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- Amelia Earhart's final flight is not the only aviation
mystery the Tighar foundation is investigating. In 1985 Ric Gillespie opened
Project Midnight Ghost to track down what he calls history s most important
missing airplane, which disappeared into thin air 10 years before Earhart
s ill-fated journey.
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- L Oiseau Blanc (the White Bird) took off from Le Bourget
Field, near Paris, on May 8, 1927, bound nonstop for New York. Had the
pilots, Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli, succeeded they would have
been the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.
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- But their plane went missing and it was the American
Charles Lindbergh who, 12 days later, entered the history books in their
place.
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- Intrigued by speculation that Nungesser and Coli had
actually reached North America, Gillespie followed up a report of an aircraft
crash heard by Anson Berry, a hermit who lived in the woods of coastal
Maine, exactly on the plane s flight path.
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- Although Berry was long dead, surviving witnesses told
of hearing or seeing an aeroplane that day, an unusual event in the 20s,
and of an aircraft engine partially embedded in the ground. However, 20
search expeditions mounted by Tighar revealed nothing.
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- Then in 1992 the search shifted to Newfoundland s Avalon
Peninsula, where folklore had it that an aircraft had crashed into one
of its lakes. This time, remote sensing indicated that a plane had indeed
crashed in the area.
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- The timing makes it highly probable that the flight was
one of several vanished transatlantic attempts. The strongest candidate
is L Oiseau Blanc. But, as yet, the exact location of the crash and the
plane engine have not been found.
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- Tighar s other major project is Operation Sepulchre.
So the story goes, bomb-proof underground aircraft hangars in Europe were
sealed off by retreating German forces at the close of the Second World
War. Inside are intact Luftwaffe aircraft.
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- The Nazi high command undoubtedly planned such facilities
and the construction of some of them is well documented, but despite Tighar
s efforts the location of the sealed sites is still a mystery.
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