B-52 crash site still haunts after 54 years

The B-52C plane wreckage hanging from trees, scattered about the ground on top of Elephant Mountain in Greenville, stays with me as much as any Maine “place of interest” I’ve visited. The site haunts me.

A while ago, spending a weekend in Greenville, Marlene and I, over breakfast at Kelly’s Landing, searched local newspapers and brochures for things to do around Moosehead Lake. I found a short paragraph about U.S. Air Force plane wreckage, left much as it was on January 24, 1963.

The brochure description didn’t make sense. A B-52 bomber practicing low-level flying, with a crew of nine on board, crashes. Seven crew members die, the pilot and navigator survive. In my life, every high-profile air disaster like this was followed by meticulous collecting of every bit of debris, and re-assembling it in a warehouse to determine what went wrong, and to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Why in the world was a B-52C Stratofortress, designed — if need be — to penetrate Soviet air space and drop nuclear bombs, left on top of Elephant Mountain?

Marlene and I drove along Plum Creek timber land dirt roads to the head of the trail leading to the crash site. It was a quintessential Maine summer day. Warm, blue sky, slight breeze, plenty of sunshine. Had we not been looking for the crash site, we could’ve easily driven, unaware, past the trail entrance. As it was, we were prepared to hike into the woods, keeping eyes peeled for obvious signs of plane wreckage.

Instead, a few feet along the trail we saw a small, white sign with a thin blue striped border. Its blue wide horizontal stripe across the middle divided the sign into three sections: horizontal white areas on top and below the horizontal blue stripe.

The white sign areas display logos of the organizations who maintain the site: Moosehead Riders Snowmobile Club, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, American Legion, MAINEiacs (Maine Air National Guard), and the U.S. Department of the Air Force. White uppercase letters against the sign’s blue stripe read: “This area holds parts & pieces of the B-52C that crashed here January 24, 1963. They were once removed and have thankfully been returned to their resting place.”

There was no full-scale removal, reassembly, disassembly and return of the wreckage. News accounts indicate the cause of the crash was quickly apparent. The vertical stabilizer, the tall part of the tail, broke off amid turbulence. The “parts & pieces… returned” refers to souvenirs presumably taken by hikers and curious people drawn to the site.

This site isn’t just a place in the woods, left alone, like an abandoned family dump, for hikers to discover. It’s a memorial, a sacred place. One part of me felt like a rubbernecker driving past a bad car wreck. Another part of me felt like I was walking through a Universal Studio attraction; where set designers did an amazing job recreating a mountaintop plane crash.

Had I not lived through double-digit below-zero temperatures, in Iowa and Maine, I’m not sure I could have imagined, even a little, how cold and terrifying it was for surviving crew members Lt. Col. Dante Bulli and navigator Capt. Gerald Adler, and locals who braved godawful winter weather, to rescue crash survivors. Bulli recently died.

Mostly I remember the kindness, bravery, endurance, and love of the first responders and crew members on Elephant Mountain. And the reverence with which this site is maintained.

There are, of course, YouTube videos of this crash site online. But they do not do the site justice. You have to be there. You have to experience it with all of your senses.

Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.