Doyle Yandell was 8 years old when he stood on the shoulder of old Highway 99 looking down at the smoldering wreck of a bomber. It had crashed the night before and the whole town of Weed it seemed was there to check it out with him.
Doyle recalls seeing soldiers around the site (the Tunnel Guards from Company A of the 771st Division stationed at Camp Mott) and so he didn't go looking for souveniers. Then.
But yesterday he did. With me. And look what we found. Melted aluminum shards, rivets, hose clamps. And the thing is, they were all right at the toe of the fill where I-5 southbound lanes now are.
We scratched around the little hill but the shards were all on the front of it, not off to the sides. Of course there was too much snow to do a real sweep and we'd need metal detectors to do that. But an emerging pattern implies that eye 5 goes right on top of the main impact site.
A plane that size would of course create a large footprint upon impact. It apparently went in belly down with gear up so the impact pattern should be triangular in shape. But the darned hill is in the way.
All the newspaper stories say it came in about 350 yards (1,000 feet mol) west of where 99 crossed the SP tracks. When Doyle and I stood there, on the shoulder of I-5 looking down, it was hard to imagine the roadway being NOT there, and the glide slope leading right into that little hill.
I guess the point is that until and unless we can come up with some confirming artifacts (ordanance, parts with numbers on them, etc.) we just have a guess. Educated, but still a guess.
The reality is to have artifacts from the folks who "souveniered" the site. Apparently there were many. The news reports that people bombarded (excuse the pun) the Sheriff's Department with stories of recovered 50 caliber shells and other ammunition so it must have scattered quite aways around the original impact site.
The end game here is a display in the Weed Museum so if you have, or know someone who has, an artifact from this accident please call me. I want to button this thing down.
USFS photos are still pending as are blown-up copies of the wreck from the military microfilm archive so stay tuned. Doyle and I may be off a few yards and there may still be artifacts there when the snow melts and we can organize some metal detector owners willing to waste a few hours.
I'm hoping to sweet-talk Aaron Richardson into driving me there too, to confirm what Doyle and I saw today.
Is anyone out there?
Editor
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