Bomber Down: Part Two

0:00Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with Visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot. Powered by Verizon for $25 a month, taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan, using the code FRESHSTART. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. Adobe Firefly is the all-in-one creative studio with AI-powered image and video editing for today's creative process.

0:37Built for creators of every kind, Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast. Because the asks aren't getting smaller, the budgets aren't getting bigger, and the timelines, oh yeah, still tight. With all the best creative AI models in one place, Firefly brings your ideas to life. Unlock a better way to make with Adobe Firefly. Felix Bunnell here, producer and host of Unsolved Histories. This episode is part two of our story about Meal 88, a B-52 bomber that's been missing in the Gulf of Mexico since February 28, 1968.

1:14In part one, we learned how the story came to light, thanks to a rediscovered monument, decades after the plane disappeared. We met the daughter of one of the missing crew members and the retired B-52 pilot leading the effort to find the lost bomber. There are many layers to this story. Cold War readiness, an intense kind of training for evading enemy radar and accurately dropping bombs, which is exactly what Meal 88 and the crew were engaged in the night they vanished. The investigation and the searches, one conducted by the Air Force and one conducted by the family of one of the crew members.

1:48And now, part two of Unsolved Histories, Bomber Down. I was an acting wing safety officer at the time, and I got the call about, it was after midnight sometime, to come out to the command post at the Carswell Air Force Base where the B-52 was stationed. As safety officer for the wing that included Meal 88, Earl McGill was one of the first people notified that the B-52 had not returned to the base in Fort Worth.

2:23A wing is an organizational word used by the Air Force that means a group of squadrons. So I drove out there. Once he reached the base, there was confusion, Earl says, and he was told to go home. The missing B-52, someone said, was visible on radar and was actually due in at Carswell any moment. Its radio had malfunctioned so the crew couldn't be reached. But, as it turned out, the B-52 on radar was a different bomber on its way to a base in nearby Oklahoma. Later that day, leap day, February 29, 1968,

2:57once it was clear that the bomber missing from Carswell Air Force Base had likely gone down somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, Earl was assigned to the Air Force team investigating what happened. I was sent down to the Gulf, to Matagorda Island, to join the accident investigating crew. And we stayed there, I think it was around 10 days. Matagorda Island is along the Texas Gulf Coast. That's where an Air Force training facility was located, known as a radar bomb scoring site, or RBS.

3:32Meal 8-8 had been taking part in training exercises at the Matagorda Island RBS late on the night of February 28th, when radio contact was lost. The first thing we did was listen to all the tapes, various tapes, between it and the bomb scoring site on Matagorda Island. And then we listened to some of the FAA tapes. When you're listening to those tapes, you're hearing the voices of guys you knew. What was that like? Well, it was spooky, to put it succinctly.

4:07Those tapes are no longer accessible, by the way, but the written transcripts still exist. And Earl did know all eight of the men who were aboard the bomber, but he says none were his close friends, though he'd spent time with many of them while on alert. Those were the seven-day periods when multiple B-52 crews would live in a bunker next to the airfield. There, they would stand ready to get airborne with their deadly bombs, if and when the alarm sounded. So you get to know these guys, you're playing poker. There's a lot of kinship. You guys are actually, you guys feel a lot of bonding or team building, doing that kind of stuff?

4:41Well, yeah, yeah. And a lot of dirty jokes. Earl wrote a book about his experiences as an Air Force pilot. It's called Jet Age Man. During his career, he flew B-29s. That's the prop bomber made famous during World War II. But Earl flew his on dozens of bombing missions over North Korea during the Korean War. I don't know how to describe it. It was more like a truck than an airplane. He also flew the groundbreaking B-47 swept-wing bomber during the Cold War.

5:13And he flew B-52s. Well, the 29 was a truck and the B-52 was a much smoother truck. Earl's book includes a chapter about the missing B-52 and the 10 days he was at the Matagorda Island radar bomb scoring site investigating the disappearance of the bomber. The instructions given to Earl and the other members of the team were clear. The colonel who was running the investigation told us not to speculate at all.

