It
was September 21, 1994 and we had hit a dead end. Ten years of searching
for l’Oiseau Blanc
had led us from the hills of coastal Maine to the high muskeg of Newfoundland.
Now we stood tired, cold and empty-handed on a remote and desolate lakeshore,
out of time, out of money, and out of ideas. Our only consolation was
the knowledge that we had stood like this in other places at other times
(too many places, too many times) and always, eventually, answers had emerged.
Sometimes, it seems, a project needs to just sit and simmer for awhile.
Keep the heat on and, sooner or later, something new will bubble to the
top. Early this year, sixteen months after that bleak day on the muskeg,
we heard a tiny but distinct “pop.”
The puzzle which had
stumped us was truly perplexing. On May 9, 1927, twelve days before Lindbergh
landed in Paris, two French aviators disappeared in an attempt to make
the same trip, but in the opposite direction. Although their heralded
arrival in New York didn’t happen, an airplane fitting the description
of their large white biplane, l’Oiseau Blanc (the White Bird), was
seen over Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula by as many as seventeen separate
witnesses. The reported track of the aircraft passed northeast to southwest
toward the Cape Shore, a coastal peninsula the interior of which is a wilderness
plateau dotted with shallow lakes. A strong local tradition holds that one
of those lakes holds the wreck of an airplane. That story is supported by
archival documents confirming that, in 1948, airplane wreckage on an island
in a lake was reported to the Newfoundland authorities. The debris was judged
to be 15 to 20 years old and the Civil Aviation Division, after checking
its records, dismissed it as probably belonging to one of “a number of aircraft
(which) left Europe about twenty years ago of which no trace has since
been found.” The exact location-a small rocky island in a lake
known locally as the Gull Pond-was pinpointed for TIGHAR by Cape Shore
residents who say they saw wreckage there in the early ’40s. An
initial TIGHAR search of the island in 1992 recovered a single piece
of debris which might be from an aircraft but is too badly deteriorated
to be diagnostic. This did, however, seem to confirm the Gull Pond as
the point of origin for the plane-in-the-pond stories. If an airplane
crashed here the wreckage on the island should logically be part of a
larger debris field which would include the all-important engine(s).
To test that hypothesis a program of methodical visual and remote-sensing
searches of the pond bottom was begun. Two years, six expeditions, and
many thousands of dollars later we had covered enough of the submerged
real estate surrounding the island to convince ourselves that there just
ain’t nothin’ there.
Something was fundamentally wrong with our hypothesis – but what?
The “pop” of
new information which might re-open the investigation came in the form
of a casual comment by a Newfoundland resident who remembered that early
versions of the plane-in-the-pond story mentioned a different pond. The
idea that we might be looking in the wrong body of water was one we had
considered and rejected many times. The problem, of course, was the credible
testimony of eyewitnesses who saw wreckage at the Gull Pond and our own
recovery of an artifact there. Mysterious airplane wreckage at two ponds
in the same region just didn’t make any sense-or did it? Part of the
plane-in-the-pond legend holds that an early discoverer of the wreck brought
metal parts home to use as sled runners. What if the material seen and found
at the Gull Pond was actually a stockpile of salvaged parts brought part
way home from a site farther away? That would explain the absence of a debris
field. Instead of discovering the crash site, perhaps we only cleaned up
the last remaining piece of a salvor’s stash. This may turn out to be yet
another dead end or it could be the answer to one of aviation history’s greatest
riddles. Until we know which we’re not much inclined to mention the name
of the other pond.
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