2. The Search

Battling snow and waves, searchers hunt for the missing plane.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The True Gash Mountains ring Elmendorf Air Force Base. They
begin at Anchorage and run for hundreds of miles, getting steeper,
higher and glaciated. Between here and Juno. Search planes are
flying near the coast and old glaciers on the hopes
of the plane detoured from the flight path to sightsea.
The weather has been so bad that small planes have
been limited in the areas they can search. Most of

(00:25):
the searching has been done by the bigger air Force
planes flying in twenty thousand feet very equipped with electronic
locator that may be able to pick up the beeps
from the locator beacon in the missing plane. One pilot
was asked how the weather was in the search area.
Crowds are overcast, from about three thousand in areas up
to forty five hundred in other areas. Had terrible turbulence

(00:48):
in some spots just absolutely turned the airplane upside down
to quite smooth another. So it's very unpredictable. Present plane
leave Major Starker. The aircraft in question left anchorage or
twenty four hours ago. Have you heard anything at all
from it? No, we have not. We've had aircraft searching
during the last twenty four hours, and we failed to

(01:09):
come up with any positive sightings or reports. At this time,
the flight plan was over five miles if you narrowed
down at all. No, not yet. The aircraft hadn't reported
into any station along the way. The last transmission was
shortly after taking off from Anchorage International. You don't feel
that your search effort so far has cut down the

(01:30):
areas you have left to search? No, not yet. Probably
what we've done through the night is an electronics search,
and they had a son emergency locator beacon onboard the aircraft,
and it hasn't as yet made any transmissions. Weather in

(01:50):
the search area has been bad, just continuing to be
bad and maybe a problem for the next couple of days.
From my Heart Media, this is Missing in Alaska, The
story of two congressmen who vanished in nineteen seventy two

(02:11):
and my quest to figure out what happened to them.
I'm your host, John Wallzac. Dawn broke on October seventeenth,
nineteen seventy two, with much of southeast Alaska engulfed in
a swirling tempest of snow and fog. Dozens of planes

(02:33):
and boats stood ready to search for Congressman Hilbogs and
Nick Baggage, who had vanished the day before somewhere between
Anchorage and Juno. If only the weather would clear. Terry
Holiday was a pilot based in the small town of
Cordova on Prince William Sound, and the next day when
the search began, we didn't. I was the first responder
from the Cordova side, and I only got halfway across

(02:56):
the sound before I run into a wall of snow
and I just kept working in my way or drittier
as a state trooper with me. You know. It was
in a beaver and floats and which give me an
optional landing about it anywhere. But it was snow and
really hard. The water was white covered with with snow

(03:17):
on top of the salt water was not nice, as
snow hampered much of the search effort. Attention turned to
hundreds of tips that flowed in from the public, including
one in particular which intrigued Air Force officials. Overnight in
the tiny town of Nevada City, California, thousands of miles
to the south, a man named Roy Harris had picked

(03:37):
up a frantic transmission on his ham radio, just playing
column for May Day, and they were over water, but
they were close to land. He was trying to get
as close to land as he could. Evidently engine problems
or something. Was that my understanding what was repeated to
me from that's former Nevada City Police Chief James Moon,

(04:01):
who took reports from several local men who heard a
garbled transmission of a pilot begging for help. They notified
the of what they heard of the plane going down.
Said they were close some islander or landing him and
they were going down, and they kind of give a
description of where I thought they were. And I notified

(04:23):
the Shakramonal psoration and they came. I shut up a
beating between them and the HAM operators, and they took
a report. The last time, new Woman Moon spoke with
Al Miller, a HAM operator and retired painting contractor, who
heard the pilot say frantically, this is Alaska mobile needing assistance.