5:43He said, I don't want to hear any speculation. And he was right to say that. A crash investigator's job is not to speculate. It's to examine evidence and gather factual information. But, aside from the tapes of the radio communications and routine documents from the training exercise, there wasn't much for Earl or anyone to investigate. The boats were out there looking for it the whole time we were there. They had some pretty good high-tech stuff, but they never found it. One theory about what happened didn't come from Earl or from other members of the Air Force team at Matagorda,

6:19though it did involve the American spy plane known as the SR-71 Blackbird. They investigated every possible contingency, such as hijacking the airplane. The United States had the SR-71 photograph all airports where the airplane could land within range of Matagorda Island. Some part of the U.S. government worried that a member of the crew had hijacked the B-52 and flown it to Cuba or somewhere in Central America. Spy photos, the theory went, might reveal the bomber parked alongside a runway

6:53at some remote and hostile place. Perhaps Fidel Castro's Havana, a nemesis to America throughout the Cold War and beyond. Did you guys see the photos? Somebody else was doing that. We didn't look at the photos at all. And how likely did that seem at the time that it might have been hijacked? About zero, per se. Earl thinks the hijacking theory may have come from the FBI. Or, at least, it might have been the FBI that was assigned the task of investigating this potential cause for the bomber's disappearance.

7:24We were even interviewed by a couple of FBI agents. I guess they were FBI. They acted like they were. They went and asked a lot of questions about the crew. There was one black guy on the crew. And the aircraft commander was of Latino descent. So all those prejudices were working. Do you remember what kind of questions they were asking you? Oh, yeah. Have you observed any unusual behavior? Blah, blah.

7:57How long was so-and-so? They asked most of the questions we could not answer because we weren't that familiar with the crew. Their personal history, that is. So, finally, the colonel was in charge, just chased him out of the room. He said, that's enough. And he asked him to leave. Why do you think the colonel chased him out? Because the questions were inappropriate. The questions about hijacking were inappropriate, Earl says, because no member of the Air Force investigation team doubted the loyalty of any of the crew of the bomber.

8:31All eight men had consistently demonstrated this loyalty through their service aboard multiple B-52 missions. A hijacking, Earl says, just wasn't within the realm of possibilities. I'm trying to understand, like, they're on a training mission and they disappear and they never find their bodies. It seems like that's rarer and rarer in the modern age. It's very common in World War II, common in Vietnam also, I guess, too. But it just seems like for 1968 to go totally missing just off the coast of the United States

9:03seems really unlikely or seems really rare or unusual or something. Yeah, well, you're right. You're exactly right. We all felt that, too, that this was really something extremely unlikely that happened. We didn't lose that many B-52s, and most of the ones that were lost were lost, well, some of them by extreme turbulence, a couple by mid-air collisions and stuff like that. They didn't just vanish.

9:33From KSL Podcasts, I'm Felix Bunnell. This is Unsolved Histories, Bomber Down, Part 2.

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10:33They had two evaluators on board, which compounded the stress that they must have been feeling. This is retired B-52 bomber pilot Cliff Sholin, who we met in Part 1. He's describing the final hours of Meal 8-8, the B-52 bomber that was taking part in a training exercise when it disappeared in 1968. This huge cold front had just rumbled through Texas, generated tornadoes in the panhandle. And when they got their weather briefing prior to the flight,

11:07you know, they were forecasting thunderstorms down in that low-level structure where they disappeared. You know, and so, yeah, there was a lot of stress on their shoulders that night. And, you know, a lot of that may enter into, you know, potential root cause. We'll never know. From the early 1960s until the 1990s, B-52 crews regularly took part in radar bomb scoring, or RBS, exercises to measure their proficiency in delivering bombs to the target.

11:40At Matagorda Island and other RBS sites, it was all done with electronics. No actual bombs were dropped by the B-52s, and no ground-to-air missiles were fired from the ground. The action was all simulated, but it was intense because the test scores could dictate promotions and other professional opportunities for the members of each crew. 99% of the time, I felt very comfortable, very secure, very safe because we knew what we were doing. We trusted our equipment.

