we appreciate your patience during that brief lull. but we're back this week with a new episode of both the main show as well as the deead letter offffice whichich is already posted by the time you've heard this. Well, I know our listeners have been wishing you and yours well across all of our social media platforms, as have I, and we're all very glad to hear that things have improved. Thank you so much and thank you to all of you out there who were kind enough to post supportive comments. You're truly the best audience in the business and we're lucky to have you A relevant update on our schedule, the show that we cancellled will be picked back up later in the year, most likely the fall. After tonight's show, we get into our summer schedule, which is not entirely ironed out, but the next new episode, which are you excited? Because yeah, I might be I am pretty excited actually. It's been a while since we've done this. The next new episode of the Main showh, which will post on june thirteenth, we'll be bringing back our very longtime friend, mister Richard H to dissect and discuss one of the most amazing books from his paranormal bookshelf collection of first Eeditions The uninvited. That's right. It was in that very generous and lovely massive gift basket that one holiday season. he sneakily dropped off. I remember at your house, he was sneaking behind your car. so you would look out the window to see him. He wanted to be Yes delivered byord over there. Yeah. Yes, pererhaps delivered with a bow by ultraatererrestrials, but it was really tremendous baskets of great books and this is one of them And ever since we've been wanting to cover this one. So I'm pretty excited about this. Also, we haven't talked to Rich in a long time, I think on the on the show professionally if this is any kind of professionalism, but yeah, I'm very excited to hear what he has to say about it because it is truly a remarkable story So here's your chance, folks. You know, we usually try to surprise you on upcoming topics, at least I do, Scott likes to announce everything, but it occurred to us that you deserve a chance to read this book before we get to talking about it. So look for this title Uninvited Colon The True Story of Ripperston Farm by Clive Herold Yes, we have a link to it in our show notes, connected back to bookshop. org, which supports small local bookstores. and our link allows us to collect a referral fee there as well. Thanks to Rich for introducing us to Bookshop a while back. Yeah, it was a great lead and it kind of reminds me of speaking of books of The book that launched Lord Byron into Stardom in his circles, his literary his letitterati circles child Herald, which I think was about his exploits abroad during a gap years as they used to say Well, yeah, so look for that book folks called The Uninvited by Clive Herd. There are other books titled The Uninvited, but you want the one by Clive, CLI VE, Harold about Ripperston Farm and get it read by june thirteenth if you want to be up to speed with our discussion Yes, and in the meanwhile, if you don't know Richard Haddam, look through our back catalog for his guest appearances on astonishing Legends or better yet, check out his podcast, Richard Haddam's Paranormal bookshelf for a fascinating look at his amazing collection of paranormal books, and also a deep dive into his own life and background that led him to become a successful television and film screenwiter and producer. Yes, his podcast is phenomenal and fantastic, and probably most folks know him as the screenwriter speaking of for the Mothban Prophecies, which once again is available to stream for free on Amazon Prime. you have of course subscribe to Amazon Prime, but you don't have to pay another rental fee to watch it. So great it's one of my go to late episodes. You're so kind No, but just like there's such a vibe to it. like I could just watch bits of it, parts of it. Eespecially late at night though. it's so when he shows up at the motel and it's got that Yeah, that's the best. Yeah. great direction too But anyway, yeah, it's not just the film adaptation of John Kill's Mothman prophecies But again, his own TV series called Miracles, Ecellent as well. And his work on Grim, second chance The gates dead zone and one of Scott's favorites and mine Titans Yes, Titans was so great. I wish it was still a production. I know ye. Enjoyed that. So all right, well let's get into tonight's story. It's hard to believe it's seventy years old this year. That's part of what makes it an astonishing legend because after all this time, there's still no resolution on this one. No solid one. And you know, when I first heard about it, we've been talking about this on occasion throughout our podcasting Foray into the unknown and It's kind of fascinated me because I'm not completely convinced. you know, I thought there might be you know, quote unquote, mundane explanation for this, but a fascinating environmental one of sorts or just something very strange happening because the whole thing went missing N to be found again. I thought, Okaykay, let's I want to get to the bottom of this because I do want to know What are the unanswered questions to it Or was it some strange, interesting process like saponification where people the water's cold enough, their body is interred in the depths like they will turn into soap. Is it something strange like that? someome kind of weird chemical process? So yeah, on the surface, it seems like a pretty simple story. You know, plane comes down, it ditches in front of tons of witnesses in shallow, you water, but but a strong river And everyone survives the landing, although, you know, sadly too, they don't make it to shore, which is oof, you know, gut wrenching in that you're that close. You just reminded me of episode two hundred eighty three of our show, the SS Cam loooops and oldite speaking ponificationine. Yeah, area. If you got if he got soapy, but he's apparently still floating we talked about it on that We did talk about it. Yeah, because something is he's still there A combination of very cold water but also low oxygen levels. Yeah. So you stay fairly much preserved, but Yeah, is it something like that But here's a strange one of the initial things about this case here about my Nongaala bomber is that it sninks but is only sinking in twenty to thirty feet of water And for a river, it's not that deep. It should have been found, but it just never was. Yeah All right, so let's get into it. So this happened on a Tuesday afternoon. It was late January of nineteen fifty six. At this time, Pittsburgh was still the steel city. It was like the center of that in the United States. The mills there were running around the clock and the J andell plant, which you'll hear a lot about tonight at Hazelwood outside of Pittsburgh is one of them with smoke billowing out across the south bank of the Menangaala or the Mon, as the locals call it. The river itself is in the condition that stayed in for most of the twentieth century, which is to say It's not really water anymore. It It's water plus yeah, it'ss decades of acid minine drainage from West Virginia coal fields, plus everything, every mill upstream has been pouring into it since before any of these guys born in the story is It's perfect for swimming, fishing and drinking straight from the Yeah st It's not a place you want to take a dip Okay ye. Well, it's also January. so if you If you fall in and the chemicals don't get you, the cold will and you've only get a few minutes to As we all know survive cold water like that. But but you do have a chance. That's like that one time I heard that story a long time ago on TV about the guy who who lived, He survived this, but he jumped out of a plane and then realized he had forgotten his parachute And because we got a bunch of camera gar I think. Oh. Yeah when he tells the story at the end, someomehow he lived, but I remember him hit the quote It's one of those quotes that I just love where he's just like, As I was falling and realized that I didn't have my parachute, the first thing I thought was This is not a survivable scenario. Which is a lot like what falling in this river sounds like between the cold and the poison and the else. Like Buster Scrug says in the ballot of Buster's Krugs like, Well, that ain't good. when you get shot a What is ain good But here's the, you know, the paradox or the dilemma of a really cold water. If it's super cold that actually might preserve you. And so there's all these scenarios we know, because this will feature in people falling in There are stories where it slowed down your heart rate so much that it actually preserved you because the thing you don't want is brain damage Obviously, but in the case of the Titanic, remember, you know, Jack and Rose and Jack didn't do so well being dunked in the water However, the the story of the chef or the baker Remember he was the guy that clung to the railing and And they they have a nod to him in the movie, but he he drank so much alcohol, which is not normally suggested or recommended. But it did something to his blood flow that you know, it basically has your blood, I think, rise to the surface of your skin, but he was so drunk that actually saved him I just can't imagine the hangover he would Yeah So yeah. So well this on this day, the water was thirty five degrees the air was twenty seven It's rush hour. The homestead high level bridge is full of cars Heing home from the South Hills and from the mill. and that bridge, which was built in nineteen thirty seven, just under twenty years earlier was the first bridge ever built using something called a Wkertt For us And the city actually later renamed it for people that live near there now. It's now called the Homestead Grays Bridge. They renamed it in two thousand three But in nineteen fifty six, everyone was calling it the high level Please explain to us one What a Weykt trus is, also, is there any connection or similarities or parallels to the silver Bridge in point? Well, that's what I was gonna say. So the Weykurt Bidge, it's a Pittsburgh thing. This was patented in nineteen thirty by a local Civil engineer named Edward Wiker W IC H E R T Forgive me, Wykt F family, if I'm saying his last name R The trick to this from a design standpoint is it has a hinged quadrilateral section that sits over each support pier, which looks kind of like a kite or a rambas if you're looking at it from the side And that breaks up the structural load in a way that lets you calculate the forces in each span independently, which sounds boring until you remember this is before computers. Yeah. Weykert, I think passed away in the nineteen forties or fifties, maybe, but They didn't have the luxury that we have today of all these computers to figure this kind of stuff out. But the bridge is, it's hard to describe visually, but if you see one, it's recognizable. If you look this bridge up,ll you'll be like, oh yeah,' seen those before. However, it's not a lot of them. before the Wiker, designing a continuous trust bridge meant doing the math by hand and the math was brutal. So the breakthrough was that Wker' design made it a lot simpler And the homestead highigh level was the first one of these ever built. Yeah, talking about it's all math and it's all doneone with a slide rule. if you kids don know what that is, Look that up because ye, I'm amazed that you could fashion a measurement device like a slide rule and have it be accurate becausecause you have to manufacture the slide rule with tremendous accuracy. to be accurate anyway. So talking about the Homestead High brridge, how many are there of this type of design out there? Well, there was maybe ten or so ever built mostostly in Pennsylvania and Maryland and Pittsburgh has two of other survivors. It's a rare bridge. Folks as Scott said, if you look this up and look at a picture, you'll recognize the design. Yes. evenven if you don't have one in your town It's kind of like V's or W's trussing on the side of it with a network over the top and it looks very sturdy and it kind of reminds me of that thing that artist makes that walks on the beach just from the wind. There's some shapes that are similar. What do you mean You know, the wooden thing, it's like wood and like the wind just barely blows it and it walks. You haven't seen those? It's I think so. Yeah. yeah. Itway there's similar like structural elements. Right. It's a lot of classic design. But on this Tuesday that we're talking about here, there are steel workers crossing it on their way home. Oh, this is really stunning pleasant and pickup trucks on the river road below. Yeah, which I think nowadays it's called Carson Street. Yes. Yeah Yeah, that was hard to source, but if you're looking on a map where Beck's run ends at the at the Mon, I'll say, todayoday it ends at Carson Street and that's the right spot for where a lot of witnesses were put. I mean, there were witnesses everywhere. Yeah, yeah. ye. benefiting really any listeners that we have might be like, o, I know where that is. Yeah. and no one else really does or cares. What I do appreciate is that We'll be looking through our Facebook group and it's like, Yeahah, I live right there Yeah. I'm right there. I'm right at it. Yeah. Whver how obscure it is, someone out theres will often know exactly what we're talking about. So anyway, the Coast Guard's got boats on the river here. And three of the JNL's own towboats, you know, that mill that we talked about here, Well, they're working the barges between Ruther Gen, Ruther Glen Street, I believe and the Cal Docks. And again, Ruther Glen Street is no longer around. Well, the name is it, but it's replaced by an updated development Now, keep in mind here, we're talking about nineteen fifty six, but the main point we're talking about here is The stretch of the Mwn from the Homestead brridge down to Glenwood is At least on this particular afternoon, one of the most heavily watched two miles of waterway in the U S. Yeah, which is important. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. because what happens in the next twenty minutes is going to be witnessed by hundreds of people. in real time and the Air Force and the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers are still going to spend two weeks Trying to find a thirteen ton airplane in just twenty five to thirty feet of water. simimple, right I'm no wine expert by any stretch, but I do really enjoy a nice glass of wine now and again, which is why I've kept my subscription to First Leaf going Now, don't get me wrong, I would love to be an expert on wines, you know mostly to impress my friends and the occasional server. But seriously, I do find it comforting when you're out with friends at a nice dinner and someone knows enough to know what wine to pair with what dish, you know, as long as you're not a stomob about it. Some knowledge is good and you don't w to make a blunder, like when Sehan Connery suspected something fishy When Robert Shaw ordered that red wine with fish in from Russia with love. Yactly. 