Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  Sunderland’s unit at Fort Myer, the 1134th Special Activities Squadron, is nearly nonexistent in public records, but the few records that are available indicate the unit was assigned to the assistant chief of staff, intelligence, for the US Air Force in Washington. The unit was part of a group that later became the 1127th Field Activities Group, whose expertise was worldwide human intelligence gathering—spying—but also was involved in “Project Moon Dust,” tasked with locating, recovering, and delivering “descended foreign space vehicles.”

  Sunderland, who had divorced several years before the crash, had been living in Sacramento for a year or so and had spent the two weeks before the flight visiting his fiancée, C. Jean Speer, who told reporters after the plane went missing that Sunderland had been en route to Burma on a “special mission.”

  That “special mission” remains unknown to this day, but it is possible he may have been on loan to the CIA at the time, an interagency arrangement that was common during the Cold War. Burma was a hotbed of emerging communist strength and influence in the region during that period, and the United States helped support the government both to stabilize it and so that it would be able to continue using the country as a base for information-gathering in a region that also included Vietnam, which was fast becoming a major concern to communist-wary American leaders.

  The CIA was deeply involved in Burma’s secret war against the Chinese Communists during the midfifties, and CIA-funded pilots were paid to fly over China and drop leaflets urging the citizens to rise up against the Communists. Other CIA pilots dropped arms, ammunition, and supplies to anti-Communist Chinese nationals who had fled their home country years earlier for northern Burma, waiting and planning for their invasion of the mainland and engaging in massive amounts of opium production on the side, something the US government ignored.

  In addition to staging overt flyovers, the CIA and its operatives covertly obtained intelligence about the Communists (inside both China and Burma) in an effort to understand what they were thinking about a possible invasion of Burma and the overthrow of its officially neutral but Western-leaning government. At the same time, the CIA was keenly interested in, and somewhat frustrated by, competing Soviet propaganda and “gifts” to the Burmese government, and deeply concerned about how that might affect the stability and future of the entire region.

  I recently discovered a declassified CIA document from April 1956 that notes the agency’s own “intelligence deficiencies” and says the CIA lacked critical information on the strength of the insurgency within Burma, as well as what was going on with the Burmese Communist Party and the communist-led Burma Workers and Peasants Party. The memo demands that appropriate US intelligence agencies “continue their efforts to overcome the deficiencies.”

  Was Sunderland on a secret mission to help overcome those deficiencies?

  After researching the histories of McGrail and Sunderland I went back to Sullivan, the US State Department labor expert I had earlier discounted as a potential target, to bring him more clearly into focus.

  Sullivan’s profile on the world stage was much higher than that of either McGrail or Sunderland. In fact, a biography of his life published in the 2009 International Bulletin of Missionary Research noted that he had a dual career, one as a missionary/educator and another as a government employee. He and his wife had called Shanghai, China, home for more than twenty years, and Sullivan taught economics at St. John’s University, an Episcopalian missionary institution in Shanghai. He also closely studied Shanghai’s labor scene during a period of unionization and unrest and had just completed research for his doctoral thesis when he was captured by Japanese occupation forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They initially placed him under house arrest, but in February 1943 he was locked inside the Pootung Internment Camp, a converted British-American Tobacco Company compound. In September of that year he and other detained Americans were exchanged for Japanese prisoners, and he returned home to Michigan, where he became an instructor with the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Michigan, where students were trained to become intelligence officers or Japanese or Chinese translators.

  In the spring of 1945, he began his second career, as a labor adviser with the State Department, where his experience in East Asia and his knowledge of economics proved invaluable; he testified several times on Capitol Hill and was instrumental in developing United States policy toward Japan following the war.

  Yes, Philip Sullivan was a higher-profile target than either Sunderland or McGrail, but there was something else about him that might have attracted the attention of unfriendly foreign governments: his son, Daniel Peyton Sullivan, had recently taken a job at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in Washington. He was on a small team assigned to research and write segments of the National Intelligence Survey, a top-secret report used by senior-level government and military leaders in the development of strategic planning and foreign policy.