12:12You know, we knew that there were guys on the other side of the radio doing exactly what they were paid to do, which was to shoot us down, you know, electronically. Cliff had flown B-52s through RBS training exercises, but he only knew his side of the process, from the pilot's seat of the bomber. And, you know, our job was to defend the aircraft electronically and put the bomb down the smokestack. And we knew that we could do that because guys like Michael had the equipment to score us down to a couple of feet.

12:45And we're not dropping anything from the airplane. We're dropping a radio tone. You know, I didn't know hardly anything about that other than what we've experienced from the aircraft. But I never knew about the mechanics of how it was all done until Michael Champion came into my life. It started explaining it to me. I was in the Air Force from 74 to 82 and in Nevada from 75 to 82 at the radar bomb scoring site. This is Michael Champion. But during my last year, you know,

13:16Chips was the TV show on the TV, you know. Oh, my God. And I was riding a motorcycle in the desert and I said, oh, my, this sounds like... And I was from California and I wanted to get back to California. Long story short, I put in an application my last year and they accepted me and two months after my Air Force discharge, I was in the Highway Patrol Academy. And I spent 31 years after that being on Highway Patrol and working all over California. Michael is something of a student of the history of RBS and American attempts to improve bomber accuracy

13:49dating back to World War II. A lot of bombs on the American side were not on target. During the last year of the war, they decided since the British had advanced the practice of radar usage that the United States would also try to do that to improve their bombing accuracy. So long story short, radar bomb scoring was developed. How does RBS work? It's a process where radars on the ground lock up onto the aircraft,

14:20the strategic bombers that are doing the bomb runs, and then we electronically track and record their movement and using ballistic data from the type of weapons that they drop, their airspeed, their known position, and a lot of other factors, we can accurately, electronically, without them dropping a bomb, we can determine where that simulated bomb would hit within 50 feet. Michael says radar bomb scoring was developed at the height of the Cold War. What the Air Force decided to do in 1961, they formed what they call the First Combat Evaluation Group,

14:52which is what I was working in and which the crew that night was also part of. And we had about 10 radar sites across the continental United States. One of them was located on Matagorda Island. I worked at the one in Hawthorne, Nevada, south of Reno. But these were placed strategically across the United States. Essentially, it was guys like Michael, on the ground, who kept guys like Cliff busy in the sky. In fact, though they didn't know each other at the time and wouldn't meet until decades later. Michael is pretty certain his group put Cliff and his crew through the RBS paces sometime back in the 1970s.

15:28We would score simulated their bomb drops, and we would also, we had radar that also simulated providing them with being attacked by surface-to-air missiles and AAA anti-aircraft guns. So we served a dual role in their training in that regard. And that's exactly what was happening on Matagorda Island that night, that fateful night when the aircraft was lost.

15:52To be clear, Michael Champion didn't join the First Combat Evaluation Group until 1975, seven years after the loss of Meal 8-8. But it's obvious that, much like Cliff Sholand, he feels a deep connection to the missing crew. Our main focus was on the Soviet Union, and we were constantly planning on what we would do in the event that we had to run an attack on the Soviet Union. So the air crew Meal 88, the call sign Meal 88, was doing a routine combat training run at the Matagorda Island site,

16:26which was not far from their home base at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. They were doing three high-level bomb runs. That's usually at 30,000 feet or above. And the low-level bomb runs are usually around 500, 400, sometimes as low as 300 feet above the ground. Those were very exciting times when a B-52 would cross over you at 400 feet after completing their bomb run. Michael found Cliff on Facebook, where Cliff had posted about Meal 8-8 and its final moments over the RBS site. I had never heard about that during my time from 1975 to 1982.

16:59And so I just became fascinated with that since I worked in that same career field and the same command as the radar unit that night. And then one thing led to another. He was asking for a lot of operational background with the radar component of the combat training run that the aircraft was involved in. And so it kind of grew from there into where we are today. Michael has read and studied all he can about Meal 8-8. He's worked with Cliff to try and better understand

17:30what might have happened that night. So they were simulating that that night in 1968 involving the Matagorda Island radar bomb scoring site. We call them bomb plots. They were at the Matagorda bomb plot conducting their second-to-last low-level bomb run. I know they had completed one release, and they had another release, a simulated bomb release that was scheduled during that final run. Again, there are no real bombs or bullets or missiles involved in radar bomb scoring. Of course, in these practice runs,

18:02no bombs are actually dropped.