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A lot of people hear World War two bomber and B twenty five and they think this is a monster plane if you're not an aircraft aficionado, but this is not a B twenty nine, right just you know we're talking to people of our generation and no younger I think Yeah had any plane officient was out there, but I think you both you and I and your son now, which is encouraging is an aircraft like that and especially military. And so Yeah, you' got to keep in mind. we have other notes here coming down about the B twenty five, but It's the nickname was the Mitchell B twenty five bomber. We're going to speak a little bit of that because there's a connection to a past show we did. I'm not sure if you realize that Yeahet Yeah. But anyway, the B twenty nine that people if you see the Enola gay, okay, that's the B twenty nine suuper Fortress It has four engines Now I'm talking out of this is Roma data ROMA. Yeah. The Yunkers are the German plane that I think they were trying to develop. I think that had Maybe eight engines or six engines in it mayaybe eight, but like It was a massive plane the Germans were working on And the theory was that and this all this ties in with the Nazi Bell discussion is that they were trying to build a plane. It is believable to go that would go from Europe to New York to Drop a bomb an atomic bomb. New York and that was in the works. But anyway, that that was the theoryies that their their Yunkers was the biggest plane. Lots of engines. The B twenty nine was the one that dropped the bombs on Hroshima and Nagasaki. sixty tons are more loaded down And the B twenty five is a was classified as a medium range bomber. So that's a twin engine plane. It's about half the size of the B twenty nine. The one in particular we're talking about is a TB twenty five N Mitchell variation Serial number fourty four dash two nine one two five. No one's going need that. Somebody will. Yeah, these planes loaded only weigh about thirteen tons. And also the other claim to fan of this plane is these were part of the infamous Dooittle Rid. Yeah, right. And if you even if you watch the movie Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay' Pearl Harbor My point being is that there's a whole section of the film where If you want to see a movie about Pearl Harbor that critics and historians say is super accurate actually, about the timeline, what happened. is a Tora Tora Tora great cast but that was never seen that. Oh you because it's a famous movie, but I have never seen it. Not only that I'm writing it down right now. Yeah. historians will say like that's very accurate, which is a rarity for Hollywood films. But Pearl Harbor at least they show a scene with Alec Baldwin. I think is I think he's Billy Mitchell. in the film where they show how they did the raid because they had to pair down those planes. Thereittle ra. Yeah, the Dittle Rid, right? So that's the Tokyo type of plane here fromrom the Dittle raid april nineteen forty two. This is four months after Pearl Harbor and Jimmy Dooittle who' also got a very storied career quite famous. He takes sixteen B twenty five s. off the deck of the USS hornet And he bombs the Japanese home islands with a lot of incendiary bombs specifically targeting their manufacturing and industry soft targets I'm saying soft targets because they didn't have any clue or suspicion or inkling that we could make it that far. That would be impossible. They wouldn't dare do that. Well, guess what If you dare Americans to do that, that's exactly what they're going to do They're going to take the hard way because you're going to be shocked when they come knocking on your door here. The B twenty five becomes one of the most produced American bombers of the war, which isn' a testament to how well it was designed and its usefulness Roughly ten thousand of them get built By nineteen fifty six, when this legend we're talking about takes place It's one of the workhorses of the US. Army Air Corps And then later the Air Force. But the fighting model by this point is gone. So what is left is the trainer variant and that is the TB twenty five n which is the version that gets converted for navigator training and like cargo work after the war ends. Now the other thing I was going to tell you about So yeah, as you'll know from the story, what they did is that they have to launch These are not meant to be launched off an aircraft carrier. okay? These are These are land based land runway, takeoff, landing type of aircraft are not meant to be catapulted And they had to be totally stripped down They only had enough, you have to do a ratio, a trade off between amount of bombs and amount of fuel you can do It was a one way trip And the idea was that it was all volunteers because they knew they were not coming back and if they did it would be a hard slog to get back to the homeland So a lot of them landed in China They crashed. One guy he's telling his story, I saw a clip landed in a Let's say a human manure field He of all places to land, I had to land there likeike he was just covered and the farmers come out like they're freaking out Yeah. But he made it back. But we wanted to show that we could touch them. And as the one Admiral Yamamoto I think said in Tor is that I think all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant Pardon me, that was just off top my head. It may not had have been that general, but it was one of the., no, it's interesting and now I do want to see that film. Well, coming back to the B twenty five, the plane at the center of this story and the Dittle raaid plane and all of that, this plane is about sixty seven feet across the wings. fififty three feet long sixteen feet tall at the tail. Keep that in mind. I thought that was interesting because if the river supposedly where it went down twenty five to thirty years halfway there. deep. Yeah. If the tail is intact, that's maybe twenty feet down. maybe or fifteen, who knows. Anyway, loaded weight around thirteen tons as I said a minute ago. And this matters for later. this particular aircraft for four dash two nine one twenty five was actually scheduled to be retired and decommissioned within about eighteen months of when this happened. It's an older airplane and in theory It's not carrying anything strategic, although we'll be talking about that in the. Well, as far as we know, right In this case they're saying it's just kind of doing rudimentary work. It's flying cargo and aerrands and this and that. The other thing I was going to mention on top of that is the other Now I don't know if he was flying the B twenty five, but If you recall our episode of The Mad Doctor of Spokane. Yes, the rich guy who is the Mad Doctor with throw these super lavish parties and people don't realize this, but a lot of celebrities of the time would come through Spokane and the areas because it's a great recreational region So there was a lot of water sport activities, lakes to go fishing and hunting and all that. And so they would come up to hang out. It was a resort area of sorts And so at this lavish party that a Billy Mitchell, I believe, was apparently at In the middle of the party's like, okay hold your Mitchell of the Mitchell Bomber. That's right. He's Yeah. justust for people who are, you know, keeping up here. I'm just It might have been literally a hold my beer watch this So he takes off from the party. says, I'll be right back and he comes back he goes to the airfield. It might have been the M have been Geiger, but he he comes back in a military aircraft, I believe, and dive bombs and buzzes the house Just for yucks, just for like fun Lands comes back to the party the head you like that? Yeah, So he was a character. Yeah, that was episode two hundred and thirteen, The Mad Doctor Spoan. V very interesting story. We had a lot of fun with that. And I was looking back and I was like, did we confirm what kind of aircraft he overflew the party and we weren't sure. We found some pictures of him with some of his planes that he had. We don't know which one He flew over. I don't think it was a Mitchell probably since that was government issue. but who knows? he is Mitchell, so you know, maybe It's a free one It's a free one, manufact. Anyway, in this case, what they're telling us, the official story is that this is basically a grocery getitter iss like to say. it's for training. The mission was a parts pickup They were supposed to fly from Nellis Air Force Base outside of Vegas to Olmsteed Air Force Base near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania pick up a load of aircraft parts or a UFO talk later. And on the way back, drop two passengers at Andrews Air Force Base outside DC. That's it. That's the whole flight The crew going east at least before they turned west to ditch. Why don't you go through the list here of who we have who are the souls on board? All right. so there were six souls on board for the leg that mattered. Major William L. Dotson, DOT S O N, not Dodson like Mar. But who knows, maybe distantly related. He was the pilot thirty three years old, World War two combat veteran shot down off the coast of Sicily once Korea combat veteran By every account, a really good pilot Th then also we have Captain John F. Jamasonon, a co pilot from Mechanicssburg, Pennsylvania, not too far from where this took place. Yeah, then we have a third pilot, Steve Tayback. Yeah. so Captain Steve Tayback. there's three pilots. Keep that in mind and Tayback is going to disappear from this story in a minute because he gets off the plane in Detroit The crew chief, however, was staff serergeant Walter Eugene Susy, S OO CEY. He was thirty two In various sources, they're listed as passengers riding along, but also military folks. Captain Jean Inraham and master Sergeant Alfred J Alan who was twenty six, also stationed at Nellis. plus an eighteen year old kid from Philadelphia named Charles Smith, airman secondcond class. Yeah, eighteen years old. And of course, this is the observation from folks my age. just In eras and generations past, how much they accomplished and how serious the accomplishments were Hving been down through World War two at such a young age, like what did I do at thirty three? Nothing. Yeah. I was editing commercials. I was like ye exactly. I was editing trailers for movies and helping the world how? Not really, just annoying people with my efforts. And that's it. It's like my grandfather was, I think he was telling me by the time nineteen or twenty owned his own gas station And that's the one that you see from Back to the Future where five guys run out to check the oil and to clean the windows and fill your tires and Full service He owned a house He was married and I think a couple years, yeah, when he was twenty one or twenty two went into World War two. when most guys were eighteen. you could get in at seventeen if you lied, I think and maybe younger, but He did all that and yeah, I think by twenty two or twenty three, my dad was bored. And a lot more than I've done at twice that age But you can't compare, it's a different time and all that. But anyway, these are accomplished men even for their young age. So I don't want you to think like just a bunch of, you know, goof balls at thirty, you know, goofing around here. These guys were hardened veterans some of them and knew what they were doing. and this route Again was from Nellis to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma where they ref fueled there, then they stayed overnight on january thirtieth. and then the next morning january thirty first, they head for Slf Ridge Air Force Base just outside of Detroit for the second refueling. And then at Tinker Air Force Base Before they leave, the maintenance crew installs a new right brake assembly and a new left outboard brake assembly on the airplane And Slfridge has been reporting ice and snow on the runways and Dotson Captain Dotson doesn't want to skid into anything. Just you know the technology here On this old forty six Ford I had that was passed out there. That was the like, oh, my grandfather also owned a car years before I was able to even afford one. That car was ten years old already when happened. It was a forord Yeah, nineteen forty six Ford. and you think like,h what's the model name? Like, no, that's it. That's the car that Ford made in nineteen forty six. Yeah. So it's everywhere. and unfortunately not the convertible that you see in Greece Thatable one. Yeah, right. It was we never had the collectible versions of anything, but it had the shocks were airplane shocks you know, that that kind of hinged shocks that you see. So It's still pretty complicated. I want to say the mechanics of this, but again, they've just been through a war. They know how these things function, how to repair them And as you as everyone knows, you have to be much more careful with an aircraft 'use you can't pull over something goes wrong. So here's the important thing about having that work done is that it just shows you that the pilot knows the aircraft and he knows the risks on a what's a relatively or supposedly relatively mundane mission. and he's thinking ahead about the conditions where he's going. Yeah. and that's my point here is that every pilot knows Every mission is not routine and not mundane in a way And I remember even when I was in high school, I had a good friend who had his pilot's license and his family, they owned a plane. You know, a small piper cub that I remember him take me for a ride uh, late one evening and, um, I was impressed by just him going through the checklist on the clipboard and checking every part of that aircraft, even for a joy ride And then later realized, Oh, I'm thankful he did that. get. you want to fly He He did' let me fly, but he knew he was doing. That's what I'm saying is that you have to be serious about this stuff. That's what you want to see. I'm like, you know what? takeake all the time you need. Yeahah. And it's like, do what do you have to go around with a clip or I said, just trust me Just go man. Yeah. But anyway, this this is going by the numbers. paint by numbers you say they they you know, the mission here They land at Slfridge at one thirteen PM in the afternoon, Eastern timeim. They're three and a half hours at this point from Olmstead. So now they have fuel And at this point, also the weather's manageable. Yes. And then they make a decision at Sel Ridge that the Air Force actually spends the rest of the year trying to back calculate. Oh back calculate. What do you mean by that? Just, you know, going back and taking a look at what was the was this part of the series of things that led to this disaster? Oh yes, of course Yes, okay. I get you with the investigation. Right. And you know, we've been down this road before with Amelia Earhart The night before she and Fred Noonan took off from Papa New Guinea Every little thing they did scrutinized on a granular level and as I was saying Everything is performed at a granular level because you h have to's if you want to survive. So The great thing about that kind of stuff is that it's charted somewhere. Yeah. And in their case, in Airhart's case, you know, they supposedly threw out water rescue gear to save weight so their fuel would last longer. Right, right, whichich may have played a part in whatever happened to them. And in this case, by the way, this this aircraft did not have anything of that type on board either just for Right. Something to know. But anyway, so we're at Slfridge outside of Detroit. It's raining. and sleeting There's a line of military aircraft waiting for the fuel truck and the wait's gonna to be two to three hours. So Tayback, he actually gets off here. He's not on the next leg, we said earlier Now there's six men on the airplane and Dotson decides he doesn't particularly want to wait for the fuel truck. Right. now why is this Well, because by the gauges, he doesn't need to. Here's the math the Air Force later wrote down in the summary of circumstances, the SOC of the accident report. And this is verbeta more or less from the unreredacted text The fuel remaining was considered adequate for three hours of flight, and the next leg of the flight would require only one hour and forty minutes. The decision was made not to refuel the aircraft, end quote. By the gauges, they've got three hours of fuel The flight to Olmstead is one hour forty. That's a, you know, essentially almost one hundred percent reserve. Yeah, it's a comfortable margin. Yeah. Now here's the wrinkle though The fuel gauges on a B twenty five of this vintage era were considered notoriously inaccurate. Yes, it It reminds me of my Austin Haley. Yes, Okaykay. well, before you ask you for that, ye, and you may have run across this yourself, I have