  With brief bios on Sullivan, Sunderland, and McGrail completed, I faced these questions: if any of the three government officials aboard the airplane had been targeted for death, who would have done it and why?

  That’s when former Dow Chemical Company engineer Pawlowski came back into the picture. Pawlowski suggested that I research the 1955 bombing of Air India’s Kashmir Princess and consider whether the crash of Romance of the Skies might have been “payback” for a foiled assassination plot that nearly took the life of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

  Crazy as it may seem, I decided to consider the idea.

  On the evening of April 11, 1955, Kashmir Princess, a chartered Air India Lockheed L-749 Constellation, was en route from Hong Kong to Jakarta, Indonesia. Its passengers were primarily Chinese and East European delegates bound for the Asia-Afro Bandung Conference, plus journalists planning to cover the event. It was flying at an altitude of about 18,000 feet with all operations normal when a time bomb exploded in a wheel bay and blew a hole in the fuel tank, causing the number three engine to catch fire. Gas quickly filled the cockpit, and the plane was doomed. The pilot fought to control the aircraft and attempted to ditch it but was unsuccessful; sixteen people perished.

  The crash was noteworthy in and of itself, but even more interesting was that one intended passenger, the main target of the bombing, had never even boarded the aircraft: China’s Premier Zhou Enlai. It was learned that Zhou had canceled at the last minute, citing an emergency medical need—later determined to have been a lie. Investigators discovered that Zhou had canceled his trip after being tipped off about the planned assassination.

  A Hong Kong airplane janitor later was identified as the man who had planted the bomb, triggered by an American-made MK-7 device, and he quickly fled the area on a Civil Air Transport flight to Taiwan. Civil Air Transport was a CIA-funded airline, and the Chinese quickly blamed the United States intelligence agency for the assassination attempt, a claim US government officials deny to this day.

  Ten years after the crash of Romance of the Skies, a self-confessed former CIA employee named John Discoe Smith, a Quincy, Massachusetts, native who said he had defected to the Soviet Union several years earlier, wrote his memoirs in a James Bond-type thriller in the Literary Gazette of Moscow. He alleged that the CIA was involved in broad worldwide conspiracies of murder and bribery and stated that four out of five “diplomats” in US embassies actually were intelligence officers. Among his other claims was that he personally had provided a suitcase with the two time bombs that the janitor then planted in the wheel well of Kashmir Princess.

  Is it possible that Zhou targeted the US government employees on Romance of the Skies as payback for the suspected CIA attempt to assassinate him two years earlier? Stranger things happened during the Cold War.

  Interestingly, just six weeks before the crash of Flight 7, President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly ordered the CIA to incite a revolution in Indonesia and to start planning for the assassination of the nation’s president, Sukarno—t
he same man who had welcomed Jack King, flight supervisor on Romance of the Skies, to his palace and asked Pan Am to appoint him as steward in charge of Sukarno’s trip around the world.

  Friends one day. Enemies the next. American foreign policy then, as now, is complex and convoluted.

  Christmas 2014

  We didn’t have much when I was growing up. Then again, we had everything.

  When Christmastime rolled around, my brothers and I knew we weren’t going to get everything, or even half of the things, on our lists, but Santa always seemed to know what it would take to bring smiles and laughter to our faces when we raced to the tree on Christmas morning and found what he had left behind.

  The first Christmas I can remember was in 1956 when Santa brought me a Davy Crockett coonskin “Indian fighter” cap and a Gene Autry toy gun set. I can still smell the fresh leather of the holster, feel the itch of that hat on my head, and hear the pop of those red pistol caps going off as the smoke settled.

  I remember Daddy helping adjust my gun belt so that it would fit a little tighter around my tiny waist, to give this young cowboy just the edge he needed in an imminent gunfight with his older brother, a Roy Rogers man. To this day I remember Daddy leaning close to me, his smiling, unshaved morning face touching mine, and giving my gun belt an extra tug.