18:06On the ground, near the pinpointed targets, are fixed radar bomb scoring sites, manned by SAC specialists, who track by radar the exact paths and altitudes of the bombers, and who plot the airplane's path over the targets. This is from an old Air Force film about the RBS program. SAC is short for Strategic Air Command, the part of the Air Force whose job it was during the Cold War to defend American airspace and be ready to attack the enemy with bombs and missiles.

18:36These SAC radar specialists also beam radar and electronic defenses at our bombers, similar to those an enemy might use to detect and confuse them. When an aircraft releases an imaginary bomb, it flashes an electronic signal, and the scorers know exactly where the release occurs.

18:58The crew of Meal 8-8 had completed five of six runs over the bomb plot and were preparing for the final run of the night when the bomber disappeared. Michael says that radar bomb scoring was intense for everyone involved, the people on the ground like him doing the scoring, but especially for the officers aboard the plane. Training was so intense that it could make or break a career if the bombing proficiency wasn't of such a high degree, because that determined that combat readiness to go to war

19:29based on the scores that we gave them. It was very serious. As a matter of fact, when they called in to us, sometimes I worked the radio and gathered that information, they would declare whether they were a combat-ready crew or not, and we knew that the ante was way up. The presence of two evaluators on board, Major Phil Strine and Captain Tom Childs, would have meant even more pressure on Major Frank Salavaria and the entire crew to perform flawlessly. We knew on the ground that we had to do everything just right

20:00and make sure that we acquired the aircraft and provided them prompt and accurate scores. And then conversely, they had to assure that they did everything right in front of the evaluators on board, simulating an actual bomb release to make sure that they maintained their combat bombing proficiency. It was a very serious operation. Radar bomb scoring was a serious business. You know, we had a kind of a slogan that there are only two things we did in the Air Force. We're either trading for war or we're going to war.

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22:05We know that Earl McGill was told by his colonel to not speculate as to the cause of the crash during the original investigation in 1968. Cliff Sholin in his role as leader of the private effort to find Meal 8-8 isn't under the same restrictions. For Earl and the other investigators in 1968 and for the current project, data from the radar bomb scoring site provides critical information. And so we knew where the aircraft was. We knew what altitude it was flying.

22:36We know what airspeed it was flying. We have some forensic evidence for voice tapes. Along with his flying duties, Cliff also trained as a crash investigator during his Air Force career. In this role, he led multiple crash investigations.

22:52As part of his work on the missing B-52, he prepared an exhaustive written report documenting all of his research as well as details about each of the men lost on the plane. Cliff did this to give the surviving family members far more than the Department of Defense ever did, but also to help inform the new search, a search which might happen as soon as later this year. The sky was full of stars. There was a new moon, which means no moonlight whatsoever. The pilot was turning the aircraft to the left, going away from the shore, back into the Gulf.

23:28And out in the blackness of the Gulf, he could see oil platforms and probably some shrimp boats. And pilots love to be able to see the horizon when they're looking out the windows because it keeps you oriented between up and down. When that happens, a pilot can quickly lose critical perspective. I suspect that maybe there was some spatial disorientation involved. And he got the aircraft into too high of a bank angle.

23:59And the aircraft, the B-52, is very susceptible to accelerated stall. When the down wing stalls and loses lift, the airplane rolls because the up wing is still producing lift. And it exceeded the pilot's capability of controlling the direction of the airplane. And when that happens, the aircraft turns from an airplane into a brick. And the aircraft falls out of the sky.

24:31Since Meal 8-8 was at a very low altitude, if a problem like this had occurred, there wouldn't have been enough time to recover. That is, to get the plane flying properly again before it crashed into the water. But that's just a theory. That's just a theory. Given your role as a B-52 pilot, the same thing could easily have happened to you. Absolutely. We flew the exact same kind of training missions. At night, in the mountains, over water. Because we were practicing for a real-world scenario in a war toe-to-toe with the Russies.

