Bomber Down: Part One

Introduction to Unsolved Histories

0:00Felix Bunnell here, producer and host of Unsolved Histories. This episode is about a B-52 bomber that's been missing in the Gulf of Mexico since February 28, 1968. But this episode is also about the bonds between those who serve in the military and the families of those who serve. These bonds are strong even between service members who have never met each other, or between service members and the families of others who served but who were lost decades ago. This story has some things in common with the story about Flight 293, which we covered in Season 1.

0:35A lost plane with service members aboard, missing but not missing in action. Families ripped apart, left behind, and feeling forgotten. But, unlike Flight 293, the mystery of this B-52, identified by its military call sign, Meal 88, and why it crashed and where it ended up, feels as if it's on the verge of being solved.

Pam LaMonica's Story

0:57And now, part one of Unsolved Histories, Bomber Down.

1:06I can remember when we did go back to school, you know, you know how kids are, and I can remember somebody saying, Oh, well, there was a submarine in the water, and, you know, Russian submarine, and they shot it down or something.

1:24This is Pam LaMonica. She's in her 60s and lives in Ohio. She was just a kid when her father's B-52 bomber crashed into the Gulf of Mexico near a place called Matagorda Island. There was no distress call, and the B-52 and its crew were never found. And, you know, at the time, you're like, I mean, I was nine years old, and I'm like, what? You know, like, I'm not even sure if I ever said anything to my mom about it. But it was just like, I guess, possibilities, different possibilities, what, that could have happened.

1:58And, like, you just don't understand why it happened. How can a plane like that go down? I think that was probably the hardest thing for my mom is wondering, you know, how could this happen? The crash was in 1968. The effects on Pam and her family have lasted for years. Decades, really. Yeah. Well, because all of our lives changed. We changed as people that day, and we weren't the same.

2:31We didn't, we really weren't the same family we were before, because it was such a drastic change to our life. Our goal was to have that, the normal family life that we had, but that wasn't possible. As much as the reality of the crash and its aftermath dramatically altered the course of their lives, there was also a lot that Pam's family didn't know about what had happened. Last year, Pam got her dad's Air Force Service records from the National Archives.

3:03I was able to read a lot and learn a lot about him that I never knew. You know, but he had very high remarks about his skills and what kind of person he was and, you know, very personal things that I would never have known if I hadn't requested this information. You know, I know he was good at his job, and I don't think I realized that it wasn't him that was flying the plane until after talking with Cliff.

3:37I think I always thought he was the one flying the plane.

3:43Pam's father, Major Phil Strine, was a decorated Air Force officer and experienced B-52 pilot. But flying the plane wasn't his job aboard the B-52 the night it crashed, on February 28, 1968. Instead, Major Strine was evaluating the bomber's regular crew as they took part in a training exercise off the coast of Texas. Pam mentioned Cliff. That's Cliff Sholand, a retired Air Force officer and former B-52 pilot. It was Cliff who helped Pam get a copy of her dad's service record.

4:16After first learning about the crash of Pam's father's plane more than three decades ago, Cliff has recently made it his personal mission to locate the missing bomber. We'll meet Cliff in a moment. When you figured that out, when Cliff explained that, how did that make you feel? Well, like, gosh. I mean, I wouldn't want anybody on that plane, but it was like, you mean he really didn't, he wasn't even the one flying the plane? You know, he was on there and he was doing, he was evaluating the other crew.

4:50So it was kind of like, what kind of luck is that? So I think, you know, in a way I was relieved. But again, in a way I felt like just if that had never happened, if he wasn't evaluating, he and his navigator weren't evaluating, then that would never have happened. So, you know, and that's probably what my mom struggled with a lot, I bet.

5:21I don't know. She's been gone for over 20 years now. The wondering about what had happened was something that Pam's family, Pam, her mom, and her brother, did for decades. We didn't sit around and hash it out a lot. But if we wanted to talk about it, we could, you know, it wasn't like we weren't allowed to talk about it. We just didn't, it was just hard. We just felt like we didn't know enough to talk about, you know, other than he was gone. Did you ever think about searching for it?

5:55I think in my mind, I thought someday that that might happen because there were eight families involved. And I thought, you know, we have such a common bond there. I mean, someday we might come together and have more answers and know more what, you know, what's happened. So I guess, yeah, I think I have always kind of wished for that to happen.

