Story Photos
 Photo by Greg Ebersole Darlene and James Greear, Barry Fisher, Philip Lipson and Charlette LeFevre prepare to leave Wednesday for the site where a B25 bomber crashed near Kelso on Aug. 1, 1947. Fisher, who is the grandnephew of one of the pilots, is holding a memorial plaque that the party later placed at the site. |
Marker placed near Kelso to honor pilots in '47 crash
Friday, August 3, 2007 8:06 AM PDT
By Leslie Slape
Printable version
E-mail this articleSixty years to the day after his great-uncle plummeted into the Rose Valley woods in a doomed B25 bomber, Barry Fisher discovered what may be a piece of the plane.
"Unbelievable. What are the odds?" Fisher said, pulling the long, flattened steel tube out of the mud and rinsing it in Goble Creek. "It looks like a piece of exhaust."
Nearby on the creek bank, a large, heavy piece of metal was buried deep in mud.
"That almost looks like landing gear," said James Greear, who in March discovered the crash site about 100 yards north of his house after looking for it for 10 years. "This is like finding buried treasure."
Wednesday, Greear led a small party up to the crash site to place a memorial marker honoring the pilots, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank Brown, who were killed when it crashed at 2:30 a.m. Aug. 1, 1947, near Kelso. Brown was Fisher's great-uncle.
The pilots were Army Air Force intelligence officers, and their plane was carrying a top-secret payload to California, according to the mission report. Immediately after the crash, the military cordoned off the site and banned all photographs, according to a report in Brown's hometown newspaper, the Vallejo Times-Herald.
The contents of the cargo have never been revealed, but the day after the crash the Tacoma News Tribune reported the plane was carrying pieces of "flying discs" that broke up over Maury Island on June 21, 1947. The Army refused to confirm the report,.
That's why Philip Lipson and Charlette LeFevre, curators of Seattle Museum of the Mysteries, are interested in the site and why they joined Greear and Fisher in placing the memorial.
Army Air Force personnel at Roswell recovered debris that has been variously reported as fragments of a "flying disc" or a weather balloon. The debate has never ended.
"Things did not start in Roswell, they started in the Great Northwest," LeFevre said.
Lipson, LeFevre and Greear recovered several pieces of twisted, scorched metal in March and a chunk of rock that did not appear to resemble any of the rock in the creek bed. They took the rock to their museum, where a Seattle scientist concluded it was either lava or a piece of a meteor.
Fisher, who lives in Vancouver, said he wishes he knew more about the crash because it's part of his family history. But the military secrecy continues today, he said.
"It's always been the old wives tale of little green critters," he said. "We heard there was a lot of suspicious things going on with the whole crash. ... It was almost an urban legend by the time I got the information."
Over the years, family members would occasionally spot a story in a magazine referring to the crash, he said. But his great-uncle's wife, who is deceased, never talked much about it.
"Unfortunately we're a lot more clouded in the mystery than people in this general area," he said.
His brother and sister-in-law, Brett and Laurie Dundas of Longview, were unable to come Wednesday. Fisher said he will bring them up to the site as soon as possible -- and maybe finish digging up that piece of landing gear.
"Finding this piece, that is insanely cool," he said.
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