25:08And we had to be ready. They were being evaluated that night. They had aircraft problems, but they kept leaning forward. The aircraft problem, Cliff references here, was a malfunctioning radar, which the crew managed to reset just prior to the first RBS bombing run. They kept leaning forward, and they could have easily aborted the mission. But because of the culture of bombs on target no matter what,

25:41they kept leaning forward, and that bit them in the butt. I'm convinced of that. The story of Meal 8-8 has multiple threads. One is what happened to the bomber and the search and Air Force investigation that followed. Another thread, as we heard in Part 1, is about the families left behind when the eight crew members disappeared. Pam LaMonica lost her dad. Cindy Dillaplane lost her husband. I was at Baylor as a student and came out of the library.

26:15And I met my brother's best friend at the door. And he yelled at me, brat, which is what my brother and this guy called me. Cindy is in her 80s. In 1964, she was 19 and a college student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, when she bumped into her brother's best friend, who she had known since she was a little girl. And he said, what are you doing here? And he was four years older than I was.

26:45And I said, well, I go to school here. And he said, I can't believe it. He said, I'm here looking for girls. The best friend was looking for a date for himself and for John Pantala, a young Air Force officer originally from Michigan. He was out at James Conley Air Force Base, and John was his roommate. And he just could not believe I had grown up. And he said, I have the perfect person for you. He said, he's a total gentleman and a wonderful guy.

27:18And if you'll fix me up with someone who's not, I will introduce you to John. And we double dated.

27:28And it changed my entire life. It would be an understatement to say that on that double date, Cindy and John really hit it off. In just a couple of months, he was just all I wanted. They got married a few months later in the spring of 1965. I was 20. And I quit school on the spot and got married. And it was, it just, I mean, once I met him, my entire life changed.

27:59And it stopped on a dime. And I had been, since sixth grade, wanting to become a physical therapist. And I stopped on a dime just because he was just everything I ever wanted.

28:17As happy as Cindy was meeting John, it wasn't all smooth sailing as far as her family was concerned. He was Catholic and I was Lutheran. And my father totally rejected him. And that's one thing I do want to tell you, that my family had enormous weddings. I had been a Lutheran all my life and all of my huge family and a bridesmaid probably 12 times and a flower girl, you know, always.

28:54Cindy doesn't apologize for her dad's attitude more than six decades ago, but she didn't let it stand in her way either. And this was my time. And my father refused to give me a wedding. He would not allow me to marry a Catholic. So John and I were married, you know, like a Saturday evening in the Catholic church close to me. And about eight people came. And then we went to a big, nice hotel there in Dallas.

29:29And the next morning we got up and we're leaving town. And my father never even came. Though he didn't attend her wedding, her new husband, John, insisted Cindy speak with her dad before the couple headed off on their honeymoon. And he said, we're not going to go till you call your father. And I said, well, I'm not speaking to him. And he said, yes, you are before we go. And I said, no. And I'm 100 percent German.

30:00And I said, no, John, I'm not going to call him. And he wouldn't come. And he's done this to us. And I'm not going to call. And he said, yes, you are. And he sat on the bed and I sat in the chair and we waited. I don't know how long. And he said, will you call, please? And I finally picked up the phone and called. Cindy says this episode, John insisting she call her father, is quintessential to understanding who John was and why she loved him so much.

30:34I'm just telling you to tell you about him. He was so kind and so thoughtful and sweet of other people. And I finally called my father and said goodbye. And we left and the fences were mended forever. He never he never acted like anything had ever happened to my father. And and my father was nice and perfect to him always.

31:08John was already with the Air Force when he and Cindy married. And his next assignment meant the couple moved to an airbase in California.

31:16John was training to become an electronic warfare specialist, learning to jam enemy radar and guided missiles and take other steps to avoid detection. The kinds of things that are critical in combat aboard a B-52 and in radar bomb scoring, of course. From California, John Pantala was assigned to a B-52 crew at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, just an hour or so from where Cindy's parents lived. It was an idyllic time for the young couple, though not without hardship and heartache.