gone through and taken apart a lot of that forty six forward I was talking about. Yeah. One thing is that the gas tank because it'll start to rust on the ins. Now they' they're coded these days. I think they were minimally back then some kind of protection, but not meant to be sitting around in a backyard for fifty years And they started to flake off. So I took the gas tank out and I had to put a new one from a junkyard in. and the float, because I always wonder this as a kid. Like how do you know how much I could have just asked my dad and my grandfather, both mechanics.. But I just I always wonder like how do they know how much gas is in there? Well, there's a very simple switch that has a rod and around, you know, ends and around hook of sorts And essentially there's a cork there That right. So it's just measuring the flatation level or the service level of the gasoline with a floating cork. And of course right L that like Yeah, the cork had rotted and so it wasn't keeping very good measurement, but Yeah, that's how it's gauged is that that there you go. What about the Austin Healy? Well, the fuel gauge and the Healy, this has been in my family since it was new in nineteen sixty four and that fuel gauge is more of a suggestion really or a kind of a guestimate of and it bounces around a lot. Yeah, Oh, that's right.ust kind of, you know, But on the plus side, you can fill it up with like eight dollars a gas and it'll drive hundreds of miles. Well Yes, everything's a trade off, but that's what I're saying like bounc the sloshing with the flloat gauge in there is maybe why are the needles bouncing? Yeah, yeah, there you go. And also British. Novamage to the Brits, but this car is very British. Thats tr. I don't want to say a whole lot more about it, but I'll tell you that it's positiveth. The positive terminal on the battery is grounded and the negative terminal is the one that does all the work. It's backwards from literally every other kind of car battery. Right you've ever seen. Yes, the early British cars were not known for their great electrical harnesses and whatnot. Yes. Well, in the case here with the Mitchell B twenty five Yeah. The way you actually verified your fuel level on the ground was Get this. Sbody climbed up on the wings with a dipstick. Right. But again, freezing rain Well, yes, so there's freezing rain and then there's very cold sleet, but that's You can access the the fuel filler cap there with on the wing and you just dipp it down And like I said, this is not meant for your convenience. Right. But you want to get an accurate measurement on that. Yeah if you're not trusting your gauges or whatever. But so this is the thing. noobody wants to stand on the way day that's, you know, there's ice noody got out there with a dipstick to do that in the sleet and also they wanted to get on their way. And so they didn't. And the three pilots, they looked at each other, looked at the gauges Looked at the sleat and trusted the gauges. So ye just like I do whenever I take the Austin Healy out for a drive But I always take my cell phone and stay off the highway. R did Morpheus suggest that you stay off the freeways. but ye, yeah, that's recommended anyway. But the point here is that there should have been plenty of margin. you know, like I said, if it's off a few gallons, no big deal, right? Yeah, this is this isn't necessarily a reckless decision. You know, everyone involved is qualified to make that call. And Captain Dodson alone has been flying combat aircraft since the early nineteen forties. this is what I was saying. They have tremendous veteran experience here. They've been through the thick of it in the worst conditions. So they take off. they go. And they lift off from Slfridge at two hundred forty three in the afternoon. Dotson moves to the pilot seat. he was a co pilot on the Tinker two Slfidge leg And Jameson takes the co pilot seat. Ingraham and Susy are in the forward crew compartment. And then Smith and Alaman are in the rear and they're flying instrument rules at seven thousand feet on a standard route Red Airway twenty Red sixty five, Green four. You know what those runway That's one thing I really wanted to study and learn. Now they're not runways. They're routes. Yeah, that's right. just I'm sorry I'm saying it in a different thing. I always wanted to understand how the traffic works on an airfield. Yeah. I don't know much about it. What I do know I learned from Microsoft fllight simimulator you talk in like twenty years ago when it first cameet. You're got be just like that the Robinhood guy who is stealing vintage planes and crashing them O having a simulator The barefoot bandit. Yeah. Yeah, I really don't like that guy. He ruins some guys handcrafted reconstructed aircraft just on a a whim. Yeah. Anyway, well, here's Listen So this is what we're talking about here. They have this route. they make their position reports First it's going to be Windsor, then Cleveland then Akron and then Columbiana, and then ono Butler. hereere's the thing I want to plant for later. reesearchers who examined the unreredacted SOC or summary of circumstances after the fact have tried to backcalculate, as I said earlier, the fuel burn. And I guess the math doesn't work. The numbers don't reconcile as to what happened here. The very first person who looked at this case in an official capacity, with documentary Access actually wrote in pencil in the margins that something didn't add up with the fuel.. Interesting. And this is before any of the rumors start forming. Yeah, before there's any rumor. there beforefore there's a Howard Hughes theory or a Vegas showgirl theory or anything else, we'll be getting to those But the mystery starts inside the official report in this case. Yes, you know, official reports spark many legends and rumors and conspiracy theories honestly. Yes, they do. So the guys hit the Butler radio Beacon. This is seventeen nautical miles northeast of Pittsburgh and the gauges, the fuel gauges start to move more in a bad way Oh, okay. you' like tapping on them. remember the u like the opening of u clos en counters. I just love that. the uh tap on the mechanical gauges to get them free. So But these are agues that are moving more than they should have. you know, not by a lot, but enough that one of the three pilots in the cockpit notices movement The flight had been conducted with and now this is the reports language here Normal engine power settings and the mixture beyond the auto lean position endnd of quote. Now what this means is that they were running as efficiently as the airplane could possibly run conurnning fuel and and all that. So they're flying clean, pretty clean. Yeah, you could say that. they're flying clean and the gauge is still moved. So By the time they reach the new Alexandria beacon which is thirty one nautical miles east of Greater Pittsburgh The report describes it as another quote here obbvious and unusual decrease in the fuel indication on all tanks And quote About one hundred and twenty gallons it was indicated. Okay, so how much should it be? Well, a lot higher. okay by the math that they did at Sulfridge This should have been substantially higher. So if you understand what we're saying here is that They're burning through a whole lot more fuel then their calculations and the gauges would have indicated Right? Right. Well burning, burning might not be the right word. We don't really. Well, that's true. It could be leaking. right. somethingomet's wrong here. Somet is in that. Yeah. Yeah, this is an adding up. It should be a relatively simple gauge. It's fuel, you know, how much it burns at what rate, at what altitude against what headwinds and all that. That's all calculated.. Again, much again same thing with Amelia Earhard That's what a lot of people have back engineered and reported over like, well, this is where they should have been. So if they did run out of fuel, they would have ditched here But as we know from Amilia Earhart, there's a lot of other factors involved which could alter that calculation. So in this case, though, they're about forty minutes out from Ulmstead. So at about four o'clock in the afternoon, four PM Eastern time Jameson Kys Pittsburgh Center on UHF Channel five and asks for a change of destination Bea now they're starting to feel like, okay, should we take some action here? Yeah. So they decide that they want to get to that their best shot is at the Greater Pittsburgh airport Whether there's three thousand feet with broken cloud cover, ten miles visibility, manage Yeah not bad. Yeah. So They're going to put down at Greater Pittsburgh and figure out where the gas is going. Right. And just about three minutes later at four hundred three PM, they spot a hole in the cloud cover Now whether that was punched about by UFO It's like it u Oh haair. I don't know. but they cancel the instrument flight rules clearance at four hundred four PM and then des secend through the hole into the visible world, right? So now you can see where you're going They dropped down to about three thousand feet as indicated The terrain over Western Pennsylvania at that location is eleven hundred to about twelve hundred feet. And that means they're flying at maybe eighteen hundred feet above the ground you know, that height, it's basically rooftop altitude for an airplane this size. So pretty low for an aircraft this large. and when they look down at the gauges again, Now the wing tanks are reading empty. notot a good sign. The main tanks are showing about just eighty gallons. Yeah. and everything is still going down fast. The fuel levels dropping at a rate that doesn't match anything. and they can't see any kind of leak. They're looking around. they can't see anything going on. The engines are operating normally. The airplane is doing everything it's supposed to be doing But the fuel is leaving the tanks faster than the engines could possibly be burning it or consuming it. Yeah. so you have a dangerous mystery brewing here and we have now the three pilots looking at the same problem And none of them are able to explain it at least in the air. They're now over the populated southern fringe of Pittsburgh and they alter their course south to avoid any housing because they realize if they go down, they don't want to crash into any houses And Dotson is already In real time, choosing where the airplane is going to come down if it has to come down. So if they have to ditch You want something flat and level, if possible and unpopulated and Greater Pittsburgh Airport is now out of their reach. So he calls for the Allegheny County airport instead. which is about fifteen nautical miles southeast. Yeah. so he's running out of options. Like where can they get to? Yeah, so as this progresses, your choices now are becoming severely limited. Right. So then at four hundred nine PM The Monongahila Rriver appears in the windshield in the windscreen here, like it becomes visible. And now both engines quit Three thousand feet indicated at this point. Jameson keys the Mday. know, Mday, mayayay, P twenty five going into the river. and that phrase gets logged into the Allegheny County Tower at four hundred nine PM on the dot Right. And at this point, the Allegheny County airport is out of the question. They're not going to make it. Yeah, exactly. There's no airport anywhere for this airplane. Anymore Best option now is just the river. Have you been following all the hooppla about weight loss injections? There's no way to get around it, sir. Yeah, especially on TV with all the celebrities and ye you know, people and they cddertainenly look great. But before that even, because I'm really curious about medications that have alternate uses to them. and I don't know if you probably knew this, but did you know that those weight loss injections are a type of receptor agonist called GLP one. and the way that they work, well actually, it was initially designed to treat type two diabetes But then they found that you know there's weekly injections and they really transform the whole weight loss landscape And the way it works is that they mimic natural gut hormones, the ones that regulate appetite And they signal your brain that you're full and then they slow down stomach emptying. Oh, that's interesting. So there it's a trick. As our friend Travis used to say, it's a trick. Your body's being tricked. Which is also pretty interesting to me, but you know, everybody, yes, you're right. Everybody's talking about the weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic. And yeah, as we said, they work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite But hold on a minute. You know what if you're looking to lose weight but you're really not interested in painful weekly injections. And especially once you start hearing about some folks that have those really intense side effects. Well, that's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called lean. and the results are remarkable. Yeah, the studied ingredients in lean have been shown to lower your blood sugar. and what happens then is that it burns fat by converting it into energy Therefore, you curb your appetite and cravings so you're not as hungry. But listen, lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brick House Nutrition created Lean for frustrated dieters with ten or more pounds to lose. That's right, And here is even better news. 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The homestead high level bridge at this point is full of cars in both directions you already brought it up earlier, but what does it remind you of? Well, this is all it's got the vibe of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia I think o the small town monsters' crew Seth and gang were just there. Oh. So they held lot of great pictures on Instagram. Yeah, Check that out folks. Oh Check that out myself. If we if we ever come into some money, I would pay just to be on there just to hang out and eat their food and yes and pal around it looks so much fun. shooting one of those But this is the Silver Bridge business is it's about eleven years later on december fifteenth nineteen sixty seven from the incident we're talking about here. But almost about the same time of day for fifty eight PM And it is packed with cars just before it fails. And if you remember and are familiar with it, some would say that the mothman gave warning to about a year, just about a year exactly before this incident And was seen after. So the mothman is knitted into the legend. Yeah. and earlier, you asked about the comm if there was any common ground between the Wyard Tuss and the Silver bridge, but there's not the it's a different kind of structure. that's called Iibar chain brridge, I think it is. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. And that one they tracked its collapse down to one of those failing I bar chain suspension bridge, I should say, which is different from a trus bridge. There are trusses, but it's actually more I think a more complicated design then the bridge we're talking about tonight, but So yeah, anyway, similar environment for sure, but no mothman in this legend that we But there are people crossing the homestad high level bridge from the south side coming home from the J andL mill that we mentioned earlier, Pe going south for whatever reason it is, people did that in nineteen fifty six and up the river From the northeast, a B twenty five bomber is descending toward the bridge silently. Yeah, no sound and not by choice. The propellers. the B twenty five are feathered, which makes it easier to glide Do you want to explain what feathering the propellers means to her folks? You're putting that on me. I don't really know, but I think what it means is that you angle the blades for the least amount of resistance that the plane can maximize its forward velocity and and have the most lift on the wings spite of the fact that it's not under power. I'm going with that. Okay. Yeahes. so I mean, I know we have so many real li pilots We do have a few pilots in there can somebody can correct me, but that's my that's my guess on what I believe that that means. Yeah. and in this case, people on the bridge This be drivers and passengers. They see this thing in their peripheral vision and they stop their cars in the middle of the bridge And witnesses said the next morning that the plane cleared the bridge by about thirty feet. So quite a buzzing. Yes. Andy Mask at the Heinz History Center you as you folks there, know Heinz Ketchup and all their other fabulous pickle products big in the Pennsylvania Pittsburgh area. They interviewed many of the people involved over the years And the estimation is now more more really fifty feet. Right. Still pretty low. Yeah makes quite an impression. and the eyewitnesses on a bridge looking up at an airplane donon't agree really on the altitude, but both numbers We came across in our research. Yeah. either way, it's low. It's a much too low for comfort. And as you've seen, remember the just just happened a couple of weeks ago, the airliner that clipped the light standard at that one airport. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It flipped a truck too. That's whichich has to be a wild commute home Yeah Well, this plane here, it's line up downstream south, southwest And the pilot now has the flaps down and the wheels are up. He doesn't want the gear catching the water and then flipping the plane. So yeah, if you followed that Sully Sullenberger, he did the exact right thing. Yeah, exactly. Because again, if you have big jets hanging down, those scoop the water which will flip the plane. It takes a little bit of skill and you know, ice running through your veins. The river is now about eight to ten knots of current on that day. eight hundred to one thousand feet wide right at that splashdown point, the width of the river. and the river is about twenty five to thirty five feet deep as we've said. and then the water is about thirty five degrees. So chiley. And yeah, and the air is twenty seven. So so it's below fif. Yes, Chile all around. Well, it's a typical Pittsburgh winter. Yeah Also pretty chilly here. and the Pittsburgh press. The next morning quoted a witness who saw it splash and said it looked like, quote, a huge geyser, end of quote. So like a massive amount of water being pushed up White froth, vertical, going up taller than the bridge. Yeah And it held on for a second, this coll up of water then it collapsed and the airplane, which is now still perfectly intact Structurally fine is now floating in the middle of the Mongahila River. There's one description I saw. This was from a Facebook post by a haunted history tour company in Pittsburgh So's it's not got the tier one source level that we you know like But it said that the plane actually submerged when it crashed and then came back up. I suppose it' possible sureure Yeah. So it was possible But anyway, when it hit the water, the impact apparently also rotated it so that the nose was facing south evenven though the river was pulling it to the west, according to one account anyway. and the men, as we'd said, they had no raft or life jackets. And then the no started going down, so they're moving toward the back of the plane. But reportedly, no one seemed panicked. And in fact, they all were like whistled at the same time together to try to get somebody's attention on shore. Yeah, there was one guy who was working near the Glenwood Bridge heard the mell. You got a boat Yeah but he did not. And, you know, but boats were on the way, but like I said, it's For military people, especially ones that have been through combat. Yeah, they usually do not panic because panicking can get you killed. Thats others around you killed. Remember it was it zero dark thirty, likeike somebody says, anyybody here been in a Halo crash? Yeah. And like most of the CLTM operators raise their hand. Yeah, ye, there you go. So yeah, it's not ideal, but you know what to do. So they don't seem to be panicking. Yeah. And so again, we had six men aboard. All of them are alive. None of them are apparently injured. They climb out They're on the upper surfaces of the plane on the wings, the fillage on top of the cockpit, while they can be Airplanes drifting south southwest at the speed of the current. toowward the Glenwood Bidge the next bridge down, toward Beck's Run, which the road we mentioned earlier Now with all of these witnesses, I mean, we're predating cell phones here, but word is out and the city is responding. Yeah, and they're actually responding pretty fast. The first call comes in at four thirteen PM. So just after Slashdown, a local citizen named James Freeman Operator Walt Gellk at the Pittsburgh Police Communication Center U And within seconds, it's classified as a major disaster And then other operators, Howard Wacker and Regis O'Donnell takeake the microphones and then start dispatching. seeven ambulances, five police cars and everyvery motorcycle officer they have to the scene. Yeah. The Marine radio station WCM out in Irwin keeps a clear channel for what they're already calling crash calls Joness and Loghl, that's J and L Steel. They their dispatcher at Ruthergland Street that Force mentioned earlier. a man named Frank Kuzak sends out JN L's diesel towboat Titan under Captain James Cyipher and two more towboats, the Charles Zubk and the Beaver are also already moving toward the drifting ple Right, peopleeople are closing in here And the Air Force report says the plane has been floating by this point about ten to fifteen minutes. Yeah. Andy Mask at the Heinz History Center cites eleven which is probably the most accurate single number. I would guess here. So let's say eleven minutes Six men on the wings of an airplane drifting downstream in a swift and freezing river Kning that the airplane is going to sink. That's going to happen and knowing they can't stay with it. And also knowing the water is cold forty five degrees And they're watching towboats race towards them and also have to figure the towboats might not get there in time. As you said earlier, after the crash, there's a suggestion that things were, you know, both calm and also terrifying at the same time. Absolutely. So now we're on to the actions happening while this thing is down Yeah. And before the airplane sinks Wh six men are still standing on it in the freezing Rriver We need to tell you who two of those men were because In about eight minutes, one of them is going to drown in front of his copi Yeah, this is horrible. They all they all survived the accident, but they did not all make it to shore. Yeah, that twist of fade it always gets me. when I, you know, hear about a veteran coming home like surviving three tours and Helman provroince or just, you know, Afghanistan and And then some accident, car accident or someone gets shot by some idiot. They survived all that. you come home and something dumb takes your life. It's just one of those things you would think could be avoided. but is an extreme situation here and Captain Ge P. Inraham of South Charleston And then the contemporaneous newspaper articles are all over the place about the state And then even the spelling of his name But the Air Force called him Ingrraham. So I'm talking about the differentiation and his name spelling here. The Pittsburgh press spelled it Ingrraham So if you go to research this on your own, just know that. But he was in the forward crew compartment when the engines quit And he was just a passenger on the airplane. Yeah. And then we have again, the aforementioned that we brought up earlier Staff Sergeant Walter Eugene Susy, the crew chief, thirty two years old, born july twenty ninth, nineteen twenty three Married to a woman named Patricia, who was a Baptist minister's daughter. They had four children, three girls and a boy his parents lived in Palmer, Alaska. Right. And one thing I want to comment here, if you've never seen it, take a look at pictures online of the cockpit inside of Mitchell B twenty five or really any other military aircraft. becausecause what you have to keep in mind when designing military aircraft is space is premium. So is weight, right And so it's very cramped T most people's standards, you're sitting by your c pilot shoulder to shoulder practically any you know, war fighting cockpit here is that it's very compact and cramped. You got lot of instruments. And I think with a Mitchell, you have to climb up it's not a straight shot like it would be on a passenger aircraft, right? A passenger plane where it's a straight walk. So Yeah, it's just it's not easy to move around much like it wasnt on BA Earhart's Electra, where Fred Duned to get to the back had to crawl at his belly over gas tanks. Right. Now getting back to Jameson Yeah, we know this because the report mentions this specifically Yeah He goes to check that all six men can swim. Yeah. and then they take off their shoes And there's a log, fortunately in the water nearby, big enough for some of them But not all of them. And now we're back to the floating door in Titanic. Tit So how do we know this about this log Right. And we know this because the SOC, this summary of Circumstances does mention that, the unreredacted version of it The quote is Sergeant Alaman and Airman Smith and Major Dodson reached the nearby log successfully becausecause the logs seem too small for all six Sergeant Ooman swam tohore And that's the end of the quote. And the log holds three people. Alaman gets to it first He does the math and then he strikes out for the bank the river bank. alone in thirty five degree water with a very strong current. Yeah, and he barely makes it. but I would say also That amount of physical exertion is maybe helping with your body temperature here. Right. Now a Baldwin police lieutenant named Charles Kelosi sees him from the south bank of the river And then a truck driver from Alliance, Ohio. Don Devine or Deivine. Age thirty two He is a driver for the J. Miller compompany of Cleveland. He also sees a And divine, he wades into the river to get to him and gets about twenty five feet out. And then the cold becomes too much and retreats. And he comes back in when Alaman finally reaches the branches of the bank on the side of the tree branches here and he grabs him And Kelosi pulls them both ashore Dotson andmith stay with the log. I just want to if you've ever been you've ever been in really Super cold water. Oh God, yes. ye. Yeah For most that have it, I want to relate. I just remember one time it was I was on a family trip to Glacier Park. Yeah. Yeah, Northwestern Montana Beautiful. E everybody should go. It's one of the most beautiful national parks in the country it was a super hot day and there's I remember my grandparents were there like hey, you want to take a dip? They're just going to pull off sitting lawn chairs and relax for a bit. Yeah from the drive and they said, well, you could go take a dip in the lake there. and I can't remember the lake of it, but it's gllacier park so right. I just remember like, oh, it's so hot. this would be so refreshing. Get on the swimsuit and the middle of this very small lake or even pond size kind of a body of water is kind of murky green in the middle That's because it's melting glacier water. Right. And I get out it's like it was just so hot. I'm sweating. I get out to about my knees Then up to my hips and the water is so cold And I was young and healthy back then. and the knees started hurting so bad. It's like, okay, I can't take much more of this. So I dove in quickly. It was quite uncomfortable, but it was refreshing. Yes. But my point being as you think you gets like, o, how cold could it be? but your joints start aching bad Yeah and least mind it. So you start to cant last one of these sci fi movies, what happens when you take your suit off in space Yeah. Yeah. Well, so coming back to the log here, the tug that we mentioned earlier or the tow boat, the Titan from the JN L Mill with Captain James Cipher, it reaches all great names by the way. Yeah really very great cinematic. Yeah. It reaches them in about fifteen minutes after the splash downown it. Mark Brandon and Isaac Dominiick of the Titan' crew pulled Dotson out of the water and warm him up in the engine room Smith was found a little later, clinging to a log of his own by the crew of another towboat, the Henry Zubk, and brought ashore at the JN L Coalock at Hazelwood Avenue. But what about Jameson? What happened with Jameson? Yeah, well, Jameson, he found a small wooden post that was floating in the water. So thank God, it's polluted. Yeah then somewhat But but it's not really big enough to be a flootation device. It's just enough to keep his h up out of the water. But he held onto it. And the Pittsburgh pololice River Patrol pulled him out on the opposite opposite of Beck's run. R. So that's now for survivors who have been rescued. Right. So Captain Ingraham was watched by Jameson the whole time. Jameson saw him in the water, saw him struggling But then at some point in the report is pretty clinical about this in the way that Air Force reports are clinical, Jameson observed Inraham to disappear beneath the water. Yeah. And Sergeant Susy was last seen on what the report calls unidentified debris Right Then he left it and then he was seen last swimming toward the left bank of the Mon And sadly, he went under about fifty or sixty feet from the shore. The sad circumstances here. Pittsburgh police assistant superintendent, Lawrence Maloney was quoted the next morning as saying and this was our opening quote tonight, onene of them disappeared in that dirty water less than fifty feet from the men who were trying to get to him. That's what hurts. So close and yet just too far. Yeah. But thirty five degree water will kill a healthy adult on average in about fifteen to twenty minutes or thirty minutes. So about fifteen to thirty minutes is your expected survival time And what happens is the cold water shocks you first and then you have a gasp reflex Which means you have an involuntary intake or inhale of water. Yeah And then progressively incapacitated as the body shunts the blood away from the limbs. Right. So everything kind of slows down That's just the reaction. So the plane drifted about a mile from where it had splashed down and then it sank. Ingraham and Susy were were gone, they passed and Fmen were now on their way to the Montefiori hospital and the McGe hospital. The whole rescue from the first call of the police operator to the four survivors arriving at the hospital took about seventeen minutes. Yeah, not a whole amount of time, but in that amount of time, a lot of damage can happen. And at this point, the airplane was now gone too. Yes, it was. So the next morning, february first, nineteen fifty six, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter named the Fororsythia was dragging the river near Beck's run and they had a three hundred and fifty pound anchor that they were dragging across the bottom trying to find the airplane. This is what dragging is. when you hear them say o, we dragged lake, drag the river, dragg when the police do that, that's you're literally dragging something, trying to hook something. And in this case, the Cynthia did hook something. Yeah, something big. That's right. that the crew of the Fororsythia thought they had snagged one of the wings of the B twenty five Yeah, so this is so far, you know, this is pretty straightforward and going as expected You know, they're not going to imagine that they won't find this plane pretty quickly, right? I mean again, not that deep. Yeah the currents running, but there should be doable. You know, this thing' thirteen tons It's sixty seven feet across So they snag this thing and then start hauling it towards the surface and then and then the anchor slips. course. The wing or