Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] magazine article

[Lew Clayman <lew_clayman@yahoo.com>]

--- Coalbunny <coalbunny@onewest.net> wrote:
> One of my past landlords was some kind of a technician for the USAF in
> the late '60s to the mid '70s.  He was stationed in AK for a number of
> years, working on the radar stations.  He showed me some pics of the
> remains of a Bear that went down east of Nome.  Went down, went boom, no
> survivors.  And radar didn't pick it up.  Eskimos first found it.  No
> bombs, full crew, even had drop tanks.  Where it went down there wern't
> any trees, just tundra.  I wish I could recall the distance from Nome. 
> He said they were baffled how the bomber could have gotten opast their
> radar, but it did.  I think it had been down long enough that they
> couldn't approximate the time of impact.  I'm thinking it had been down
> a few weeks before the Eskimos found it.
> Carl

Well, anything from 50? - 300? miles east of Nome is pretty unpopulated.  Then
comes Fairbanks, and then the almost-nobody-lives-there starts again.  No
surprise that, having once gotten in and gone down, nobody would find it. 
There's a reason they call AK "the great land!"  No surprise either that the
dating was uncertain, any human remains would likely have frozen solid in a few
hours - not counting high summer of course.  Grim.  (But here's an amazing stat
- as of the 1990 census, Wyoming was on average more sparsely populated than
Alaska, in total people per unit area.  Haven't seen 2000 figures.  Not many
PSUBS in Wyoming, though.)

Presumably it was on a recon mission and had a problem, but that's not the kind
of thing anybody would publish in detail.  We'll probably never know.  

Thanks
-Lew

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"I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." 
             - Pascal, Provincial Letters XVI
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