31:48John had long deployments to the Pacific and Southeast Asia. And a year after they were married, Cindy and John lost their first child, a newborn daughter, who died tragically from complications during childbirth. However, in February 1968, the couple were overjoyed when Cindy gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Then, just a few weeks later, came the morning of February 29th. Okay, so I'm holding this newborn baby, and they're knocking at my door.

32:18And I'm holding the baby, and I open it. And I think he said before I opened it, he said, Cindy, it's Father Morris. And I said, no.

32:32No. And he said, Cindy, open the door. He knew me personally. You know, we went to Mass at the base, and he knew me by name. And I said, no. And he said, open the door. And I opened it, and he's standing there with this lieutenant, and it seems like another guy. And maybe it was just the two of them. Even as a 23-year-old Air Force wife, Cindy knew what was happening. And I opened the door, and I said, I think I'm going to drop my baby.

33:09I think I'm going to drop my baby. And I kept saying that. And I said, take my baby. I'm going to drop the baby. That's what I kept saying. Because I knew what they were there for. What they were there to tell Cindy was that John's plane, the P-52 known as Meal 8-8, was missing. I think I just kind of zoned out because I thought, they'll find him soon. They were telling me that, I think their words were, they haven't landed.

33:43They haven't found a crash site. Remember, it happened like at, what was it, midnight?

33:51So they don't know where the plane is. This is 6 in the morning. They don't know where the plane went.

34:01So are you hopeful or optimistic at that point? Or are you leaning on your faith? Or what's your mind doing at that point? My mind was like completely numb. I was totally mystified and feeling like they weren't telling me what they needed to tell me. Which would have been what? I don't know. I don't know. I'm just totally confused by the entire thing.

34:32Six hours later, you haven't found a crash site or you don't know where a B-52 is like a block long and three stories tall. And you say it's disappeared? Does that make any sense? Several days later, when Cindy heard that the search in the Gulf of Mexico had been suspended, she was not happy. They did terminate it. After like three days, they declared them dead and came out and told me he was dead and I freaked.

35:04And I said, here's eight people that have been serving and you say they're dead? What makes you think they're not floating around on a piece of wing or something and you don't care? And I sent off telegrams to the president, the senators, the congressmen from the area. And they sent back and said, oh, no, the search is ongoing. There was a mistake. It's unclear all these years later exactly how the days and weeks unfolded after the B-52 disappeared.

35:39But Cindy has a vivid memory of going to Carswell Air Force Base sometime in March. There on the base, she was seated in a conference room with Air Force officials and with the wives of the other missing men. I think that's when they brought all the wives in for a meeting with the base personnel, you know, and they had like a briefing, which was totally elementary. And they talked down to us.

36:11However events transpired, Cindy was not satisfied with the Air Force's response to the disappearance of the plane. I think it was a cover-up because then in a few days later, they did end the search. And that's why I felt the need to go see for myself what was going on down there. Seeing for herself what was going on down there meant Cindy wanted to undertake her own search off the Gulf Coast.

36:41But knowing where to look wasn't necessarily an easy thing to figure out. Then, on March 8th, a schoolteacher found debris, believed to be from the B-52, along a beach on the Texas coast near Corpus Christi. Late yesterday afternoon, a schoolteacher down at Port Isabel, Texas, found an object approximately two feet by three feet on the beach there, about four miles north of Port Isabel, the Coast Guard station there at Port Isabel. This is from a local TV news report in Dallas-Fort Worth.

37:13The voice is an Air Force spokesperson. We had this object sent to the Boeing Corporation in Wichita, Kansas. There, a Boeing official stated that it was a piece of a B-52 aircraft that would not have come off in flight. But they couldn't state specifically that it was from the specific B-52, which is missing. It might have been this news, which was on TV and in Fort Worth newspapers, which gave Cindy some idea where to search. She says she also tracked down a professor at nearby TCU, Texas Christian University, for expert advice.