whatever it was goes back down. So they try again. They they come around for a second pass. they hook it again And this time the load was heavy enough that the two inch steel tow line snapped from the tension. That's a serious tow line. N something you could probably coil up by yourself. Yeah, and it's probably one of the lines that they use for the barges that they're running around all the time with, you know, coal or whatever on them. So They're beginning to think it snapped because they had hooked something close to the full weight of the thirteen ton plane. And then now of course, they're going to try for the charm, the third try. Yes. So this third try, they got a smaller anchor lost it. The hook sheaered off and went down and after that, the Fythia never reestablished contact with the airfame or whatever it was that they had theoretically hooked I do wonder what they actually hooked here, but of course logic simple logic would say it was the plane. So the only confirmed posting and contact now that we're talking about that anyone ever had might have been the airplane was a Coast Guard cutter that hooked it Th times And it lost it three times. in the span of about twenty four hours. Yeah. that's it. That's the only physical contact. And they never laid eyes on it. right As far as I can find in any of the reporting. So one has to wonder if that could have been something else, although something that large, you would think they would know it was down there if it wasn't the plane the Fororsythia's ship's loog, the actual log book where the captain wrote down what happened, That's in the Heinz History Center's archive in Pittsburgh in a collection called MSS four six The B twenty five Recovery Group collllection, which there's a lot of references to online, Unfortunately, it is not digitized. There's some part of you can find online I would love to have been able to access that for for this episode, but o yeah, I need to get there in person and I can't quite get p for they They probably don't let your photographer take notes. you have to just read it while you're there. It's going be When we covered Sheriff Henry Plummer. Yes. There was one great book that was in a Los Angeles main public library downtown. It's like, you You couldn't check it out. So you had to it's like, what am I going to come back every day for a month and read it? like yeah, if you want to. But I could take some snapshots with my phone of it, but yeah it's just one of those things anyway every conspiracy theory you're going to hear in the second half of this episode Every story about midnight cover upps and trucks moving wreckage out of town oy now it's sounding like the the Kesburg case, right There's always flat bed trucks covering something up moving them out of town And then here's one the CIA hiring drivers to haul plane parts out to to missile bases. Yeah. every one of those theories conspiracy or not starts right here with a snagged wing and a slipped anchor and a snapped two inch line. Right. because at this exact moment on the morning of february first, nineteen fifty six The U.S military theoretically knows where this plane is. 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So stop getting lost in the slob by heading on over to squarespace dot com slash legends to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain using code legends Forrest and Scott, thank you for supporting their sponsors I'm Friday. let's get back to the show All right, so we left off on february first, nineteen fifty six, the morning after the splashdown, with the fororscythia hooking what may or may not have been the wing. threeree times and losing it three times. That was the only confirmed post snking contact Anone ever may have made with the airframe. And I want to remind everybody and I went back and checked through all our notes and research on this There was differing maybe apocryphal stories saying that somebody did see it come out of the water a little bit, but it seems like the reality of it is they're not even really sure what they hooked There was a lot of stuff at the bottom of that river. But still, researchers point to and during when you read the reports on this, they're like, no, they hooked it That's not a foregone conclusion. I just want to keep that in everybody's mind right there But after that, you know, the cable snapped and they had all those problems, the search was just searching. twowo days later, february third, The Army Corps of Engineers brings in a dredging barge and runs one hundred and fifty passes up and down the river Nothing. You're right. We're talking about just two days later, just two days. Keep that in mind. Also you made a good point. I was going to reiterate if you did not and that officially, no one actually saw what was hooked So again, I know that sounds conspiratorial, but like they don't know what they grabbed a hold of They arere assuming, of course, it's the plane. So again, that's an unknown So now we're talking about the Army Corps of Engineer bringing in specialists on Monday, february thirteenth The tug Redstone, run by a man named Russell White comes up from Pittsburgh with two experts from the Louisville Engineers's Office This would be Carlos Wilson and P. L. Sharp And they've got an echo depth findinder. Okaykay. Now we're getting technical here So they sweep the stretch between the point which is the confluence of the Allegheny and the Mon at downtown Pittsburgh and the Slashdown site And then just below the Amico oil plant. Remember Amico is a company? Are they still around? Yeah, I think that Yeah, I don't know. they this area is it would be near Becks runun Road. Okaykay and the needle draws a hole two hundred feet wide, forty seven feet deep water here The river around it is twenty feet deep. And what that means is the needle finds a hole two hundred feet wide forty seven feet deep. Now remember, the river itself is about twenty feet deep And because it's a heavily trafficked industrial river Navigation hazards are a serious threat not only to safety But investment by you know, we're talking about giant industrial powerhouses that are all on the river right there. There should not be any secrets on the bottom. No case. they can't afford the risk. The depthfinder shows them the hole Here's the thing about that. The hooks can't get into it. You can't drag down in there. So they mark it on the chart and they keep working the humps and the rises on the bottom in their other areas And the depthfinder helps them highlight that stuff and figure out where they need to go. Now, White, the tug captain told the post cazette the next day, quote You'd think we'd at least pick up something or see some wreckage by now. We've searched every inch of the shoreline and haven't even seen anything that resembles a piece of the plane end quote Sharp added The lack of wreckage would indicate that the plane's still in one piece. It was a heavy plane, so it can't have drifted too far, even in this current heavy current actually, he said in quote. So Yeah. so things are not making much sense at this point. Quick anecdote here and it just reminded me of like hooking something that's mysterious just popped into my mind. I went fishing with my great grandparents one time. you know, just three of us And we're out on this lake and something caught my line Yeah, I wasn't that old, but I'd been fishing a lot before that. And whatever it was was so big and heavy and Forceful it bent the pole by fishing pole all the way down curve of the robat Okay, yeah first are excited in that millisecond of like you got a bite And I just held on. And then you panic like what I should have done was releasase some drag on the reel, right? So just kept going. But like I got this like, oh my God. And it just like bent the pole all the way down I'm starting to make exciting like, Ohh my Godd, grab a graa. look at, look at this And then whatever it was did not budge a bit. It just snapped the line No And the poll springs up And I think by the time they started paying attention to me, you know, it's like there wass something big. like, Oh, that's nice. Yeah They knew obviously they could see that the line was snapped, but I'm going to guess that it was maybe a massive sturgeon, which can it can grow from like eight to ten to I think some people said fourteen feet. So massive fish, but that's how because like I said, there was no poll or a play with it It just went down to the it just freaked me out a little bit, but I was still exciteding. Anyway, getting back to what's fascinating here because think about this. For example, you know, when we did our series on flight nineteen The Gulf stream current was a huge potential issue, you know, because depending on where the planes may have gone down They could have traveled miles between impacting the surface and drifting to the bottom I want to reiterate, strange things happen underwater. It's like You think like, oh, there's a Titanic it should be easy to find or all these other shipwrecks There's a lot of travel between where it goes under the surface and where it lands That's right. So yeah, this thing could have traveled miles between impacting the survice and drifting to the bottom But here, we're only dealing with twenty five to thirty feet. We're not dealing with an ocean, right Right And in the case of this one hole, you could say, forty seven feet deep, you know, which honestly It's still not that deep comparatively. But either way, the point is the plane should not have gone that far. and even if the current had been more extreme, the river is so shallow that there shouldn't be a problem finding this plane, right? I mean ye't it's not making sense. Anyway, We're not talking about class three rapids here. This thirteen ton plane didn't go like flying down with people yelling and screaming, wearing light jackets, you know, It's just kind of drifting down. It's a strong current to be sure. but So the next day, february fourteenth, the Air Force makes the call The wreckage is not a hazard to navigation. They know this because they've done all the dragging. they couldn't find it So the search is being abandoned. fourteen days after the splashdown, but and you may have been wondering about this, where are the two guys who drowned because we haven't talked about that yet. theirir bodies not turned up. Yeah, that' it's disturbing and it worries so. So the Air Force report has a line in it that goes unchanged for months actually. It's quote, no trace has been found of Captain Inraham Sergeant Susy or the aircraft in quote. So Pittsburgh's Rriver patrol apparently at that time was and maybe still watching the water through February and into March And river police know that in the winter, I guess, the bodies usually surface fourteen to twenty one days after a drowning But it was almost four months before those two were found. And part of that was because the river was running high and it was particularly cold all winter. So. Right, right. Well, Walter Susy's body was finally recovered on may twenty eighth, nineteen fifty six And that will be exactly seventy years ago, five days after we post this episode to our feed. Yeah. Another anniversary is a couple of days when we started the record on this is the anniversary of Mount Stain. Helens ex. That's right That's may eighteenth, nineteen eighty And then Captain Gean Ingram's body was recovered later that spring. So quuite a while, more so than you would normally expect The exact date and burial location didn't they don't come through cleanly in the public record that we've seen So it's a little burky there, but he's returned to his family in South Charleston. And the plane, however, as you obviously know by now, was never recovered to this day, still notcovered. Well there's hence the mystery. you know, at Monte Fiore Hospital The day after the splashdown Colonel Edward F. Roddy. He was the local Air Force Unit commander gives a statement to the Pittsburgh press, quote The plane a B twenty five gave out of fuel. The gauge was apparently wrong The engines quit To avoid hitting any homes, the plane was intentionally landed in the river. Qote But we have to point out something here B twenty five' ss had four fuel gauges, not just one Yeah, so that adds a layer to this. We've already pointed out that they're famous for being inaccurate, but it's unlikely that all four would have failed in identical ways. Yeah, sounding a little like the wet whiskey compass kind of a thing or maybe. Yeah. I don't know. anyway. Well, unless they have an an accuracy design flaw, right they wouldn't have failed. But if they had won this extreme You'd think they would have been running out of fuel all the time, right? Right? I mean, just in general, right? Yeah is congenal kind of thing. The standard configuration for these planes was four tanks twowo in the left wing and then two in the right wing and those were divided into forward and aft or rear tanks. So there were four main quantity gauges And then on top of that to fuel pressure gauges or two indicators anyway that monitoreor the fuel pressure for the left and the right wing You know, for these radial engines, which were the right R twenty six hundreds in the B twenty five, all right Both of those pressure gauges might appear in a single indicator Okay, but the point is With four gauges indicating levels and two gauges monitoring fuel pressure If something's wonky, there's a lot of information there to make a deduction from, right? The more more data points you have easier it is to triangulate a problem. Right, exactly. And and this is something that I thought was weird about what Colonel Roddy said. If the quote to the Pittsburgh press is accurate and we know from on this show over the years, a lot of times that stuff is just barely slapped in there. but he supposedly said the gauge was apparently wrong. I'm quoting that. The gauge was apparently wrong and use the word gauge singular. Yeah. You'd think As an air Force commander you know, there's multiple gauges in that aircraft and most aircraft. So you think you would have said gaug. it's a dumb thing for me to bump on, I guess, but it ges rise to a made up observation to cover something else happen or just a quick statement to say hey, nothing to see here, stop asking any questions kind of. Right. posossibly. I mean, maybe it's nothing. you folks would be surprised not Yeah about all the time Scott and I we werere all flub a line and I want to or I want to make sure the intonation is right because I misspoke. It's pretty common. And especially under a pressure situation like that, we're trying to make a statement case and point. I was on jury duty once And there was an officer from the ATF alcohol, tobacco firearms for those in the states and also explosives. so ATFE And they were testifying about finding a gun on the suspect And the guy who's supposed to be yeah, he's with the ATF. He's a firearms expert And he said like, yes, there was a forty millimeter weapon And I like, well, that's a grenade launcher. Like that's you know, this is this is under oath, you know, and this is for their record. You know, there's a stenographer taking notes here. It's like And I just like, whoa, that's Well, if you're entering into that, I mean, I don't know if that's a technicality that can get somebody off because like, well, then you don't know what you're talking about What he meant was a forty caliber, which I think would be about right ten millimeteround. So you know he missed Maybe just Mbe this guy just kind of said under pressure said the wrong. You never know, but it is a curious p like a R flag. No, no, no, no. But it is a strange thing to me, though. It It's going to know there's multiple field gauges in that aircraft. So you would think, but you know, look the speculation about what this flight may have been transporting And this light takes on a life of its own Yeah C to be an atom bomb, nerve gas or Howard Hughes And Vegas showgirls or separately Vegas show Girls. Yeah. look at the speculation about the whole flight of Glenn Miller, you know, the the jazzband leader. I kind of wantan to cover Glenn Miller. We should. I don't know how much there is to cover. It's kind of like you went up, you didn't come down. Well, no, there's a lot more to it. as we were told by one of our friends and compatriots on Beds, glitters Yeah Anomaly Christmas show. I didid a whole episode on that. Yeah. So there's a lot there actually. Or think about this, Cold War era, right? a Soviet defector being couldould have been Mafia Money, who knows? or communications gear from arerea fifty one or Wright Pat or Cadavers is from Roswell. Okay now we're getting into my favorite territory. like Mai Island, likeike is this debris from something? And did the debris cause the crash or something to evaporate the plane? I don't know Whatever Pittsburgh was doing in in the fifties and sixties. You know, whatever they were anxious about somebody eventually put it on that plane, maybe. Yeah. Andy Mesic at the Heinz History Center put it well in a twenty twenty three interview with the Pittsburgh City paper He said, It's turned into kind of a fun ghost story for Pittsburghers. But to Dodson, he lost two crew members. He never wanted to talk about it afterwards. Yeah, that's completely understandable. There's always often tragedy at the heart of these mysteries. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket Visit progressive. com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive casualty insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I'm going to be honest with you. I am online way more than I probably should be. And between me and everyone else at my house, we've got a zillion screens going on at any given moment. So when my internet slows down, it is a full crisis. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need optimum famously Fast fiber Internet Optimum fiber blows flaky five G out of the water and keeps it cool with the fastest and most reliable speeds that don't slow when things heat up. And right now, they have the deal of the summer, just thirty dollars a month for five years. So don't wait, callall eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today Famously Fast Fiber for thirty dollars a month for five years. You can't beat it Terms apply, see optimum d. com for details need to reduce carbon emissions in your business Exxon Mobile can help As a global leader in carbon capture and storage, we're working to reduce industrial emissions including those in our own operations, while helping businesses stay competitive. so you can focus on raising your ambitions while lowering your emissions. Exxon Mobile. Let's deliver. This is Sandy H. Crane, shadowy curator of the Astonishing Legends Facebook Group's NISA Awards. Will your name be detected in the ports? Join us over in the group to find out. Now back to the show. Why don't you tell us about some of the other theories here as we get into the stretch? Okay, yeah. so we need to start with the wild ones. These were hard to categorize, but they break into roughly four groups or four clusters. There's the midnight removal theory. That's the one I want to start with if you don't mind for us. This comes from a Pittsburgh family whose account has been shared online in recent years It goes a little something like this The storyteller's grandfather worked the overnight shift at the Mesta Machine pllant in Homestead. And this is a big industrial steelworks build just up the river from the Slashdown site And on the night of the crash, the grandfather was sent home from a shift early because the rail tracks on the south side of the Mongahila the stretch from Duquainne down to the south side had been closed And on that same night, the storyteller's father and uncle At this time, both teenagers walked toour the Glenwood Bridge to see what was happening They saw portable spotlights illuminating the Hazelwood trainyard across the river When they tried to get closer, they found police at the bridge and military personnel turning their friends back from the yards Now years later, This guy's father worked alongside a man who had been on shift in the Hazelwood yard that night And the coworkers said that just after midnight Recovery crews dragged the fuselage and one wing out of the river the wing off then loaded both pieces onto a flat bed train and were gone before sunup. That's a great story. It has specific information Mesta Machine was a real plant in homestead. Hazelwood Yard, that's a real rail facility.. The bridge of sppotlights. It all has the right feel for what a recovery might have looked like at that time. And it's a multig genererational story. Yeah the feel of family history, you know, instead of than of a fabrication. But that recovery, if you think about this, this would have required a derrick or some kind of crane on a barge or on the train, maybe. I don't even think you could do it from a train because of the weight Maybe lifting a B twenty five teen tons loaded, but imagine how much by the way, imagine how much that weighs when you're pulling it out from the bottom of the river and it's also full of water. ue Like it's got to be twenty, thirty tons. I'm not doing that they did the math, put that on Reddit for that one. But anyway, what does it be twenty five full of waterway? Anyway, this would have required all kinds of equipment. And then on top of that, the cutting equipment to sever the wing off on site in the middle of the night I don't know. it seems to me like the transport, like all of that, that would have been a very, very big secret to Key. Yeah, but, I mean, here's now we're getting into bread and butter territory as far as like what we talk about here or talk about Kcksburg and people saying like, well, it was a cosmos ninety six And, you know, it's just a space reentry vehicle that's a little bit steerable But does that explanation match up? And then where we're ready to go with that? It's like, well, that sounds pretty reasonable. You know, it's a steerable kind of thing. That's why it's a changing And the people said, no, it wasn't just veering a little bit. It was like making decided turns. And then we talked to Stan Gordon and he said like, oh, yeah, there's witnesses I've talked to At least two. One was the firemen, I think somebody else as well. they said Yeah, they loaded that thing onto a flat bed And they tried to tarp it, but underneath people could still see things that look like hieroglyphs. Yeah. strange writing markings on the bottom that were not US. Air Force or whatever or the Rusky Red star or whatever it is They said like, no, no, no, this was something else. And this is nothing we talk about when you're now the popular topic of crash retrievals for UAP and UFO's Yeah, there's some things you can't get on a flat bed or onto a train a rail car So what do you do? If it's too big, now this is the scuttle butt around that is that you build a facility around it And you just keep it there. That's easier to do than try to cut this up. So the other thing too is that this thing was cut up Maybe that makes things a little easier. Who knows. But yes, I see your points and would tend to agree with them Now talk about the mills. They're running three shifts The unions were very powerful, still are and talkative. And then we're talking about a press that was competitive And if something this big had happened in a working class neighborhood at night does seem the secret would have leaked somewhere Maybe, okay, but Yeah you know what I'm saying? It's like we all assume that it's like people like, well, you know, the government, they can't keep a secret. It's like, okay, that's notequivocal or efficient false equivalcy, you what I'm saying?'s Right R. Yeah, there's other secrets you obviously don't know about. you know, you may know of it, but people say, o, you know, no, people can't keep secrets. like, yes, they can Yeah. and they do that by threats if they have to and there there's no compunction about not doing that. So The Mest Machine story is pretty compelling though. Yeahep. I like it. and I like stories like that that come down through families. Yeah plenty of them locally of weird stories just around here in North Carolina where I live. I've mentioned them on the show before. The locals have stories of weird stuff happening out in the country, cryptid oriented things and it's not on the internet. These are old folks tell me stories that they saw them. theirir granddads saw something. There's some people that aren't even on the internet to this day. Right. And when they die, those stories are gone. Well except for maybe a few people that heard it at church or something like that. Yeah, exactly. and think about this. peopleeople think, well, now we got the internet and it's everything's Egalitarian and stories can't get out. It's like if you think, if you entertain the idea that they're feeding you Baloney however they wish to craft some kind of narrative then it's just as easy to remove stuff from any ne even personally and I do believe that they can take stuff off your personal devices if they so choose. you're not important enough and thankfully neither are we to have them bother with that. But I do believe there's that kind of manipulation possible. So back then Yeah it's easy to keep stuff out of papers You know, people often point to FDR. It's like they told the press, no pictures below the waist. We don't want to show him in a wheelchair Right. And so they just like, okay, we won't. And they Yeah, they didn't back then. Yeah. and they didn't want to show Marilyn Monroe in the back of JFK's limo, so they did those pictures didn't get published. Yeah. So there's there's a little bit more control in some ways and a little bit less in others. And yeah. Now you're talking about a CIA trucker. Yes. I do want a trucker's capap that says that on it. Yeah, CIA trucker. Truck's a good band.. Oh, absolutely. Well, listen to this. in the seventies, the nineteen seventies, a man called into a late night talk show. also loved that setup Pittsburghs KDKA Radio and he claimed to have been a truck driver hired by the CIA in the late nineteen fifties to haul a piece of the B twenty five to a Nike missile defense site at Oakdale Air Force Station a few miles west of Pittsburgh. And we did look for any archival version of that broadcast couldouldn't locate one. This story exists today as references in later research files, but not as primary recorded testimony We're working with reports of a phone call that nobody we know has heard. And there's the simpler explanation that the recovery group raised in the post Gazette in nineteen ninety nine. There were other aircraft crashes around Pittsburgh in the same area two years before this B twenty five went down In nineteen fifty four at DC three crashed near Mckeesport, actually killed ten people when that happened And there were some other crashes too. So the recovery group, which we'll be talking about more here in a minute too, felt that if the Oakdale trucker was real and not like a prank caller into the radio show and was hauling real wreckage, he might have been moving pieces of a different airplane and then conflating it with this one because it was decades later when he went on the radio show And maybe maybe he did haul some plane parts out You can't clearly say to, oh, well, he's definitely lying. We just don't have enough information. We don't have a recording of it. We don't know who he was that kind of thing, but also it is plausible that somebody might have been hired to drive a truck hauling stuff aviation related wreckage at this time from the general area. Right Right. And of course, that again fits in with the current disclosure narrative is that the military doesn't do everything. They hire people out. even like simple things like an abase They hire contractors to make the food. It's not all army cooks like it used to be. So yeah, it's just easier saves the money and time. And then there's the movie Remember the movie Hanger eighteen? Yes, I do remember. Oh, classic. I recently saw it, I think last year. It's like not sure it holds up, but it's fun for nostalgic purposes And of course I always love Darren McGavin and anything Yeah, But anyway, yeah, there's a hangar eight teeen And we're talking to right Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio This thread claims unnamed witnesses saw the wreckage being transported out of state to write Patterson or write Pant The famous facility in UFO Lore Ag, as the home of allegedly, of Hanger eighteen where the government supposedly keeps or at one time kept recovered alien material which we're going to get back to here in a minute. But again I think I don't can't remember if I said this before, but remember there was also the anyim you do something big like that, especially with construction you got to hire people. I always wonder about the James Specter, the James Bond villains Well, that's so secretive, like you got to hire your own people to do that. but Who built the facility in the middle of that crater? Wh did you Who made all this stuff? Where do they get the computer components? Well, if you're that criminal, you got to do it yourself O you hire people to do it. But there's it's like it right, Pat Remember people during the whole Nazi Bell Diglaca, they said like, oh, we saw shipments of flatbed trucks coming in carrying ceramic bricks R whichich there would be no need for unless you were doing something that put out a tremendous amount of heat or maybe even radiation. So. People see stuff coming in and out and then they wonder. Well, and that that's an important point here too because like you know, when you're talking about these trucks with objects going through on tarps and which I do believe happened in Kecksburg because of the witness stories, I think there's no question to me that something left Kecksburg on a flat truck with a tarp over it And it's not just because Robert Stack said so, but it's like a little bit it is. But in this case though, one of the things with a lot of these theories where something had to happen under the cover of night, whether it was loading that, you know, cutting the plane up and putting it on a train or this idea of this truck coming and get stuff This was a very thriving, vibrant working twenty four seven community. likeike it didn't sleep. This was the, you know, New York's the city that never sleeps. Pittsburgh was the steel city that never stopped making steel. All night long, all day long. peopleeople are going and coming and going to work. I do believe, especially as close if you look on Google Earth or Google Maps and at the spot in the river that we're talking about here, just look up Beck's Run Road that points right to where they think the plane essentially sank. Yeah. There's a lot going on there and you're right at Pittsburgh. So there's there's a lot of activity. so I still feel like this would be a hard thing to hide. Perhaps. Yeah. No, it's a good point. you know, here's one of the more prominent claims. Okay nuclear. Either some kind of an atomic bomb or nuclear materials transported from Nevada Okay And for you folks out there, don't say Nevada. don't they don't care for that. O Oregon. Yeah. Nevada. So the geographic logic here is that Nellis Air Force Bace is adjacent to the Nevada Test site where the United States conducted atmospheric nuclear testing throughout the nineteen fifties. Yeah. So the plane originated near where the nuclear program lived or was operating. and from there The speculation runs that the plane was carrying nuclear material east to Olmstead, AFB or Andrews or wherever, and the crash exposed something that had to be retrieved before the public got close to it for safety and bad PR. So the thing about this and I