(04:46):
The pilot told Miller he was twelve miles southwest of Juneo,
battling seventy mile hour headwinds and had only eight minutes
of gas left. He said he was flying Assessment three ten,
the same model as the missing plane, and that he
had landed earlier in the day at a remote airstrip
to ride out bad weather before taking off once more
for Juno. The pilot broadcasts tail number, but the transmission

(05:09):
was garbled. Miller heard in a one and a two.
Then oh my god, we're going to hit the rocks.
I'm out of gas. I'm heading down. This is it.
A few minutes later, the pilot told Miller that the
plane had crashed near Juno. Then one final transmission in

(05:31):
morse code, we need help. Everyone was injured but alive.
In addition to Harrison Miller, at least three and possibly
four other men heard the transmission. But were they telling
the truth? Chief Moon believed them, so too did Air
Force Major George Eldridge, who spoke with one of them
by phone. The Air Force decided to fly them to

(05:52):
Alaska after interviewing them in person. Major Henry Stocker, the
search commander, spoke to the press saying that transmission was real,
but that the person who broadcast it was likely a hoaxer,
a quote sadistic person. For years, I tried to find
the Ham operators to have died, and I can't locate
the other. Four national accounts of the mysterious transmission mainly

(06:19):
quoted Al Miller, the retired painting contractor, past that there's
not much to go on. I filed a Freedom of
information after requests with the Air Force, but didn't find
many new details. But late last year I got some help.
Tracy Liloquist, a Nevada City librarian, dug up an article
that ran in the local paper, The Union, in nineteen two,

(06:40):
which quoted Roy Harris, another of the Ham operators, that
allowed me to compare Harrison Miller's contemporaneous accounts to look
for inconsistencies. I only found two. First, Miller heard the
pilot say he had only eight minutes of gas left,
Harris heard fourteen. As for the garbled tail number, Miller

(07:00):
heard n A one and A two, Harris heard n
C twelve. Otherwise, their stories line up. In the Union article,
Harris was also quoted as saying that the operators had
beamed in on the signal and that it was coming
from the direction of Juno. To me, though, what's most
interesting is what Miller heard of the tail number. Remember

(07:21):
this was the night the congressman vanished, before their tail
number had been widely shared. Again, Miller heard what sounded
like N A one A two. The tail number of
the missing plane was N one eight one to H

(07:43):
seventy two hours after the plane vanished, searchers finally caught
a break in southern Alaska. Today, the search continued for
House Democratic leader Hail Bogs and three other men. Weather
conditions in the area were greatly improved. The four men
were in a light plane which disappeared on Monday on
a flight from Anchorage to Juneo. The search now centers

(08:03):
around port Portage Pass, southeast of Anchorage. The sky turned
blue around Anchorage, Alaska, and suddenly it was possible to
see what storm and fog could so treacherously masked the
Portage Pass. Now the rescue teams could effectively scan the
most likely area of the accident from the air of

(08:25):
the weather clares up there anywhere along the Alpine troops
began reconnaissance missions into the ice and snowbound areas and
onto the ice of the Portage Glacier itself. At the

(08:48):
Air Forces Rescue Coordination Center, which has saved lives in
a ten year period. Already, every effort that might help
find and save the four missing men was orchis s trading.
We're looking for fires either survival fires, camp fires or
emergency signal fiers, anything that may indicate where the aircraft is. Uh.

(09:10):
They are coming back now. It is now a daylight
and they have returned, and they have nothing to record
as yet. Congressman Boggs's tragedy was an old story to Alaska's.
This was the rescue mission just this year. The Air
Force was well aware that intense attention was focused on

(09:31):
its rescue operations. The most involved spectator of all was
Mrs Hale Boggs, who drove out to the Portage Glacier
to see for herself the dreadful force of nature which
seemed to have claimed her husband. The chances seemed slim,
but Mrs Boggs said she still believed her husband would

(09:52):
be found. Shortly before Lindy Boggs flew to Anchorage, she

(10:18):
had received a call from President Next Time, Mrs Box,
the wife of the Majority leader. Hello, Mrs Box, I
know this is a very hard time for you and
your family, but I wanted you to know that Mrs

(10:38):
Lex and I are thinking about your and we're just
braying that out in that snow. They're gonna they're gonna
find him. Work around up there yeah. Well, we were,
as you know, doing everything we can. The government said
not the week that we can do it. But there
every search plane is on and uh. But but you

(11:01):
just keep your faith. Okay, you get my best to
you those wonderful children. Thank you, grandchildren two okay, okay,
thank you. Nixon also called Peggy Beggett. Hello, Mrs Bigitch.
She is the wife of the congressman from Alaska who