37:49And I talked to a man who specialized in the waters and in waves and currents and things like that, a professor. I told him what my problem was and what I was worried about, about my husband and the crash. And of course, being in Fort Worth, he was very aware of it. And I told him what had happened and where and that we didn't know what happened to the plane. But if it did crash in that area, where would the currents have carried it?

38:24Armed with this information, Cindy's father—remember, this is the same guy who had initially rejected Cindy's Catholic husband— chartered an airplane and private pilot from Love Field in Dallas. Cindy and her dad flew to Corpus Christi on a Saturday morning in March 1968, just a few weeks after the B-52 had disappeared. You spend the day, the one day out on the plane over the water.

38:57And do you see anything in the water that aroused any curiosity or anything? Nothing. Nothing. We went along there and didn't see anything. We spend the night. And the next morning, we get this Jeep and we spend the day going up the beach. And we come upon pieces of wreckage, that honeycomb with the edges all torn apart. In the sand and waves along the Texas Gulf Coast, Cindy and her father came upon multiple pieces of debris that looked to them to be from the B-52.

39:33And my heart started to sink because I realized there was a plane crash. And when we pulled up an Air Force jacket, you know, that goes like under a coat kind of thing, and it says, you know, Air Force issue on the title. And we found a mask that went inside the helmet. Are you and your dad talking to each other about what this means to find these pieces, or is it silent?

40:06I think we were both in just hideous shock. It was when she was telling this part of the story that Cindy paused to explain why she wasn't ready to accept that her husband, John Pantala, had died in a plane crash. I want to share one thing with you that's very important to me the rest of my life. I didn't realize I was walking in the water, you know, I've got tennis shoes on. I'm walking in the water about up mid-calf, and I got tangled in seaweed, and I couldn't take another step.

40:44The seaweed was tangled around my ankle. Cindy had made it clear that John was the love and light of her life. Theirs was a storybook romance. But as a couple, they'd also experienced terrible loss when their first child died. And I'm yelling at God in my mind, and I'm saying, you took my little girl away, I buried my little girl, and now you expect me to bury my husband? I'm not going to do it. You can't expect this of me.

41:15I'm not this strong. You can't take him away from me. And I'm yelling out in the air. I don't even know where my father was. He may have heard me. And I said, what do you expect of me? And I reached down and untangled the seaweed. And do you know what was there? A shell was tied around my ankle. And it had a cross imprinted in the top.

41:45A perfect cross. And I've still got my shell.

41:52I brought it home. And it is just a perfect reminder that I'm not alone. I'm not carrying this burden alone. He's there. He's going to carry it.

42:12Perhaps it's this faith, or the earlier tragedy, or the relationship with her husband, or some combination, that explains why Cindy was the only one of the eight wives of the crew members who conducted her own meticulous search. Whatever the reason, this meticulousness is key to what happened next. I drew all the pieces on the stationery back at the motel. We measured them, and we drew them. And don't ask me what made me do that, because we had them in our possession.

42:47Cindy and her father took the debris they'd found back to their motel in Corpus Christi. They'd already taken pictures of everything back at the beach. You drive back to the motel, the hotel, and that's where you make the drawings and the measurements? Mm-hmm. Luckily, we have pictures. And then, did you have some kind of container? When you took them on the plane, did you have some kind of a bag or box or something? No, we had some trouble getting it all in this airplane. And we flew back to Dallas.

43:18My father puts it in the back of his truck. And he drives me to Fort... I called and told Barbara Salavaria, you know, what I had found. And she's anxious to see it. Barbara Salavaria is the wife of Major Frank Salavaria, the pilot of Meal 8-8. She's the widow Cliff Sholin found in the Dallas-Fort Worth phone book after he'd discovered the monument at Carswell Air Force Base. Barbara and Cindy were friends because Frank and John were friends and members of the same crew.

43:53We drive back to Fort Worth with it. And in my yard in Fort Worth is two trucks of APs, the Air Force police. And they have guns.