6:28In 2025, Pam's wish for someone to search the waters of the Gulf of Mexico for her father's missing plane may be about to come true. And just like learning her dad wasn't at the controls, this effort to find the missing bomber would not be possible were it not for Cliff Sholand. Life is just a really, you know, it can work in strange ways for sure. And I feel like he's kind of come into at least my life for a reason.

6:58And he's been able to help a lot. And I guess make me realize the importance of what my dad was doing. For Pam, Cliff's research into the flight and the time he spent talking with her and with families of the eight men who disappeared has gone far beyond simply an effort to track down a missing plane. Cliff, anyway, he's helped me in a lot of respects kind of work through some of this. So I feel like I've been able to live a really good life

7:29and had a great husband and great sons and grandkids now. So you just have to make the best with what you have because I didn't want to be miserable. I didn't want to struggle. I wanted to have the best, you know, the best life I could because that's what my dad did. He had the best life he could. And so that was inspiring for me. And so being able to talk with Cliff is giving me, like, it's amazing

8:01because, like, when I talk to him, I feel like,

8:06and I didn't realize this until recently, it's almost given me the sense of what it would be like to talk to my dad. From KSL Podcasts, I'm Felix Bunnell. This is Unsolved Histories, Bomber Down, Part 1.

Cliff Sholand's Experience

8:35Dumb question, but what's it like to fly a B-52? You know, it's a great airplane. You know, there are so many redundancies with eight engines, you know, four generators, multiple hydraulic systems. It was built to be a reliable aircraft, but I don't think the designers nor the Air Force realized just how reliable airframe it was going to be and how flexible it was. You know, it was designed to attack the targets in the Soviet Union

9:08from an altitude of 50,000 feet. Cliff Sholand flew B-52 bombers from 1977 to 2000. B-52s are still the workhorse of the U.S. Air Force more than 70 years after they were first introduced. The B-52, America's biggest and newest jet bomber, goes into squadron service with the Strategic Air Command. This is from an old newsreel from the 1950s. A wingspan of 185 feet, length of over 150 feet and intercontinental range,

9:39over 6,000 miles without refueling, combat ceiling of 50,000 feet and the speed estimated at over 600 miles an hour. The bombers are giants, powered by eight jet engines and capable of flying thousands of miles. With mid-air refueling, a B-52 can literally stay aloft for days at a time. During the final years of the Cold War, Cliff and the squadron he commanded stood ready, if necessary, to fulfill a grim duty. To deliver a knockout nuclear blow to the Soviet Union in the event of World War III.

10:12You not only flew together, but you lived together because they would go on alert every third week. And they would live beside their nuclear-equipped B-52 on the end of the runway. And they would have 12 minutes, if the horn ever blew, to get to the airplane, start the engines, taxi, and take off, and be a mile and 3,000 feet off the end of the runway at the end of 12 minutes.

10:44That kind of work, with stakes that high, meant serious bonding for the members of B-52 bomber crews as they stood by on alert. We lived together every third week, and we socialized with each other. The wives knew each other. It was a tight, tight unit, the combat crew. And when you failed, you failed as a crew. When you succeeded, you succeeded as a crew, and you got promoted as a crew.

11:15It's hard to imagine that kind of responsibility on the shoulders of young Air Force officers like Cliff Sholand. But somehow, they did the job, and nuclear war never came. The old adage is, it's a black-and-white world out there. In a world of nuclear weapons, there's no gray area. It's either right or it's wrong.

11:41You either pass or you fail. There's no in-between. And so, that was the world we were living in, and it was stressful.

11:54But boy, when you succeeded, you felt pretty darn good about it. It's this camaraderie with others who flew B-52s that at least partially explains why Cliff has been leading the effort to find the missing bomber and the eight members of its crew.

The Lost B-52 Meal 8-8

12:13The bomber that disappeared was known by its call sign of Meal 8-8. The B-52 and its crew were based at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. That's part of Cliff's connection. He was in the same squadron as Meal 8-8 and stationed at the same base. But Cliff didn't arrive at Carswell until years after the bomber disappeared. And no one ever talked about the missing B-52 while Cliff was on duty at Carswell. He only learned about it because the Cold War ended.

12:44And the Soviet Union, our adversary, it went away. By 1993, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the threat of nuclear war had evaporated almost overnight. And so the Air Force changed, the military changed, and they started getting rid of all of these Cold War Air Force bases. And Carswell Air Force Base was one of those bases. These were big changes for the American military to close dozens of bases that had supported B-52s and their mission to always be ready to respond.