(11:24):
is missing. Hello. I wanted you to know I talked
to Mrs Box earlier today that Mrs Nixon and I
were are thinking of you and just talking for the
best on your trip. That's uh. It was a terrible

(11:48):
shop to all of us to read about it. And
would you to your six children to that that we
called from us. I know it's a tough time for you,
but you know, just keep the faith. The best in Alaska.
A reporter asked Major Stalker, the search commander, if he

(12:10):
had enough manpower and aircraft. We have more than enough
to do the mission. We have ten h C one
thirties various configurations. They're all search qualified aircraft. We have
enough cruise. We have the C A P with an
abundance resource of light aircraft. We have helicopters, we have
post guard. We even have a post guard cutter available

(12:33):
to us. We have the forces necessary to do the mission.
The search initially focused on Portage Pass, a narrow gap
through towering, snow covered mountains just fifty miles southeast of Anchorage. Okay,
I mean a little portage Pass. I can't tell you.
I can't tell you how many airplane crashes we've had
in Portage Pass. I can't tell you how many friends

(12:53):
I've lost in Portage Pass. Definitely it looks very benign.
But what happens is, you know, you fly to the
end of turning an arm out of Anchorage and then
you're gonna pop over Portage Pass into the Sound, and
that thing gets sucked in with fog and it's just
like flying into the black hole. Teresa Gerson, who we
heard from an episode one, has been a flight attendant

(13:16):
for nearly thirty years. In nine she was a young
volunteer for the Civil Air Patrol. So in our state
of extreme weather conditions, extreme weather conditions, which is something
I need to talk about, is that in leaving Anchorage
to fly to Juno, you fly past the largest ice

(13:37):
field and and what happens is that the wind just
roars down the glacier when we say, oh my goodness,
it's gustin on the hill today. Most places that would
be a hurricane or something. Here it's just a big wind.

(13:58):
So with no in the knowing the route from Anchorage
to June one, flying past this huge glacier with which
makes its own weather, you can only imagine what they
might have run into. The missing plane was supposed to
follow a specific route V three one seven, which would
have taken it through Portage Pass, over Prince william Sound

(14:22):
and onto Juno. It's hard to fully grasp the vast
beauty of Prince Williams Sound and the Fiords, mountains, glaciers
and islands that fill it in surround it without looking
at a map. So maybe pause for a minute and
pull it up on your phone, and while you're at it,
also look up Portage Pass. On the morning of October six,
Donald Mellish, who had hosted a fundraiser for the congressman

(14:44):
the night before, was driving with his two sons on
his way to the Kenai Peninsula to go canoeing when
he spotted a dark veil on the horizon. As we
had then we dry right sorge that portage pass, and
I could disturble ends along this ang along the water.
They're cotinely, there's terrible winds, and they're just a boiling

(15:08):
black mass in this sportage pass. And I thought to myself, already,
tell you know, they probably didn't fly that day, but
they did. And anyway, I still remember that because I
had to get out for the far every f R
check by loads and make sure I didn't blow the
can off the top of the bar, just falling that
hard that morning. Only twenty minutes before the congressman took off,

(15:33):
an Air Force helicopter had abandoned an attempt to cut
through the pass after encountering severe turbulence. In November, curious
to see the pass for myself, I flew to Anchorage
and chartered a small plane. At the time, I only
had my crappy phone to record some audio from the air.

(15:57):
On a clear sunny day, the passing surrounding mountains are stunning,
so I see it wow, emerging from the past. I
looked below and spotted the tiny town of Whittier, nestled
between mountains and sea. A day later, wanting to see

(16:20):
the pass from the ground too. I parted a trailhead
near Whittier and hiked into the mountains alone. Today is
November six, and I'm standing right Portage Pass in Alaska,
about fifty miles southeast of Anchorage. I had all the

(16:42):
way up here and saw footsteps in the snow part
of the way, and now I don't see anything. I
don't think anybody has been up here in a little while.
It's twenty one degrees and I haven't seen anybody since
I got here. The passes book ended on one side
by mountains and a massive glacier, and on the other