44:10And they get out of their trucks and demand possession of Air Force property. Do they say, like, hello, Mrs. Pantilla? I mean, are they cordial? No. No, they're not cordial. I'm talking about guns across their chest. Guns. So they're actually, they're holding the guns. Yes. Oh, yes. Why would they do that? Does any of this story make any sense to you?

44:43While Cindy and her father were searching, Cindy's mom and sister had stayed behind at Cindy's house in Fort Worth to watch the baby. Cindy says that somehow the Air Force knew what she had told Barbara Salavaria on the phone about the debris. She thinks her phone and Barbara's phone had been tapped. My mother and sister apparently left, let someone in that put a listening device. They knew when we were arriving. They were waiting. With Air Force security in the front driveway demanding the debris, Cindy's father sent her inside.

45:18And my father said, don't stand in front of the guns. He said, go in the house. He didn't want anything to happen to me. And don't ask me what in the world threat these two Air Force wives were. But they took all of those pieces out of his truck, put them in their pickups with guns and drove away.

45:49And how are you feeling at that point? When you've come home and there's guys with guns and your dad sends you in the house, what are you thinking at that point? I remember thinking I would someday get back at them.

46:05But Cindy isn't someone to become consumed with revenge. She had a son to raise. When I sat there and rocked him and talked to him and I made a pact with God that I would wait a year to see if he came home. And if he didn't, that I would pick my life up and live without him. A year passed and still, of course, there was no sign of John or of the plane. When your husband dies like that, the best way I can describe it, and I've talked to other people, you feel like you have one arm and one leg and just half a body.

46:47So when you walk or you step or you go someplace, you're just actually half a person. That other half of you doesn't even show up. And so you don't function, and then it takes that year for your body to phase back in and for you to feel like a person again. You may be sitting there, you may be talking, but you're not really there yet. And though Cindy went back and finished her college degree, she found other ways to continue searching.

47:21John and I belong to the Mary Knoll Fathers, which is a group of Catholic priests who are missionaries down in South America. And I sat down and wrote the priests all through South America and told them what had happened to John. And that if any wreckage or anything came up in any of those coastal areas or they heard any rumors, to write me back.

47:53Did anyone respond to your letter just saying they'd received it or anything? Most of them did and told me they had talked to everyone along the coastlines and that they didn't have any information to help me. Cindy eventually remarried. But as the years passed, she still wondered about what had happened to the B-52 and to John. In the early 1980s, she requested copies of pertinent documents from the Air Force. But it was only because of Cliff Sholin tracking her down a few years ago that she really began revisiting those long-ago events.

48:27Events that have left a bad taste in her mouth about the Air Force. Cliff has been a godsend. And he has dedicated his life to the Air Force and he tolerates my negative talk. And I bless his heart. I apologize every time I talk to him because of my negative outlook. And he, I don't know why he puts up with it, but he does.

48:57And he has a goal to write it. When Cliff tracked down Cindy a few years ago, she still had the photos and measurements of what she'd collected on the beach. Those armed men who confiscated the debris back in 1968 didn't know Cindy had so thoroughly documented her discoveries. The goal Cliff is pursuing, what Cindy described a moment ago as writing what happened in 1968,

49:32is a lot like what Cliff says the crew of Meal 8-8 was doing that night near Matagorda Island, demonstrating a principle or value that he called leaning forward. When you say leaning forward, what do you, tell me what you mean? Leading forward means culturally you, you have guidance on how to do things, but you're always leaning forward to get the mission accomplished. Cliff is talking about the crew of Meal 8-8,

50:02but he could also be describing the work that he and Michael Champion and the other volunteers are doing now to find the lost B-52. There are always obstacles that come up in getting your way of accomplishing the mission, but you do everything in your power to work around those obstacles.

50:23We'll have details about plans to search for the missing bomber, and more about those left behind in Part 3 of Bomber Down. For more information, including photos and maps, find us on Facebook and Instagram at unsolvedhistoriespod, 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 podcasts.

50:56Unsolved Histories is researched, written, and hosted by me, Felix Bunnell. Production and sound design by Josh Tilton. Special thanks to Trent Sell, Aaron Mason, Andreas Smartin, Kellyanne Halverson, 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.

51:26We'll see you next time.