The Ghost Bomber of the Mon: What Really Happened in 1956

A B-25 ditched in the Mon in 1956 and was never found. Here's what actually happened, where the conspiracy theories came from, and who is still looking.

By LocalOctober 1, 20263 min read

The Ghost Bomber of the Mon: What Really Happened in 1956

There is a bomber at the bottom of the Monongahela, or there was, or there never was after the first night. Seventy years on, Pittsburgh still can't agree, and the fight over it has buried the part that actually matters.

January 31, 1956

A TB-25N Mitchell, a trainer version of the World War II bomber, left Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada bound for Olmsted Air Force Base near Harrisburg. Six men were aboard, with Maj. William Dotson and Capt. John Jameson flying.

Over western Pennsylvania the fuel ran out. The gauges on those aircraft were notoriously unreliable, and checking the tanks properly meant climbing out on a wing with a dipstick in winter, which nobody had done. Both engines quit at about 3,000 feet. The crew asked for Greater Pittsburgh Airport and knew within seconds they weren't going to make it.

At about 4:10 p.m., Dotson put the plane into the river wheels up, between the Homestead High Level Bridge, now the Homestead Grays, and the Glenwood Bridge. It was a clean landing. The aircraft stayed intact, and everyone got out onto the wings.

Then the current took it. According to Heinz History Center president Andy Masich, the bomber floated for roughly 11 minutes before it went under. The men went into water that was just above freezing. Boats and people along the bank pulled four of them out. Two drowned. Their bodies were recovered downriver in the days and weeks that followed.

The search that found nothing

The Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers worked the river for two weeks. An attempt to raise the plane the day after the crash failed, and it sank back down. After that, nothing. A 40-foot aircraft disappeared in a river that isn't much deeper than the plane is tall, and it has never been found.

That's the whole engine of the legend. Pittsburgh doesn't lose things that big.

The theories

Over the decades the story has collected every attachment you'd expect. The plane was carrying nerve agents. It was carrying a UFO or parts of one. There were Soviet defectors aboard. Witnesses claimed to see a seventh man pulled from the water, one who doesn't appear on any crew list. Others said a helicopter passed over the site with a Geiger counter. And many people insist the government quietly barged the bomber away in the middle of the night and said nothing.

The explanation nobody repeats

Here's the detail that rarely makes it into the retellings. Steve Byers of the B-25 Recovery Group has pointed out that several other aircraft went into the rivers around Pittsburgh in that era, including a DC-3, a twin-engine plane that looks a lot like a B-25 from a riverbank. That one was cut apart and hauled off by barge and truck.

So people genuinely did watch crews pull a plane out of a Pittsburgh river and take it away. It just wasn't this plane. Decades of memory did the rest.

The people still looking

In 1995 a group of volunteers formed the B-25 Recovery Group, led by the late John Uldrich. They have spent decades on side-scan sonar, divers, and archival work, and they reject the conspiracy theories flatly. Their theory is duller and more plausible: the plane settled into a roughly 40-foot gravel pit in the riverbed that has since filled in with silt and debris.

In the 2010s they applied to the Army Corps of Engineers for permission to dredge a 200-foot stretch of river near Hays. Masich has said he believes the remains are still down there. The Mon is not a friendly place to work, with poor visibility, heavy barge traffic, and a bottom that moves.

What gets lost

It's a great ghost story, and it's been a great ghost story for 70 years. It's also the worst day of several people's lives.

Two men drowned in a freezing river in sight of a city of a million people. Dotson flew a dead-stick landing clean enough that every man aboard walked out onto the wing alive, and he still lost two of them. When the Heinz History Center interviewed him about the crash years later, what came through wasn't mystery. It was that he lost two crew members.

Both things can sit next to each other. Wonder about the plane all you want. Just remember there were people on it.