In
the house diagonally across the
intersection from Mary Peck, Doris Monroe hummed softly to herself while she
laid bread slices out on the counter and plopped on baloney and American cheese
as she made lunch for her children. She had called out to them twice from the backdoor, each time
checking on one year old Betty Lou who was playing happily in the small patch
of grass a few feet from the screen door.
The young mother worried a bit when the older three left the house
and immediately headed down to the creek
at the back of the property. But now she could hear them laughing and
making their usual noise as they came home and she felt a little easier.
Doris
and Floyd were pleased to find this house in Walesville and had moved in just 3
days before. They came from Franklin Springs, further to the south, and were happy to
move in a week earlier than expected when the landlord finished rebuilding the
structure ahead of schedule. He had
converted it from an large old garage and Doris thought it turned out quite nice. Everything inside the house was new because
of the renovation. The family would have
more room here and Walesville was much closer to Floyd’s job at the foundry in
Westmoreland. The children were thrilled
with the creek and surrounding countryside.
Only a few hundred feet down Westmoreland Road sat a small general store where the kids
could buy cokes and sit on the steps in the afternoon. They were also closer to
shopping and doctors as well as other family amenities in nearby Whitesboro.
The
whining sound Doris had begun to hear a moment ago now got
so loud she could no longer hear her children returning from the creek. Outside the back door, Betty Lou began to cry
and then scream. Doris ran across the kitchen and flew out the
door, looking around the yard and then up at the sky.
About
twenty minutes before and ten miles from Walesville, Bill Atkins had barely lifted his F-94 fighter jet off the
runway at Griffis Air Base when the Ground Control Intercept Officer cut in on
the flight’s mission controller and directed
the 24 year old Lieutenant and his radar man, Lieutenant Hank Coudon, 26, to fly due north to intercept an unidentified
aircraft. The ordinary training flight became
a real mission.
While Hank began to work the radar controls, Bill swung the nose of the aircraft over from east to north and pointed the plane at the Adirondack Mountains. As the fighter jet gained altitude, the pilot could see the edge of Lake Ontario come into view and he adjusted his heading to 310 degrees. The Strategic Air Command at Syracuse and Rome’s ground control radar were guiding him to the unidentified craft. In the back seat, Hank was waiting for his screen to light up with the bogey.
“It’s
ahead,” said the radar man.
“I
see it,” said Bill. “It’s a C-47 and
it’s Canadian. We’re not at war with
them yet, are we?”
The
Douglas C-47 “Skytrain” was the military version of the DC-3 and a workhorse
of armed forces around the world.
Bill
and Hank called the C-47’s tail numbers into Mission Control and advised of its
obvious friendly status, never to know why the Canadian transport plane was
unable to identify by radio. They turned
back toward Rome, each quietly happy to have not met a
Russian MiG.
The radio crackled again and the GCI officer gave them a second
assignment. Yesterday’s UFO reports, like those Mary Peck had just
been reading about in her morning newspaper,
were believed by the Air Force to have been caused by a deflating
weather balloon as it slowly dropped down through the atmosphere over central
New York. A Mohawk Airlines pilot,
unsure of what he was seeing the day before,
had called the object in at 20,000 feet.
The GCI officer ordered the F94 crew to find and investigate the
unidentified flying object. They were
told it might look like a silver bowl.
Meanwhile, Stan Phillips and his wife Florence left work on this first day of what
promised to be a beautiful weekend. The
couple worked as teachers at the Rome State School, where classes were held
year round for the mentally disabled young residents, The staff was free to leave at noon on
Fridays in the summer and the couple planned swimming and a picnic at Hinckley Reservoir with their 11
year old son, Gary, who was waiting for them to come home and pick him up.
Gary had spent the morning with a neighbor in
the tiny village of Hecla.
After stopping for their son, Stan
drove east to Westmoreland where he bought charcoal at the local Agway
store. From there he had a choice of
routes that would lead him eventually to the town of Marcy where he would drive up Route 12 to Hinckley.
He could either drive out of Westmoreland on Cider Street and through the village of Oriskany or go out Stone Road through the hamlet of Walesville over to
Marcy on his way north to Hinckley.
Aloft
in the F94 jet, the two young lieutenants sped south through the open sky
toward Rome while they looked for a weather balloon
resembling a silver bowl. Hank got a
blip on his radar screen indicating a target below them about 30 degrees to
starboard off their line of travel. Bill
backed off on the throttle, nosed over
and rolled off to the right to see if he could eyeball the object. It did indeed look like a silver bowl. He backed off the throttle more to drop down
directly toward it for a better look.
The
official Air Force account is sealed for unknown reasons, but the USAF Project
Blue Book UFO Report (Case 19-B - Walesville) published in 1976, says the crew
believed the object was a weather balloon at an altitude of 8,000 feet, but when they dropped down for a closer
look, the cabin temperature abruptly
shot up and the fire warning light lit on the instrument panel. UFO enthusiasts have maintained the object
fired a blast of heat at the F-94. The
pilot and navigator said simply they presumed a catastrophic engine fire had
erupted and that it would soon engulf
the plane. They testified they stayed
with the plane as long as they safely could before Bill ordered Hank to
eject. Bill quickly followed his radar
man out of the plane.