13:20I had an assignment, but I couldn't leave right away because my assignment wasn't open for me. So I stayed at Carswell and helped them close the Air Force base. Cliff was still flying B-52s in 1993. But during a break between assignments, he was tasked with helping close down the air base. One of Cliff's solemn responsibilities was relocating the remains of the base namesake, a World War II pilot and Medal of Honor recipient who was actually buried on the base.

13:52My job was to move Horace Carswell off base to now his permanent resting place, which is now at a historic cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas. But part of my job was also over, since Carswell had been around since the 40s, every once in a while a monument would pop up on base. You know, some lost air crew or somebody died in combat and they got approval and here's a monument somewhere on base or as a tribute.

14:27And like the remains of Horace Carswell, the future of those monuments had to be addressed too. But some of them were hidden or had been forgotten. So we're having our morning meeting and a civil engineering representative came up to me and says, Hey, Colonel Sholin, I've got something I need for you to see. So we jumped in this truck. He drove me across base to the base chapel. We parked on the street, walked across the lawn. And the base chapel was built right away when the base was built in the 40s.

14:58And it was basically a brick building. But in the 50s, late 50s, they built an annex on the side of it, which was wood. As he walked toward the chapel with the civil engineer, Cliff didn't know he was about to begin a journey he's still on more than 30 years later. There was a big shrubbery, you know, that was just landscape that was overgrown. He takes me to this shrubbery and he pulls back the shrubbery. Behind this shrubbery is a six-foot-tall granite monument.

15:30And the first thing I see on it is the etching of a B-52. And it's a B-52 with what we call the tall tail. The B-52s that I flew, 1957, 58, 59, 60, 61 models, had a shorter tail. And I looked at it and I said, oh, that's a B-52 that was lost over Vietnam. But the bomber etched onto the monument hadn't been lost in Southeast Asia.

16:00This tall-tail B-52 had disappeared a lot closer to home. Well, I started reading the names and down below was a little inscription. And it wasn't a Vietnam-era loss. It was a loss during a training mission. And the eight names on the monument were the guys that were lost. And that's all I knew about it. So I grabbed my notebook and I copied all the names down.

16:31It might seem hard to believe now, but in 1993, there was no search engine to type those names into on a computer screen. So Cliff did the next best thing. And I don't know what drove me to do this, but as soon as I got back to the office, opened my desk drawer, pulled up the Fort Worth phone book, opened up the white pages. First name on the monument was Major, abbreviated MHA period, Frank M. Salavaria. I looked under the S's, and here in the white pages,

17:03exactly the way it was etched on the monument was this guy's rank and name, even abbreviated MHA period for major, in bold, and a phone number. And I said, boy, this is weird. Now this is 1993. And so I dialed it, and I get voicemail of a lady. I quickly leave a voicemail message, and later that afternoon, I get a call back from his widow.

17:36And she tells me the story. And it's just, it's heart-wrenching to hear her tell the story. I'm all the way on the phone with her for maybe, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes. And when I hang up, I said, this story can't be true. You know, the Air Force would have never done to the widows what she just described to me on the telephone.

18:06What Frank Salavaria's widow had described to Cliff Sholand was something that might sound familiar to anyone who heard Season 1 of Unsolved Histories, what happened to Flight 293. The eight men on the lost B-52 were missing and declared dead. Their families had been forgotten by the Department of Defense, and no one had searched for the bomber since just after it had disappeared in 1968.

18:31Emotionally, it tore me up because for, you know, the years I was flying the airplane, and in the back of my mind, I always thought, well, if I disappear on a training mission, somebody's going to come looking for me. And if they never find me, they're going to take care of my family, you know, and that's not what happened in 1968.

18:59Cliff's work helping close down

Cliff's Investigation

19:01Carswell Air Force Base wrapped up a few months after he'd found the monument and spoken with Major Salavaria's widow. Since the base was closing and the monument needed a new home, Mrs. Salavaria had suggested it be moved to a public park in Fort Worth. Cliff made the arrangements for the monument to be moved. Then, he went on to his next squadron assignment at another Air Force base in another state.

19:26Cliff continued flying B-52s for nearly another decade. He didn't think much about the monument or about the lost plane and its crew. In 2000, he retired and settled with his wife in Minnesota.