(17:03):
by Prince William Sound. Between the sound and the past
sits Whittier, population two five, A town accustomed to raging storms.
Whittier has fierce weather, and I really mean fierce, and
snow so hard that I've several times I've seen the
geese had to land because they couldn't get through the

(17:25):
pass either. They were sitting on every light post, every
every place, tree, how cars, everything else, and the snowflakes
will be as big as my hands, sometimes just waffling down.
Dorothea Taylor, a retired teacher, lived in Whittier for several

(17:46):
years In the nineteen six seas and seventies, and the
mounds are high on each all around. Then they're glaciated. Well,
that win comes pitching in there from either side. That
will come bow like crazy from the ocean side for
a long time, and then uh, it will get just
as much forth coming through the path and it keeps

(18:09):
doing that trying to equal wife. That's pressure. So yeah,
they have big storms, they have big snows, they have
lots of rain. But when it's a beautiful day, that
is the most beautiful place you ever saw. At ninety
four years old, Taylor is a fearless woman. In At
the age of eighty six, she garnered international attention when

(18:31):
she saved her husband from a rampaging moose, hitting it
with a shovel until it ran off. In nineteen seventy two,
right after the congressman disappeared, she led a group of
her students into the surrounding mountains to look for the
missing plane. We regressed appropriately and we went out and
then started taking up the mountain and we had then
acts and lunch, whatever you need, and then we got

(18:54):
fogged in up there. Yes, we were up there for
probably an hour just sitting in place. I said, don't
anybody moved, Just stay right where you are and we'll
just talk and that. But we will move until the
fog starts to go. About an hour later, it started
to move out, but it was so thick you couldn't

(19:16):
see anything there for that hour we were we were
quite a ways up. It was very steep up there,
and uh, the kids did very well, and we looked
and then they cleared up and we could use our
binoculars and and they're pretty good at looking for things
when they live out in the bush like that, but

(19:39):
we never did see anything. As Taylor and our students
start supportage path on foot, Angus Lynn, a reporter who
had flown in from New Orleans, was high above in
a military plane. I hooked up with the Alaskan Air Command.
They said, yeah, we can take you up tomorrow morn.
I said, great, So I got on. Asked the captaine,
I said, how long are we going to be up?

(20:00):
He says, well, we got enough fuel for eight hours?
And I'm thinking, oh, ship eight hours an airplane. We
weren't up eight, but we were up maybe six and
a half or something like. That's a long flight, you know.
And uh, he said don't worry. There's plenty of there's
plenty of barth bags on board. Because what it is,

(20:21):
it's a it's a visual search. So you'd be you'd
fly up. I mean you're literally doing this. You're flying
up the side of a mountain and down the side
of a mountain, you know, into a pass, maybe a
glacial pass, and then back up and you just repeat it.
As I remember, John, they were assigned areas to go search,

(20:41):
and I mean that was all drawn out on maps
before they took off. Here's where you're searching today. So
it's not like they just took off on a goose chase,
you know, saying we're gonna go take a look at Hey,
why don't we go over there. It's not like jumping
from fishing spot to fishing spot, you know, when you
you're in a boat. But Lynde got back to Anchorage.
He went to a library to do some background research.

(21:04):
I said, look, I'm I'm interested in you know the
history of this. Uh you know the bush pilots and
plane wrex and you know private plane b sinces. Okay,
I can put you something together, I said, Okay. So
when I showed up at the library, there was like
a you know when these fold out tables that the
guy had set up for me and it was loaded

(21:25):
with loosely you know, scrap books like this loaded. He said,
this is for twenty years. He said, this is only
for twenty years. And I mean I was mind boggled.
I couldn't have gone through that in a week. That's
how many planes had disappeared, and how many stories have

(21:47):
been written, and how many search not for a high
profile figure like uh like Bogs and Beggae, but just
bush pilots that had disappeared. Unlike lynd Alan Dodds, Frank,
a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, was well versed
in covering aviation disasters. That the one thing you really
learned as a reporter in Alaska's how to cover a

(22:07):
plane crash. So not long after I got there, a
troop plane chartered I think it was a Flying Tiger
charter carrying troops to Vietnam, crashed at the end of
the Anchorage, Alaska International Airport runway, and I think forty
nine people died. We were burnt up in the crash

(22:29):
because the plane was fully loaded with fuel and caught
fire when it hit something at the end of the
runway because it didn't get up in time. So covering
a plane crash was a big deal in Alaska. And
and so you when you covered that first crash, were
you there on the scene right after it went down?

