One of Pittsburgh's best-known urban legends is mostly a true story.
At first glance, the details of the incident are simple: on Jan. 31, 1956, a B-25 Mitchell bomber made an emergency landing in the Monongahela River, was ditched by its crew, sank, and hasn’t been seen since. But nearly 60 years later, the story of the “lost bomber” or “ghost bomber” of the Mon has become the center of local conspiracy theories.
This is because “things don't add up,” says Andy Masich, CEO of the Heinz History Center, which maintains a B-25 “Ghost Bomber” collection in its Detre Library and Archives.
Before it disappeared, the B-25 was flown by experienced pilots, Maj. William Dotson and Capt. John Jameson. Also aboard were two more pilots and two airmen, making a total of six passengers, according to the official Air Force report — itself an object of speculation.
The bomber set out from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada the night of Jan. 30 with a mission of flying to Olmstead Air Force Base near Harrisburg to retrieve aircraft parts. It made two refueling stops along the way, the first in Tinker, Okla. where it stayed overnight, and the second scheduled for the next day at Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit.
Masich says by the time the crew got to Selfridge, “it was raining and sleeting, very cold outside.” Planes were lined up waiting to refuel, making for a two- to three-hour delay.
“Dotson and his crew looked at their fuel gauges, which were notoriously inaccurate, and it was cold and … nobody wanted to go out on the wings with the dipstick [to check the amount of fuel]. So they just relied on their gauges, looked at each other and said, ‘You know what … I think we could make it to Olmstead.’”
As the flight pushed onward over Western Pennsylvania, Dotson noticed significant fuel loss — to this day, it’s unclear if there was a leak or malfunction — and he radioed the Greater Pittsburgh Airport requesting an emergency landing. But the plane was dumping fuel so rapidly that Dotson began to lose altitude, dipping under 3,000 feet as he headed toward the city; he sent out a mayday call, attempting to land at the Allegheny County Airport closer by.
Curving back over the Mon, both the B-25’s engines sputtered, then completely cut out, and while it rapidly descended, the bomber glided over the Homestead High Level (now the Homestead Grays) Bridge. People driving across the bridge stopped their cars to watch.
“[Dotson] cruised silently over that bridge, probably 50 feet over it, and did a perfect wheels-up landing in the Monongahela River,” Masich says, of the maneuver, also known as a splashdown. The plane floated in the middle of the Mon’s icy waters for 11 minutes before the crew ditched it and attempted to swim to the riverbank.
“By that time, there were people on shore, guys in pickup trucks,” Masich elaborates. “People stopped their cars on their way home from work. They were shouting to the guys… The water temperature was probably just above freezing. They'd say, ‘swim over here!’… There was a lot of driftwood in the river, but that wasn't enough for all of them. Some of them were good swimmers and some of them weren't. And two of them were soon lost from sight.”
In the end, two airmen drowned, Capt. Jean Ingraham and Staff Sgt. Walter Soocey (their bodies were later recovered). The B-25 bomber drifted and sank into the Mon, and in the aftermath, an intensive two-week operation conducted by the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers failed to retrieve it. Today, its location remains unknown, even after several recovery attempts were made by groups in the 1990s and 2000s using side-scan sonar to map the bottom of the river.
“We know where every Ford pickup truck, barge, and shopping cart is down there,” Masich says. “But we don't know where that plane is.”
The conspiracy theories generally start from this premise: no one can find the lost bomber because the government already fished it out in secret.
In Heinz History Center’s Ghost Bomber collection — which Masich gathered eyewitness accounts for — are several handwritten notes of Pittsburghers claiming they saw parts of the plane being carted through town at night.
“I am not signing my name, because I do not wish any publicity,” reads one letter that claims to have seen the wings lopped off. In the 1970s, a truck driver called into a KDKA radio show saying he was hired by the CIA to haul part of the plane to a missile site at Oakdale Air Force Station, just east of Pittsburgh.
To compound suspicion, content from the Air Force’s official missing B-25 bomber report — viewable online — remains heavily redacted. (Masich says the Heinz History Center requested unredacted copies of depositions and was “flatly denied,” but the Air Force stated it was their general policy to withhold full testimonies about crashes and disasters for privacy reasons.)
The classified nature of the ghost bomber naturally rouses speculation about what could’ve been on board that the government wanted to keep secret — which is where the legend really starts to spin out.
In the Ghost Bomber archives is a list compiled by a local historical group, Praetorian Gate, and potential hidden cargo includes: a Russian defector or spy — a “seventh man” scenario; Vegas showgirls en route to Washington D.C.; a nuclear device; a chemical or biological weapon (which, if left in the river, could’ve contaminated Pittsburgh’s water supply); mafia money; and aviator Howard Hughes. That the B-25 departed from Nevada, not far from Area 51 or Roswell, N.M. — and less than a decade after the Roswell “incident” — also brought about theories of alien cadavers or a UFO.
“All of these conspiracy theories emerged logically out of a time when there was a UFO craze … and all kinds of scandals in Hollywood and among politicians,” he says. “It didn't seem so out of line that Las Vegas showgirls might have been going to visit their senator boyfriends aboard this plane.”
When Heinz History Center put together its Ghost Bomber collection and spoke to Maj. Dotson personally, it “changed [our] opinion on what the tone of the investigation ought to be,” Masich says. “It’s turned into kind of a fun ghost story for Pittsburghers. But to Dotson, he lost two crew members. He never wanted to talk about it afterwards.”
Masich believes that, someday, we will find the Ghost Bomber in the Mon. Climate change or construction will reveal it, or sonar and underwater detection will evolve.
And yet, the legend endures because it has “all the elements of a good story,” Masich ventures: interesting characters, reliable and unreliable witnesses, and lots of “whodunnit plot twists.”
At the History Center, the B-25 Ghost Bomber collection still draws regular visitors who, according to Masich, grew up hearing the story or “have talked to family members or friends who swear they saw it, or they saw lights on the river at night [or] a mysterious truck going through town.” Each time a tale is passed down, it’s as if the mystery begins anew.
Perhaps part of the allure is that the Ghost Bomber is hidden in plain sight — the idea that walking at any point along the Mon, it could be right there, just beneath the surface.
"You can [still] see the Homestead High Level Bridge. You can see the terrain that Major Dotson saw. You can imagine that plane cruising silently and splashing down in the gray waters of the Mon. And you can imagine those crew members standing on the wing of the plane shouting to the people on shore,” Masich says. “And then, it's all gone. What happened?"
