The Plane in the Pond Section 4

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery
2366 Hickory Hill Road · Oxford, PA · 19363 · USA
610.467.1937 · info@tighar.org

The Question of Credibility

The dozens of interviews with people who claimed to have direct or secondary knowledge of the plane in the pond were all conducted after the October 1969 publication of the Herald article which proclaimed the plane to be the White Bird. We have no way of knowing to what extent the interviewees’ recollections of long-past events were colored or influenced by what they now knew, or thought they knew, about the famous lost airplane. Also, there are no audio recordings or transcripts of both sides of the interviews. All we have are the interviewers’ notes of what they were told, so we have no way of knowing to what extent the information they recorded were answers to leading questions.

All of the information in the post-1969 interviews and letters must, therefore, be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. It is worth noting that Nicholas McGrath claimed to have heard three explosions on a Sunday or Monday in May 1927. The Herald said the White Bird disappeared in 1921, so his recollection, at least, does not appear to have been altered to fit the Herald article.

So, what do we have in the way of hard evidence?

The 1948 correspondence between Patsy Judge, Claude Noonan and the Newfoundland Civil Aviation Division reliably establishes that, in 1948, Judge said there was what he believed to be “parts of an airplane with spots of blue paint on it ... on the island of Great Gull Pond nine miles south southeast of Gooseberry.” There is a pond shown on maps as Great Gull Pond twelve miles east northeast of Gooseberry, but that’s not the pond Patsy was talking about. The pond at the location given by Judge is the Gull Pond, also known as Big Gull Pond, Branch Gull Pond and Goose Pond. All of the witness accounts agree with that location.

Judge also believed “it must be fifteen or twenty years ago since the plane fell as the iron is rusted out.” The Civil Aviation Division confirmed that no aircraft were known to be missing in that area in recent years
The artifact TIGHAR recovered in 1992 fits the location and description of what Judge said he saw in 1948 in that it was found near the island in the Gull Pond, is largely “rusted-out,” and has spots of blue paint. The TIGHAR artifact appears to be debris from a machine that exploded.

The Null Hypotheses

The hard evidence suggests a machine of some kind suffered an explosion on or near the island in the Gull Pond at some time several years prior to 1948. The hard evidence is consistent with the loss of the White Bird but alternative possibilities must be considered.

Alternative Hypothesis #1

All of the witnesses were in error. There was never a plane in the pond. The debris Judge reported and the artifact TIGHAR found were not from an airplane.

So what sort of machine could have come to a violent end on or near the island several years before 1948? Machines of any sort were unknown on the muskeg until after World War Two, when a few surplus M29 Studebaker “Weasel,” small tracked vehicles were reportedly used to transport hunters into the country. There is no aluminum sheet in a Weasel and no M29s are known to have been anywhere near the Gull Pond, much less known to have blown up. If one did, its wreckage would not look rusted-out in 1948.

Alternative Hypothesis #2:

The plane in the pond was an aircraft other than the White Bird.

More than a dozen aircraft were lost during attempts to fly the Atlantic. In theory, any one of the unaccounted-for aircraft could be the plane in the pond. The missing aircraft most often mentioned as an alternative to the White Bird is The Dawn.

Mrs. Frances Grayson and the aircraft in which she hoped to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air.

The Dawn was a Sikorsky S-36 eight-place amphibian powered by two Wright J-5 Whirlwind engines. On December 23, 1927, The Dawn took off from Curtiss Field, Long Island headed for Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Aboard were Norwegian pilot Oskar Omdal, navigator Brice Goldsborough, engineer Frank Koehler, and Frances Grayson, a wealthy divorcee who financed the flight and hoped to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane.

The weather was predicted to be bad, and it was. The Dawn didn’t arrive at Harbour Grace. Searchers found no sign of the missing plane, but there were radio messages heard indicating the flight was in trouble and reports of an airplane being heard over a number of towns in the northern part of the Avalon Peninsula, but not on the Cape Shore.

A message in a bottle was found on January 9, 1929. Accounts of the contents of the message vary, but all indicated the plane was down at sea.

Conclusions

There appears to be no plausible way for the wreckage seen and recovered from the Gull Pond prior to 1970 to be from a machine other than an airplane. Patsy Judge and the other Cape Shore witnesses were correct. An airplane crashed at the Gull Pond.

That the airplane was not the White Bird is possible, but the documented hearings and sightings that put l’Oiseau Blanc within seven miles of the Gull Pond and in apparent distress on the morning of May 9, 1927 make the Levasseur PL-8 of Nungesser and Coli by far the most likely candidate for the plane in the pond.

Returning to our original question:

Is the Gull Pond the best place to look for whatever may remain of the White Bird?

The answer is yes.

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