(22:49):
I not only was I on the scene, I I
had been out. A bunch of us have been out.
One of our, my colleagues was sitting in the Captain
Cook Hotel Crowsness Bar and sort of saw the crash
from the bar, which is the highest point in Anchorage
at the time, and so we all scrambled out to

(23:10):
the airport. I remember going out there was that there
was a snowstorm, and I was wearing wolfers, which turned
out to be nuts because I ended up getting minor
frost bite. And I remember pacing off in my wafers
and about a foot of snow or more, um how

(23:34):
far off the runway the plane had gone before it stopped,
and it was like a half a mile. I was
putting one ft in front of the other, you know,
to measure it exactly. And then I remember going into
the hangar and counting the bodies. There were like once
of charcoal was shrunk and combat boots on it. Was

(23:56):
really grim and smells horrible. That experience stayed with Dodds
Frank for decades, especially as he covered nine eleven for CNN,
only blocks from the World Trade Center when it collapsed
in nineteen seventy two. It had been his tenacious reporting
to help shape the search for Box and Baggetts. Or

(24:18):
the search the first day was in part based on
my reporting because I figured I calculated what the flight
pattern was, but it should have been to Juno and
called every place on the ground along the way, and
one of them was a little town called Whittier, Alaska,

(24:38):
which is on the on the sea, I mean in
the inland passage. But it's one big building that was
a secret building during World War Two. So there's a
in the middle of nowhere in the fiord there is
a twelve story building that was hidden from Japanese forces.
I guess to this day about half the population of
Whittier still lives in a single build holding now called

(25:00):
the Beggatts Towers. The morning the Congressman vanished, several local
residents heard a plane flying overhead. According to Dodds Frank,
if true, that's an important clue. No other flight passed
over Whittier around that time, it would mean that the
missing plane made it through Portage Pass Pass Whittier and
Honor Prince William Sound. The search shifted from the Pass

(25:26):
to the sound. So I went out in this glass
those planes, which was an observer plane that used to
be used during the war, and flo was really low,
like fifty ft above the water depending on where you're
looking with the visibility is looking for debris. And what
was it like for you to be on that plane

(25:46):
over the sound? It was It was really dramatic, and
it gave me a real feel for what it is
like during wartime when you're hunting an enemy from not
far off the ground and flying as slow as you can,
but that's still a hundred twenty miles undred, so you

(26:09):
cover a lot of territory and you can actually see
all kinds of things. I mean, you can see a
a soda can floating in the water at that speed
and height. So it was a pretty thorough search. I
don't have any doubts that they were. The government did
everything it could to try to find him. Jim Shook,

(26:29):
an Alaska state trooper, was also searching the sound by
air well. We were in the departments woman goose, and
we came over the pass its lid here and began
what our assigned good Church was. And we did a
good search with the goose and actually came close to
um an SR seventy one bloop blackboard while you were

(26:55):
in the air. Yes, what shook spotted. The SR seventy
one Blackbird was a top secret spy plane. It was
a technological marvel capable of flying higher than eighty thousand
feet at a speed of two thousand miles per hour,
and it had the ability to photograph more than sixty
thousand square miles of terrain per hour. The radio crack

(27:17):
old with the SR seventy one's pilots giving us his
position and that he would be passing from our right
to our left, that he was at a higher altitude,
and we acknowledged that. And I saw this small spec
to the south, and then a blur goes by an
aspec to the north, and of course we were in

(27:38):
a position to see quite a distance in both directions,
and the speed was blinding and close. That was a
pretty interesting part of the search. But we were covering
as much areas as we were assigned, plus a little
bit and we were actually in a bowl and a tight,

(28:00):
tight turn in a bowl alongside the mountains on the
northern side, I think of Prince William Sound. And as
we were in the tight turn to the left, both
engines quit and uh. It turns out that the pilot
had forgotten the transfer fuel and as we were plummeting

