The search isn’t over for an Aroostook County pilot missing since 1972

By Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli, Houlton Pioneer Times Staff

They think he was east-northeast of Augusta Airport when his mayday came into the Portland air traffic control tower in 1972.

Requesting directions to the closest airport, Lewis Billy Hogan Jr. was flying a single-engine, two-seater plane called a Citabria at about 3,000 feet. He was lost, low on fuel and in bad weather. It was late morning. 

“He left Danbury, Connecticut, at 8:30 a.m. and he was due at the Houlton Airport at  3 p.m.,” his younger brother Jerome Hogan said Wednesday. ”He never arrived.”

Hogan’s call for help was the last anyone heard from the 28-year-old Houlton resident who worked for LISAir in Presque Isle. And while law enforcement and aviation officials led a massive search after he went missing on May 2, 1972, they stopped.

Jerome and hundreds of others through the years kept looking. 

The search for Hogan’s plane is front and center again, because at 1 p.m. Saturday the Maine Army National Guard is giving a U.S. flag to Jerome in honor of Billy, who was a member of the Houlton Army Guard. The military ceremony is at the Maine Air Museum, 99 Maine Ave., in Bangor. 

It will be a tough moment for Jerome. He and Billy, as everyone called him, were inseparable. 

“I was taking it real hard,” Jerome said, recalling the early days of the search, adding that he just wants to bring his brother home. 

In December 2015, Jerome, along with his friend Malcolm Brydon, a retired Federal Aviation Administration traffic controller, started what would blossom into an exhaustive endeavor with hundreds of volunteers hiking thousands of miles based on clues and leads offered by hikers, fishermen and even pilots who recalled hearing Billy’s mayday. 

“It is a mystery with a capital M,” Brydon said. “It has become a passion of mine. I think even if I wasn’t friends with Jerome I would keep looking. The Hogan family needs closure on this.”

Brydon started a Facebook page, Hogan’s Citabria, as a place to get leads and let people know about the ongoing search. 

Once the site went up, they started getting new leads from lots of hikers who said they remember seeing a plane or parts of a plane on Mount Waldo in Waldo County. 

“We asked, ‘could Billy have made it to Mount Waldo?’ We looked at fuel exhaustion and all the answers said, ‘yes,’ he could have easily reached it,” Brydon said.

Hiker Diane White’s experience seemed the most compelling, Brydon said, adding that she remembered seeing a plane at the top of Mount Waldo.

“He could have slammed into the top or just ran out of gas,” he said.

When Hogan and Brydon began following all leads, DEEMI Search and Rescue out of Orono,  also began helping with the search, taking aerial photos of the mountain.

When an Appalachian Trail worker contacted DEEMI to say he found a wrecked Citabria on Fourth Mountain in Piscataquis County, they were certain the search was over.

“We thought, that’s it, we found Billy,” Brydon said. 

But a serial number on the wrecked plane’s fuselage led them to identify its owner. It was not Billy’s plane. It actually belonged to a local pilot who crashed with his son and they had survived. 

“It was winter. They left the plane. But then they could not find it when they went back,” Brydon said. 

Hogan and Brydon contacted logging companies to make them aware, they talked to community groups, they brought a television crew with them on a long search, they have used drone images and sent divers into the Androscoggin River after a fisherman detected something unusual. 

There have been hundreds of leads and they will search all of them.

Jerome Hogan said he will never stop looking for his brother.

More recently, they got DNA samples from Jerome, another brother and his sisters for comparison to the DNA of several John Doe bodies that were found off shore in the 1970s.

Two of the bodies were buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor. They were exhumed for the Maine medical examiner’s office to get DNA samples that are being evaluated at a special lab, Brydon said.

“We are waiting to see if there is a match,” Brydon said.

There is not much searching in summer because of thick foliage, but they will pick back up this fall and winter, Brydon said, adding that they are expanding the search beyond Mount Waldo to a 100-mile radius of where he was last seen. 

Meanwhile, they will attend the event in Bangor honoring the life of Lewis William Hogan Jr.

“I will take it real hard, but I will accept that flag and hold my strength,” Jerome Hogan said.