19:40Fast forward to just a few years ago, and during COVID, Cliff and his wife planned a driving trip to Texas to visit their son's family. For some reason, it seemed to Cliff like a good opportunity to visit the city park in Fort Worth where the monument from Carswell Air Force Base had been moved to back in 1993. And I told my wife, I said, you know, since we have some time, let's take a right where I-35 breaks off to Fort Worth and let me go see that monument

20:12in this new location. Well, I started looking for it and it was nowhere to be found. I went to the park and recs department in Fort Worth. I had a guy who took his kids out every night looking for this monument and it was nowhere to be found. Cliff was stumped. As it turns out, he wasn't the first to go to Fort Worth looking for the monument. Someone else had gone in search of it about 25 years earlier. In the early 90s, my husband and my sons,

20:42I have two sons, and they were like, I don't know, they were probably 10 and 13, somewhere around that age. This is Pam LaMonica, who we met earlier in this episode and whose father, Major Phil Strine, was aboard the B-52. She's describing the pilgrimage that she too made in search of the monument. And we were in that area, in the Dallas area visiting friends and kind of a last minute type trip. So we decided to drive over to Fort Worth

21:12and I wanted to see the memorial stone. And this is like before the internet, you know, we just like did things, you know. So we drove over there and it was only, you know, a half hour from where we were. And so we drove up to the gate of the base, which was the same exact gate I remembered. And I mean, it just brought back so many memories, but I did not know until we, or we did not know until we got there,

21:43it was a naval base now and not an Air Force base. And which is kind of seems weird because you're not on the water, but you know, I was like, okay. And so I told the, you know, the guards there why we were there. And they said, well, you're not, you know, you don't have clearance to get on the base. Though Carswell Air Force Base had been officially closed, the land had become a facility for the U.S. Naval Reserve. And though the Navy Guard tried to turn her away,

22:14Pam didn't give up. And I told him about my dad's accident and there's a memorial stone and I am here to see it today.

22:25And I, I'm pretty sure I had some tears going down my face that were real. And they just looked at me like, okay, we're, we get it. And so one of the men walked over to the, you know, his phone and called and he just said, just a minute, I'll be right back. And he came back and he said, I just talked to the chaplain at the chapel and he's going to meet you over there. Pam didn't need directions to get to the old chapel. She hadn't been there in decades,

22:57not since she was a small child, but she remembered the way. And we drove up and chaplain was there and he greeted us right as we got out of the car and he said, I'm really sorry to tell you, but that memorial stone is no longer here. And I was like, oh, okay, well, where is it? And, or do you know? And he said, well, it's been transferred over to Dias Air Force Base, which is in Abilene. And, you know, we don't, we had no idea how far that was.

23:28And he said, well, it's about three hours. And we were like, okay, well, I guess it's just not meant to be. So I was pretty devastated because there were so many things, you know, the saying, you can't go home again was kind of like, wow, this is why. The fact that Pam LaMonica and Cliff Scholand both went in search of the monument in different locations and roughly 25 years apart says something about a kind of cosmic alignment or maybe it's more of a cosmic misalignment. As Pam LaMonica learned

23:58in 1994, the monument had not been moved to a public park in Fort Worth. It was now in Abilene, about 150 miles away. And then when we found out the memorial stone wasn't there and it wasn't even in Air Force Base, it was just kind of a weird feeling. Pam's search was in 1994. Carswell Air Force Base had closed only a year earlier and so the monument had only just been moved. In fact, the park where it stood in Abilene with other monuments to lost service members had not even been

24:29officially dedicated yet. And that didn't come until 2019. So then when this Memorial Park dedication came up, I was like, okay, we're going because I know where it is, you know. Pam and her husband drove from their home in Ohio to Abilene, Texas to attend the dedication ceremony. We drove over and I saw it almost immediately and it was towards the back of the park. And it's pretty big.

24:59It's about probably a little over five feet tall and three feet wide. And it was still like, there was still dirt on the ground. I think they were planting grass but it hadn't grown yet and it's in the middle of Texas so and this was in July so it was pretty darn hot. And then I took a picture of it. Of course, I took multiple pictures. Social media didn't exist in 1994 when Pam tried to visit the monument at what had been Carswell Air Force Base.

25:31But it did exist in 2019 and Pam had a Facebook page. I posted some pictures from that day. I don't do a lot of those, you know, posting, you know, that kind of thing but I felt that that was really important because, you know, people that have, you know, family and friends that I've known over years would know this was a pretty big deal. And so one of the pictures I posted was of the memorial stone and you could see all the names on there.