(28:24):
towards here, um, he started pumping fuel from one tank
to another, and the engines caught and the firewalls fob
of the course, and it took both of us to
pulling on the yolk. You know, I've got my own
yolk on my side, and I took both office to

(28:45):
pull out of the of the dive and we landed.
We were both pretty well shook up and sat there
for a while, and at the time I was a smoker, unfortunately,
But anyway, we sat there and smoked, both of us
for probably twenty minutes, and then took off again and
continued her good search. Sure had plenty of experience in

(29:07):
investigating plane crashes, including a very memorable one that occurred
a year or two before the Congressman vanished. You know,
there was a there was a plane crash of a
F twenty seven, a fair child up at Pedro Bay,
um gosh. Back in what was it seventy or seventy one,
I was given the job of guarding the bodies at

(29:29):
the coolest air guard base and they brought all the
frozen bodies in wrapped in plastic and my fellow troopers
my guardian because I was just at Breening Rookie. They
turned all the one light off in that huge hangar
and told me I had to turn the bodies all night,
so they thought for autopsy purposes in the morning, and

(29:51):
I was I've never been so frightened in my life,
and gave me a pair of boots because they said
it would be so slimy. I had to wade through
the this run oh God. And of course an hour
later they called me from the office and said they
were just kidding. A night was over, twenty dead bodies

(30:11):
rolling and thawing and moaning and so forth. O home man,
I'll tell you that was my introduction to dead bodies.
As the days ticked on, searchers still hadn't found any
sign of the missing plane. The search for House Democratic
leader Hail Boggs, now in its eighth to day, moved
today to the Gulf of Alaska. An Air Force plane

(30:34):
spotted debris in the gulf in an area near the
flight path of the plane that disappeared on a flight
from Anchorage to Juno with Bogs on board. A Coast
Guard helicopter was sent to look for the debris, and
it reports that the debris is orange colored. The plane
on which Boggs was traveling was orange colored. Searchers spotted
many other things too, including a wrecked sailboat and orange

(30:56):
rock shaped like a plane, a school of jellyfish, a
log that looked like a plane way, a smudge on
a glacier, half of plastic, pale sad, a piece of
orange wood, a rock slide, a discoloration in the snow,
and a piece of styrofoam. Ultimately, nothing turned out to
be from the missing plane, nor did any sign of
it show up in photos captured by the SR Blackbird.

(31:17):
A sense of despair started to set in. The Air

(31:42):
Force indicated today that it may soon call off it's
search in Alaska for House majority leader Hail Boggs. The
plane carrying Bogs disappeared on a flight from Anchorage to
Juno twelve days ago. Frustrated authorities reviewed other leads they
had initially deemed less important, including some from the general public.
Early on, the Air Force had detected two emergency signals.

(32:05):
The first was weak a hundred and fifty miles northeast
of Anchorage, nowhere near the planned flight path. The second,
west of Juno, lasted for forty minutes, but neither could
be pinpointed with accuracy. The Coast Guard had also taken
a report on October eighteenth from loggers near Juno who
heard a light plane passing overhead, followed by a loud boom,

(32:25):
But the loggers had heard the sound before the missing
Cessna could have made it that far. Authorities determined another
dead end. Meanwhile, psychic started to flood the military and
the families of the missing men with tips. Dear Mrs
Hale Bottles, one letter began, the Lord showed me a vision.
The missing men were twenty five miles southeast of Anchoragees
said they only have a few bullets left for the gun,

(32:48):
and they have dug a place in the side of
a cliff or a mountain where the plane was forced
to land, and they climb up there on a ladder
to keep animals from getting to them. Lindy got other
bizarre letters to including from someone who had a vision
of a man in a rose colored suit and a
woman who wrote that her method was quote particularly suited
to the semi Arctic and Arctic areas. The military discounted

(33:11):
nearly all of these odd tips, saved for one. A
curious call the Coastguard received from a man in California.
Draw a line from Anchors to Juno. The man said,
head west from Juno for two hundred and fifty six
point five miles, crossing Yakutat Bay and mause been A glacier,
and eleven point four miles from the glacier, draw a
line to the coast. Go back and forth along the