didn't really understand this, honestly, I don't have the military expertise to understand this, but until we started digging into this and the research on it and what people thought about those particular theories is There's an operational problem with it. Yeah ye. In nineteen fifty six, the Air Force already had specific aircraft and specific protocols for nuclear weapons transport. They wouldn't have put weapons grade material in a twenty year old converted bomber being flown by parts pickup crews to retrieve aircraft components know from Pennsylvania. just doesn't make sense. This TV twenty five N was an obsolete navigator trainer scheduled to be scrapped within a year and a half It wasn't equipped for nuclear handling.. It wasn't operationally appropriate for that kind of mission. and the flight plan Nellis to Tinker to Selfridge to Olsteed to Andrews was actually a routine logistics route. none of those waypoints are nuclear facilities. Yeah. Well I'll say this. I agree with that. I will that m sense to me. but I will say this. for those especially Well, anybody that's been in the military currently, but I could speak for like my grandfather and father. it's like you The military does a lot of things that don't make sense. Yeah to regular people. Look, they've had what two hundred years to get things right to work on stuff, but yeah, they do things that they test out a lot of stuff. and it's like as my grandfather said, well, if it didn't work, guys died, well we don't do that again. Right. But to them, it's like, well, let's try this. So that's possibility But some things yeah, just like don't work out, especially when it comes to transportation. Yeah. but I feel like if they had let's say they were doing it and it was a cover story or something like that, I feel like they would have picked more reliable equipment. at the very least, even if the plane even if the exterior of the plane is ' like it's a sleeper. It looks like a it's a plane It's about to be junked. but on the inside, it's, you know, brand new Rolls Royce engines and whatever. It should be pretty if you're carrying something that dangerous.. I mean, of course, there's plenty of broken arrow stories. There's even one here in North Carolina, I think where they've never even found the bomb. I'm pretty sure it's in a sp. Oh Yeah, there's right. There's a few stories out there like that or the time that guy he dropped a it was like a three foot ratchet in a missile silo Almost igniting and nuclear explosions. So accidents do happen, things that you're doing too many complicated and dangerous things all at once with too many people and rushing around usually. So things will happen, but you know, maybe that's a perfect cover Yeah like you said, I've always wanted a car like that where it looks really junky in the outside so nobody wants to sleeper whereak can into it, but it's very luxurious. Also a house like that in the Not so much war games. And remember the the house at the yeep And the Misso silo just looks like a plain old grandma house and you travel down several stories into into something else All right, so anyway, yes, perfect cover more likely to me that it would have happened that way, But still look, I think at that point the plane, you know, they would use something you're right that you wouldn't risk somethingomething with that that would be unreliable and an older piece of junk even though it's been checked out, you because now you got a bigger problem in your hands with more money and more time and more exposure So yeah, I agree with that So anyway, that all tracks for me, what you said. The next claim here is chemical or biological. And yeah, now we're talking about nerve gas or biological weapons Robert Gorman, a researcher in New Kensington, Pennsylvania I spent years on a website dedicated to this case And he made the argument in this way, quote It wasn't a briefcase they could have sent a diver down to get. It was too bulky Sometimes I lean toward nerve gas, but do I really know? No end quote Gorman's framing is interesting here because he reasons backward from the alleged cover upp that if there was a cover upp What would justify one and lands on chemical weapons as the cargo that would be too dangerous to just leave in the water? Yeah, and there's a version of this theory that adds an urgency argument, but like if nerve gas or biological material had been on the plane It was left in the river. It could have eventually leaked, contaminated Pittsburgh's water supply So that's the cover upp modotive. R The military had to recover it because the alternative was like a serious problem, maybe even a mass casualty of him. On the other hand The river was borderline nerve gas already with the pollution. Probably not biological would be a different thing, but like I don't even know if a biological weapon could survive in those conditions. Yeah So that's when it comes around to my theory here. It's like, well, if there's biological something in this aircraft and it goes down in that river that's so polluted that it eats metal you know, I don't think that that would have necessarily amounted to much. But I also I don't know I just don't For me and I'll get to it here in my theories here in a minute, but like it's just hard for me to imagine that there was very high value cargo on booard this aircraft I don't think that's what happened. But it' in my opinion. Right, right. I probably would go with that. But to your point though, it's difficult to pull off. That's why I asked you if it was real anthrax, I've heard this one Yeah I can't it up because I can't even remember now. let me see. Well, that I didn't look up. What I was going to say is that if you folks remember, there was a nerve agent attack on the subway in Tokyo in march twentieth, nineteen ninety five where these cult members released liquid a form of Sarin There was a very potent nerve agent on three of the metro lines in Tokyo. During morning rush hour, it actually killed fourteen people It caused problems for about a thousand others. And then it it sickened over six thousand commuters. I know those are those trains are packed, but yeah. Yeah, but that's nerve gas, which I guess the nerve gas is more dangerous than a biological agent. I have no idea what to go. But I did just see that what Tom Brokhw got or what was sent to him was real. So that was it was real. Okay.'s R right. And so it's possible that stuff's floating around. And then people panicking, remember this one poor lady. she had called because I think that the husband came home from work and then like the lawn was like full of FBI agents becausecause she thought somebody had spread anthrax all over her lawn turned out to be flower fertilizer Oh, I really think just you without any. You're not Tom Brokos. If somebody decided to pick your house But I can see the level of panic in people Yeah, like just thought there was so much happening. It' scary. And then like I said, you were just every time you turned on the news or listened to ten ten Wins or whatever, they were telling you about all the different things that were probably going to happen to you while you were commuting to work. you know, there's a lot of fear among along with that. whichich is the origin of the word terrorism, I guess. Oh, well, there you go. But yes, it's meant to to have that effect But to your point here about the nerve agent business here, this skeptical response here would probably be same or similar to what Aldritch made about the secret recovery question. Yes. Aldrich, meaning one of the recovery group specialists here was talking about this secret recovery proposition or theory The variant of the B twenty five, the TB dash twenty five and that wasn't any kind of a chemical weapons platform As much as it was for a nuclear platform for transportation here The Air Force in nineteen fifty six had specific protocols. and a specific aircraft for that kind of cargo too, as you would imagine Right somethingomething that would survive a crash, not break open and spread it all around And then the crew of this flight include passengers that we're going to go home to Washington, DC. not a hazardous cargo containment team, all right? So R passengers don't make sense for that Yeah. And then the seventy years of monitoring Pittsburgh water supply. doesn't show any anomalous contamination. Right With anything concerning submerged chemical containers. So that's not there either. Yeah. And so then there are still other, I guess, local folklore, lighter cargo theories, mafia money, loads of cash being moved across the country for organized crime. again, coming out of Vegas State of the art communications equipment that needed to stay classified, maybe. That's possible, sure Yeah It's less dramatic, but these have the same fundamental problem It's a routine parts pickup flight, probably. Its just not doesn't seem like that kind of stuff would be sneaking around in this old plane. But who knows? Like you said, they don't always make the most rational decisions in the military. No, but they but they not to throw any shade. That's just that is the Yes, is the attitude Well, things yeah can go wrong pretty quickly. Like I said, my friend who was A childhood friend who was stationed aboard several carriers L the Enterprise, USS America. you know, he said a lot of times on the flight deck, like something there's an accident that almost happened that would have been quite terrible if somebody didn't catch it in time or just by sheer luck something dangerous didn't happen. but But no, they know about this stuff, especially the kind of transport of these serious materials where the public is concerned as well. Okay, well put that under your tin fooil hat and then the last wild theory we have is about Who was on the plane that wasn't supposed to be on that plane And the most persistent version of this conspiracy is the seeventh Man. Some local eyewitnesses claim that a mysterious seventh passenger emerged from the sinking aircraft wearing a military uniform, with all the insignia stripped off. Now it's starting to startn again like Amelia Earhart, which again, remember if you're talking about Thomas E. Deivine. Oh Thomas That's right. He wrote the Amilia Earhart incident As an eyewitness, he was on site pan in the post office there communications section there and he claims that he saw people flying her plane, you know, military people Right Take it out of the hanger. That's a fasting h how that fits together with three guys that didn't really know each other Yeah neighbors Wallock and Thomas E. Dvine. Yeah. And he said they flew it around, landed it, then doused it with gas, strafed it, and cut the pieces up and disposed of them So again, it's like somebody may know something out there about that. but Here we're talking about a mysterious seventh person you know, this guy has got all the uniform, but no scrambled eggs on his on his cap bill right no insignia Boy does that come up a lot? Also with Emilia Earhard. Remember Wallock was the other guy who blew open the safe and claims to have found Emilia's flight and he handed it over and it was picked up by two guys officers but had no insignia from the Navy. Right. So there you go. I like anywayag on mash. That's right. this CIA officer well have been OSS maybe. Anyway, this implication is being that this was someone who wasn't part of the official manifest, which I also believe happens. And then from there the theory branches out The most popular branch of this theory here is defecting Soviet spy Also quite possible. There's even a piece of local lore noted in a Pittsburgh post Gazette local history video. which claims that the alleged offector was later interviewed on television while wearing a hood to disguise his identity. Ooh, that's pretty juicy. Also though that could have just been the unknown comic. but we should It would have been grocery bag. Yeahah. Yeah, yeah, that was a grocery bag. We should be clear about how the post Caz to handle it though. They documented that the rumor circulated. They weren't assight, right. They weren't asserting that the hooded interview happened. No, no. They were noting that it's out there. It's in the lore. rightight Exactly. So ye. Yes. The Air Force record is pretty clean on this manifest here. R. Six men were on the fatal leg of that flight Captain Tayback got off at Self Ridge before the leg that flight leg crashed. twowo died and then four survived The survivors went to Monte Fiore and McGee hospitals and were then interviewed by the press the next morning None of them had mentioned an extra passenger, but if it was secret, why would they? Yeah The hospital records, the police records, the river rescue accounts, none of them had a seventh person. But then again, if you're of a mind of us to entertain why out stuff, it could have been very secret or Supernatural, obious. Yeah. Yeah. this would all make a great movie. Oh And so would this The Vegas Sgirls. Oh yes, let's not forget them. Life of a showgirl here. on a B twenty five Now this claim is that the plane was being used to fly or ferry Las Vegas showgirls across the country to entertain senators and congressmen. in Washington, D.C. I'm sure that's never happened. Now the geographic logic actually has more legs than most, right? So this flight plan here that the flight plan It did end at Andrewers Air Force Base just outside of Washington, D.C So the route would be consistent with a Vegas to DC transport. Yeah, so that makes sense. It's Vegas to DC. which is also though, but that's why they're putting everything. They're putting showgirs on the plane, they're putting mafia money because it's Vegas. They're putting nuclear because's Vegas. All of that stuff is happening out that way. Right So the main problem here is the same for all the other ones the plane is is a converted trainer. You couldn't fit horse line in it even if you wanted to especially with six other passengers. so It just doesn't seem It doesn't seem plausible to me. stories are fun though. This is my favorite thing about fun. Yeah, that is Fun stories here. Aside from the people perishing this, it's Yeah of course. Yeah, yeah. I know. I don't gu. Now you make me feel horrible Yeah. No, no, no, not at all. No when I'm slick, L look. And I should. It's by the way, I'm not saying you should. No the deal is you w to know what really happened And I'm sure the families and descendants of the air crew also want to know what exactly happened. And as we're getting towards the end here, there's not many solid answers for something so concrete in a way. You know, that's what makes a great mystery is that This shouldn't be that unsolvable. No. It shouldn't be like it this plane go? It just it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And so yeah, no matter what was on it, where is the plane likeike forget all of the stuff that's on it Where did the plane go? The mole air mystery. it's like, okay, plane guy falls out. how and how is he in that condition? You know what I'm saying? L It's a making of a great mystery like everything seems mundane up until a certain point where it's just really not mundane anymore. like I said and it should be And so you have a lot of players, especially around this time Finally, getting to one character, most folks know, Howard Hughes. Yes. Now, this theory exists, there's two versions of this theory here. The first one is that Hughes' stuff was on the plane. Now we're talking about classified aviation technology. whatever he was doing with the military and I figured that there was some stuff like that. kindind of like with Tesla. Where did his eighteen trunks of information go after he Right Die to the hotel. Yeah. Somebody came by and scoop about free energy for everybody. Yeah, kind of suspicious. That's another one we should dig into one day. Yes,es. But we're also talking about could be money, cash, you know, something else that was related to Howard Hughes. And the second branch of this theory is that It was actually Howard Hooghs himself that was on board. S Maybe the seventh b. I don't know. You know, I read his biography many years ago. onene of I did. Yeah, with the crazy long It was really, really fascinating Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive dot com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Potential savings will vary, not available in all states This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I'm going to be honest with you. I am online way more than I probably should be. And between me and everyone else at my house, we've got a zillion screens going on at any given moment. So when my internet slows down, it is a full crisis. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need optimum famously Fast Fiber Internet Optimum fiber blows flaky five G out of the water and keeps it cool with the fastest and most reliable speeds that don't slow when things heat up. And right now, they have the deal of the summer, just thirty dollarsty a month for five years. So don't wait, callall eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today Famously Fast Fiber for thirty dollars a month for five years. You can't beat it Terms apply, see optimum d. com for details So good, so good, so good New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big, with up to sixty percent off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. S that' better from the city of Serokenbos. When I'm not practicing the pronunciation of my last name and the name of the city I live in, I'm listening to astonishing legends. Now let's get back to the show I feel like in this case, the passenger version is probably the easiest one to dismiss because in fifty six, he was one of the most famous people in the world in one of the most photographed periods of his life Even when he was trying to hide. He owned RKO pictures, he was running Hughes aircraft. everythingverything he did made the news. The idea that he was on this military flight that crashed and then nobody saw him after the plane crash, it just it doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus he's a pilot and with lots of He can fly anywhere he wants. He doesn't need to hitch a ride. so it doesn't. Yeah Th one's a little bit thin, but fun as you're saying. So Okay, and then the cargo version has the same I guess you call them structural problems that the other theories have. Hugh' aircraft was a defense contractor with its own logistics, right? you were saying here they just wouldn't put u sensitive materials on a plane Unless it's a massive cover upp of something else and he was involved with aliens. I don't know. Right Right, right. You'd have to be you have to go even more fantastical to make that one that square peg fit in the aroundound hole for me. Well, so that sums up those none of those can we go really deep on because there's not a lot on any of them. It's all basically local oral history and folklore There are some compelling degrees to some of it, but it does feel, again It just none of it like has much teeth to it, I don't think. But it doesn't change the fact that it's super strange. the plane is missing. So we've talked about the midnight removal, the dangerous cargo, ET's, NHIs, mysterious passengers There are probably dozens of conspiracy threads that if you look at this. So now let's move forward to nineteen ninety five backward from now, from fifty six forward forty years after the splashdown. Four people started the B twenty five Recovery Group, which is composed with the late John Aldrich, whichce mentioned a few minutes ago. alsoso Bob Shehima, Steve Byers, and Matt Punzak. They've been working on the case for thirty years. They've been pursuing this. Yeah, and this is where John Aldrich of the B twenty five Recovery Group landed at after decades of trying to verify the story here. He says not credible ight Not because Aldrich was a skeptic per se, he spent the last thirty years of his life trying to find this airplane The recovery group had its own quarrel with how the official search was conducted. That's interesting here. Yeah. He felt like all those stories, the family stories Those late night calls into the radio station, the unnamed witnesses The documentary silences across seventy years really doesn't add up to evidence Right. So Here's the big question, Scott, where do they think the plane is now? The B twenty five recovery Group thinks the plane is at a place called Birds Landing. Maumarker four point nine on the Mon left descending bank across from the former J and L Mill wororking hypothesis is A the Fororsycythia lost it, if that is what it hooked those twes. Was that the plane drifted along the bottom and settled into the gravel pit the tug Redstone identified in February of ' fifty six, that forty seven foot hole that you were talking about earlier PunzZak told The Associated Press in nineteen ninety six, quote, there's a mystery here It's a challenge in quote They've suggested that the plane is sitting under ten to fifteen feet of silt and thirty two feet of water about one hundred and fifty feet from shore Wow, you know, but at that point in thirty years of trying. Every search has come up empty so far. Yeah, Bob Shima has been consistent for thirty years on this investigation and his position is The aircraft simply ran out of gas. That's what he's been quoted saying that. That's the recovery group's whole position too. The plan's in the pit, the river ate the skin and you need sub bottom profiling sonar, the kind that sends low frequency pulses through the sediment to se sideide scan from the surface can't penetrate the silt. They estimated the budget back in nineteen ninety nine for something like this at twenty five thousand dollars and they just never got that kind of funding to do that. So these guys are volunteers. So Yeah, it's like an airheards plane or you know, or a Bookca. It's just like it all takes a lot of money and some real drive to go do this. Yeah, exactly My sponsors and and then knowledgeable people. It's not just the will to do this in an organization. So there's a lot of how goes into this to make it happen And sadly these things will just sit as mysteries, But it'd be cool in the future if there was some other technology that could could do that. Yeah cheaper and easier. So again, Andy Mesich, the same twenty twenty three city paper interview here said it pretty plainly, quote We know where every Ford pickup truck, barge, and shopping cart is down there But we don't know where that plane is All right, so it comes down to us here at this point. What do we think happened Right? Well, I'm not sure there's there's much for me to expxosed It's just, yeah, I like I said, there's a lot of dead ends and kind of thin Yeah, nevertheless, but still a pretty intriguing mystery here. But you know, based on aviation mysteries we've all covered in the past, like like Amelia, we've been talking about We can tell you that sometimes, you know, the thing you're looking for has been right there all along. You know, it's been reduced to next to nothing By nature, as I always say, the earth swallows all eventually And just it just buries everything in its wake here. And then maybe in this case, you know, pollution created by people Yeah had a had an effect on it. And if you don't look in the exact right place for something minute You may never find it.s That's the thing with all treasure. We talk about this with Butch Cassidy and stuff. It's like you bury something. you know exactly where it is. you made a map You've lined up side points, you come back later and it's nearly impossible to find. Yeah. Even like we Pandy the Bigfoot trudging along. it took a long time for people to find that exact spot. And when I started the show, I remember thinking, oh, well this know what if you brought this story to me and we covered it early on in the early years when we started the show. I would have thought, well, Yeah, there's just no way. somethingomething is very, very fishy Since then, we have been exposed to so many aviation mysteries and other kinds of things that my I'm a little more, I think realistic about this kind of stuff. And I think this is, you know, what you were just talking about is closest to what happened. I think Maybe the airframe got into that gravel pit or whatever or somewhere just like it in the first day or two after the splashdown This occurred to me too. What if the fororscythia actually did have a hold of it on february first in fifty six And then the anchor it caught it and actually dragged it into that hole or into another or plowed it under while it was trying to drag it out. posossibly. And so then once it kind of ns down or got into a hole or something, then all the the bad chemicals in the m started going to work on the aluminum acid mine, drainage, mill runoff, all that stuff And then maybe by nineteen ninety five, thirty years later when the recovery group first put the sonar into that stretch what they were looking for probably already would have had a very different shape or be too small Yeah for them to identify it as a target. So you know now by the time you look at last year, what's down there It could just be like the engines, the landing gear. Beacause that stuff is steel. That's not aluminum. Yeah. Everything else could just be silt or degraded or gone. So it's like at this point, your targets are infinitely smaller than originally what you were searching for, maybe. I don't know. Or you know, or the whole thing could maybe the whole thing's intact under some soft silt. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, a shot of them bringing it out. You know who they need to get is that guy That volunteer dude that is finding all of the missing people in their cars and waterways off the roads of Northa. Oh, yeah, that team volunteer diving team. Yeah. those Yeah, that' what I'm saying? It's somewhere, but it's just not where people thought it was. and But now we have LidDAR and all this tech I feel like, you know, but it all takes money, you know Yeah So somebody's got to invest in it and take the time to go deal with it and I'm sure it's still a very busy area even today in terms of river traffic and that sort of thing. So business. Yeah, it's like I said, it's less of a mystery in that u You know, there's no famous people associated with it like Amelia Earhart or somebody else where you want to know, but it's like and it's different than like flight nineteen and just that that That one very quickly got weird And then stayed weird And so u Where is that? And then like just like I said, what gets added to it Not so much with this case, but like with flight nineteen. Rember one of the I think his name was George. one of the pilots Somebody claimed that he showed up later and delivered a telegram to That's right. a family or somebody delivered telegram supposedly signed with his family nickname Yeah Yeah. Right. So that's the, you know, the weird keeps on going and some people believe that those planes are somewhere intact. I thought you were going to say in time, somewhere in time. And they might be somewhere in time as take perspective. Yeah. Like I said, they're they're in another place In this one, I don't know. I mean, are you u You're not really going to the exotic ideas and I get why? because Yeah it's just they're kind of thin. I would love to pick a stranger. I love strange endings. We've done plenty of episodes where the strange ending I felt like turns out to be right, but that doesn't feel like this one to me The strange version of this case seecret Recovery, exxotic carargo, seventh man. it's just hard to imagine stuff. based on the other circumstances and just complete lack of any additional proof And also Aldrich who's since passed away, but he did the work on that. and I think when I greatly respect a researcher who's focused on one thing like this for decades. And that whole team, the B twenty five recovery group. Yeah. If they have an opinion, I think it carries a lot of weight because they oensibly, they know more about it than anybody especially when it's this been this long since it happened. Right. So what are your thoughts though about the fuel gauge anomaly here or just the mismanagement or misconception on that So the official story is the gauges were wrong and the plane ran out of gas. And you know, the pencil math we talked about earlier said that somebody on the investigation side couldn't quite get the numbers to reconcile with the normal fuel burn for that distance in those conditions. And And we noted that commander Roddy from the nearby Air Force base said gauge, singular, but there were four of them. So whatever. maybe that's not a big deal. Like you said, maybe that's a misspeak. but My question is what if the fuel didn't disappear? What if it was in the tanks but it couldn't get to the engines? Like maybe fuel pressure problems maybe the The lines were fouled, the engine starved, the plane's going to come down. It's going to be the same thing as if it ran out of gas, even if it had it. But You know, and then the engines quit because they're not getting the gas even if it's on board. But the problem is this doesn't really work either because supposedly they said they could see from the gauges that it was draining super fast or too quickly So I guess that doesn't make sense. Yeah, I don't that would imply some kind of leak, but they also said they couldn't see a leak And how and would that drain all four tanks? I don't really know how B twenty five works, but I feel like there'd be some isolation there for redundancy between the tanks, especially in something that was originally designed for combat. So That doesn't make sense either. I got to think about the fuel pressure indicators too because the B twenty five had two of those, one per engine. If pressure was dropping, you'd think at least one of those would have caught it before the engines quit. Both of those indicators failed at the same time or both got missed That's its own anomaly that doesn't make sense, especially with I think three people who were pilots on board. It doesn't make sense that they would have not noticed that. So I don't know where I'm at. honestly I think there's more than just the gauges were're just wrong going on. Yeah ye. and Like I feel it. mayaybe the plane came down with the gas. We don't know that because we're not the plane. C could be if they had recovered it at the time. they might have been like, oh, the tanks were full, the lines were clogged and the engines or the engines failed for some other reason And maybe it just looked like they were draining tooast because the plane it's a bumpy ride, the needles were bouncing around. I don't know. Anyway. So My thought is that I think that it went down there and I think it's still there. and I think there's very little of it left. and I think it's entirely possible we may never know what happened to that aircraft, but I guess the And the biggest part of the mystery to me is simply why did it stop operating What brought it down? Well, at this time and point in history This mystery is still preserved. whether that's under a lot of silt, in a river or on a spaceship at an alien museum, who knows, But it's preserved for right now. It's just kind of frozen Whver it's at and the recovery group, they're still working on it sub bottom profiling sonar, they might find the engines, like I was saying, maybe there's some technology in the future, ten years from now, whenver, we might get a better answer. Again, you have to have the will and the money to apply that technology to this mystery. Yeah. but maybe they find it with some new technology here. Or maybe nothing ever surfaces. The river just takes the plane like the sea takes all. and never gives up its's dead rarely. And the plane just stays where the river put it