26:03Meanwhile, Cliff's trip to Fort Worth in 2020 and his own attempt to visit the relocated monument had sent him back to look at his old notebooks from 1993 before the internet when he first found Frank Salavaria's widow in the phone book. This time, instead of flipping through the Dallas-Fort Worth white pages, he went to his computer. and I found out about it by doing a Google search for the first name that was etched on the monument because I took notes

26:33and I kept those notes and lo and behold, Google comes back and says, yeah, there's an image of what you're looking for and it's on the Facebook page of a lady by the name of Pam LaMonica and she's a real estate agent in Ohio who used Facebook, you know, for business purposes. Cliff's online search came barely a year after Pam had posted the photo of the monument

27:03to the lost B-52 and the men, including her father, who were still missing. So I instant messaged her and like 10 minutes later she said, yeah, that's my dad's name that's on that monument and it's in Abilene. and so I contacted her. His name popped up and so he reached out to me through Facebook and just kind of, we started a conversation about, you know, what he was interested in

27:34and finding out, which was kind of, you know, a little, at first, I wasn't sure how to, you know, wasn't sure what was going to happen with the conversation, but we just spent a lot of time talking and felt comfortable. I felt comfortable talking with him and his job was to find a home for that, Memorial Stone, and he wanted to know where it was because he thought it was somewhere else and it wasn't. Why wasn't the monument

28:05where Cliff expected it to be? It turns out that the Air Force bureaucracy went a different direction than what Frank Salivaria's widow had suggested. Well, come to find out that the organization that was at Carswell was the 7th Bomb Wing, because of its historical lineage, the Air Force decided to keep the 7th Bomb Wing going, so they moved the organization, not the airplanes, the airplanes moved to Louisiana,

28:35Marksdale, but the organization went to Abilene, Texas, at Dias Air Force Base. Somebody thought it was a good idea to move that monument there because the air crew members were all members of the 7th Bomb Wing. And so that's where it ended up. Beyond just learning from her where the monument had gone, speaking with Pam LaMonica was something of a watershed moment for Cliff Sholand, spurring him to honor his old squadron and the families of the missing crew.

29:06So I had connection to all eight of those guys from an organizational standpoint, but I think what really drove me down this path was my conversation with Pam, who confirmed, as the daughter, everything that the widow of Salivaria had told me back in 1993. That conversation inspired Cliff to begin an intensive research project, which has now become a full-on mission to search in the waters

29:37off of Matagorda Island for the missing B-52. Because she watched her, she was nine years old when this happened. Her dad never came back for breakfast as he said he would and take her to school. And so she was old enough to chew on it and see the grief that her mom went through. So, you know, part of me was to try to right a wrong here. For Cliff Sholand, retired B-52

30:07squadron commander, righting that wrong means finding the plane and bringing the eight men home. We're going to go find the aircraft. I'm fairly confident. We know where it's at. It's in a big area. You know, about 30 square miles. But it's still important for us to determine the root cause of that 1968 accident because that aircraft is still flying.

30:37It's still part of the active Air Force inventory and we want to know why that aircraft crashed.

30:46The search for Meal 8-8 in the waters off Matagorda Island could begin as early as later this year if Cliff and his crew can raise the funds necessary to support the mission. And that's a lot of sea floor to have to look at. That's the reason they're planning on a 21-day expedition. But they could find it on the first day.

31:10We'll have more about the search

The Search for Meal 8-8

31:11and about the people left behind and waiting for answers in Part 2 of Bomber Down.

31:19For more information including photos and maps find us on Facebook and Instagram at Unsolved Histories Pod or visit our website UnsolvedHistoriesPod.com Episodes are posted every other Tuesday. Each covers an unsolved, little-known, or mysterious event in history. Follow Unsolved Histories by KSL now wherever you get your podcasts. Unsolved Histories is researched, written, and hosted by me, Felix Bunnell. Production and sound design by Josh Tilton. Special thanks to Trent Sell,

31:50Aaron Mason, Andrea Smartin, Kellyanne Halver, Ryan Meeks, Amy Donaldson, Ben Kebrick, and Dave Cauley. Our executive producer is Cheryl Worsley. Unsolved Histories is produced by KSL Podcasts in association with Rhapsody Voices.

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