Without a pilot, the jet rolled over and headed to earth at Walesville. It came screaming in across the farm fields and the creek, missed the center of the intersection by about 100 feet and slammed into a huge old elm tree, ripping itself apart. The wings tore away and catapulted toward the road. The engine separated from the airframe and described a huge arc before hitting the ground and continuing forward plowing up the earth. The fuselage, now a ball of fire, plunged through the roof of the newly renovated home. Doris had unfortunately re-entered the house. No one knows why. Of those killed in the carnage that summer day, hers was the last body found
Without a pilot, the jet rolled over and headed to earth at Walesville. It came screaming in across the farm fields and the creek, missed the center of the intersection by about 100 feet and slammed into a huge old elm tree, ripping itself apart. The wings tore away and catapulted toward the road. The engine separated from the airframe and described a huge arc before hitting the ground and continuing forward plowing up the earth. The fuselage, now a ball of fire, plunged through the roof of the newly renovated home. Doris had unfortunately re-entered the house. No one knows why. Of those killed in the carnage that summer day, hers was the last body found
Betty
Lou saw her older siblings coming back from the creek as the sky screamed down
at her and she ran from the patch of grass toward the boys and her older
sister. She doesn’t remember the plane
hitting to this day, but a piece of it, or maybe it was a piece of the house, tore
a deep laceration up her leg from ankle to thigh. The man from the general store saw her tumble
and fall. He ran over to the house as it
burned furiously and carried the little girl back to the safety of the store, unknowingly
jumping over one of the air-to-ground rockets the Air Force would later find at
the scene.
Stan
and Florence and Gary passed the elm tree in their Chevrolet
just as the plane hit. A wing full of
jet fuel shot from the plane and ignited into a fireball that chased the Chevy
into the intersection. Like an angel of
death, the wing caught up and exploded, engulfing the car and the family. The Chevy rocketed into the front of Mary
Peck’s house. The old woman, luckily in
her kitchen in the back of the house,
staggered and fell backward in
shock as her living room erupted. A wall
of flame rushed down the hallway towards her.
Mary jumped to her feet and ran out the back door. Stan and Florence and their son Gary died in the fiery car
wreck in what had been Mary’s living room.
Lieutenants Bill Atkins and Hank Coudon parachuted safely to earth a few miles away.
Lieutenants Bill Atkins and Hank Coudon parachuted safely to earth a few miles away.
Doris’
three older children, returning from the creek, survived along with Betty
Lou. They saw the entire panorama of
destruction as it unfolded. The plane
hitting the tree, the debris destroying their house, the screams of their
mother, their baby sister cut down, the Chevy erupting in a ball of flames and
shooting into Mrs. Peck’s living room and the huge jet engine as it tore up the
earth and plowed toward them, stopping just in time. They would never trust the sky again.
Floyd
returned from work and stood all afternoon by the smoking pile of rubble that
had been his new home, waiting for the firemen to find his wife. They uncovered her remains in the evening,
just as a cool breeze began moving across the fields and the sun turned to
amber on the western horizon. It was Doris’ favorite time of the day.
Neighbors
stood nearby in small groups, wondering how such a tragedy could have happened,
and thanking God they had been spared. A
few might have looked up into the deepening blue sky. There, arched high above the creek now turned
black in the shadows, hung a dim silver bowl.
ooo
I was ten
years old that summer. I can’t imagine what he was thinking, but my father took
my older brother and myself to see the aftermath of the crash the next
day. I will never forget it. The smoke and flames had mostly died
out. People … gawkers like us …were
milling around the destroyed homes. .
The police didn’t rope anything off back then. Where Mary Peck’s living room had been, the
Chevy sat burned to a crisp. Not a drop
of paint was visible on the completely blackened exterior. And inside the car spiral springs sat on the
floor like tiny skeletons lined up in rows where the seats had been.
A man who
I was told was Mary’s son stood guard over her partly destroyed home. People
walked up to him and asked about Mary. I
couldn’t hear his answer. The living
room of her house was never re-built, but the rear half of the building was later remodeled into a finished
home. Doris’ and Floyd’s home was never
rebuilt. Over fifty years later the
corner lot is still empty of any building.
Images
from the tragedy remain with me. On the ground near the car by the side of the road lay a woman’s skirt. It was grey and
prim, like a teacher would wear. I
suppose it could not have been Florence’s. I don’t know how
it got there. I just remember it as vividly as the burned
out Chevy
For a few
months after the crash, I would shudder whenever I heard a jet fly low over our
neighborhood in Utica, a frequent occurrence 12
miles from an Air Base during the Cold War. One morning a jet engine’s roar was so loud I
was convinced we were about to be hit and I ran out of the house into the back
yard. Across the grass, over the little
white picket fence, into the garden and down behind a line of Morning Glories,
my ten-year-old John Wayne persona in a shambles.
I will
never forget Walesville. As a teenager I
would drive through the intersection in my father’s car. I’d look up into the sky and then press the
accelerator and speed away,
copyright 2007 David
Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
