The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery |
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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 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.
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.
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. The answer is yes. |
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