(33:33):
line for ten miles. The plane is in that area.
Two men are still alive. Investigators took this lead seriously,
in part because the tipster had a military background. D
FBI dispatched the team to interview him at his house.
According to an FBI report, which didn't disclose his name,
the man was about thirty five years old, six three
and two and fifteen pounds, with dark hair and an

(33:56):
injured left arm. Investigators described him as national extremely intelligent,
but somewhat strange. He claimed he got information on the
specific crash location from a friend who had access to
experimental electronic equipment. It's unclear at the military double checked
the spot he pinpointed, which is near Icy Bay, a
remote body of water sixty five miles northwest of the

(34:19):
town of Yakatat, but it was likely scanned in some
capacity at least once by search planes. On November seven,
as the search ground on, President Nixon defeated Senator George
McGovern in a landslide re election victory. The missing congressman
were also re elected. Two men elected yesterday probably will

(34:41):
never take lass seats. The House Democratic lead to haild
Bugs of Louisiana and Representative Nick Beggett of Alaska, disappeared
in an airplane accident in Alaska three weeks ago. Barring
a miraculous survival, there will be special elections to replace them.
Two weeks later, as the search entered its fine old days,
Nick Beget's wife, Peggy, received a disturbing letter pasted together

(35:04):
from newspaper clippings. Your husband, Mr. Beget, an American Croatian
Alaska Democratic rep, has been assassinated by our organization. He
and others aboard will not be found reason criminally insane
nature of his pact with American croat separatists. Next time

(35:27):
on Missing in Alaska. These two events, in coordination with
one another, actually very quickly marked I think an important
turning point for chreation terrorists, this idea that there are
no innocent victims. As we conclude this episode, I'm giving

(35:48):
you four more tasks. First, help me figure out whether
or not any of the HAM operators who heard the
mysterious transmission the evening the plane vanished are still alive.
I know that too, Roy Harris and Ac Fonts have died.
I'm not sure though about the other four, all of
whom lived in California, Al Miller and Victor Parker of
Nevada City, Ronald Crawford of Olive Hurst, and Joe Tatum Abute. Second,

(36:13):
the Los Angeles TV station k n x T now
known as k CBS conducted interviews in Nevada City and
air to report on the HAM operators on either October
seventeenth or eighteenth, nineteen seventy two. I haven't been able
to find a video of the report. Maybe you can help. Third,
help me find out what happened to photos taken by
the SR seventy one Blackbird. It's possible that they've been destroyed,

(36:37):
but documents I obtained from the Air Force didn't make
clear their final fate. If you work for the Air Force,
you're welcome to contact us anonymously. Finally, help me identify
the tipster who phoned in the alleged location of the
wrecked plane citing information from experimental electronic equipment. His name
was redacted in an FBI file I obtained, but for

(36:58):
some reason, his phone number wasn't and it's an important clue,
perhaps the only one at this point, that can help
us identify him. His number was three seven eight five
two four three. I'm not sure about the area code,
but since he called the Long Beach Coastguard station, let's
assume for now that the right one is to one three.

(37:20):
So again, his number would have been to one three
three seven eight five two four three. See if you
can find that in a California phone book from nineteen
seventy two. An interesting side note, by nineteen seventy four
that particular number belonged to the anti abortion group Right
to Life, but I'm not sure if it did in

(37:40):
nineteen seventy two. You can reach us by phone at
one eight three three m I A tips that's one
eight three three six four two eight four seven seven
again one eight three three six four two eight four
seven seven, or you can reach us via email at

(38:00):
tips at i heeart Media dot com. That's tips, t
I P s at i heeart Media dot com. Ben
Bolan is our executive producer, Paul Decant is our supervising producer,
Chris Brown is our assistant producer. Seth Nicholas Johnson is
our producer. Sam T. Garden is our research assistant, and
I'm your host and executive producer, John Wallzac. You can

(38:23):
find me on Twitter at at John Wallzac. J O
n w A l c z a K. Footage for
this episode was provided by CBS, NBC K t VF
in the Vanderbilt Television News Archive special thanks to the
Elmer E. Rasmussen Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks

(38:43):
and Tracy Liloquist at the Doris Foley Library for Historical
Research in Nevada City, California. Missing in Alaska is a
co production of I Heart Media and Greenfork Media.