  Looking back now, I treasure most not what I received from Santa that year, but that closeness, that touch of love from my father.

  He would not be with us for another Christmas.

  While he never again tugged my gun belt, I felt his love throughout my life, and his love is a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

  It’s always the little things that matter the most.

  The Christmases of my childhood changed after my father died in 1957. We still got everything we needed (though never everything we wanted), but my mother struggled to raise three boys on Social Security checks, and making ends meet was never easy. It was especially difficult at Christmas. As we grew older, she gave us a “Santa budget” that we’d have to live with that year, and while we didn’t especially like it, we learned to live, and wish, within our means.

  Her lifetime gifts to us included frugality and responsibility, but her biggest gift was unconditional love. No matter how far we strayed or how far we pushed the boundaries, we could always count on her love.

  On Christmas Eve, just as on many other nights, she would shout from her room to make sure we heard her from down the hall:

  “I love you boys. My three little boys.”

  Even as rebellious teens, we were her “three little boys.”

  On Christmas morning, as other kids in our neighborhood got more “stuff,” the latest gizmos and brand-name clothes, my mother somehow managed to save the day and make it a Christmas to remember.

  She made the day special with her joyful sense of humor and the way she squinted her eyes, looking closely to see if we really liked what she had scrimped and saved for Santa to bring us. It was the way she scurried about the kitchen to make the Christmas meal, including her famous powdered sugarcoated rum balls. It was the way she acted so pleasantly surprised at what my brothers and I had pooled our money to give her as our Christmas gift. One year we came up with a whopping $3 and bought her a freestanding, cheap, fake-bronze ashtray. She proudly placed it in the living room, right next to the big, stuffed chair Daddy used to sit in. My mother didn’t even smoke (nor did my father), but she loved what we gave her.

  Things weren’t always perfect in our house. Of course not. Three growing boys. One house. One parent. Four separate lives. Despite our hardheaded selves, my brothers and I grew up and flew the nest, and have led reasonably successful lives of our own. Mom died a few years ago from Alzheimer’s, and my brothers and I celebrate Christmas separately, in different states and in different ways. But we have a common thread: a mother and a father who loved us, on Christmas and every day of the year.

  “I certainly believe in aliens in space, and that they are indeed visiting our planet. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities.” —US Senator Barry Goldwater (1965)

  The eight-column banner headline in The San Francisco News on November 15, 1957, must have raised a lot of eyebrows as people glanced at newspaper racks:

  DID METEOR HIT PLANE? Experts Checking Pacific Mystery

  “Government investigators said today Pan American’s Stratocruiser may have crashed into the Pacific after being hit by an ‘exterior object’ such as a meteor.”

  However, there was nothing in the story itself to support the sensational headline. The article went on to mention several other prevailing theories about the crash, including sabotage and mechanical failure, but not another word about a meteor.

  Incredulous as it seems, could a meteor have struck the airliner as it flew across the twilight Pacific sky?

  That idea was quickly nixed as “mathematically impossible” by George Bunton, manager of San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, who said that while it was theoretically possible for a meteor to strike a plane, the probability was extremely slim. Bunton said that even predictable meteor showers consist of particles that are too small to survive passage into the earth’s atmosphere and that the chance of a larger, sporadic meteor hitting the plane was “improbable.”

  Improbable, but not impossible.

  Just two days earlier something resembling a small meteorite had blazed through the northern California sky and had torn into a field near the W. W. Crocker estate. Hillsborough police officer William Offield checked out the location the following morning and found that the fireball had crashed into the earth under some pine trees and planted a scar in the ground about the size of a six-inch shotput. Scattered molten lead spread all around the small indentation. Another unknown object fell from the sky about the same time in nearby Burlingame.

  Could a similar metal fireball falling from the sky have crashed into the Stratocruiser and caused its demise?

  This was one of those improbabilities that deserved further study in the search for my father’s killer.

  I began to look more deeply into what was happening in the skies that week in 1957. Much to my amazement, dozens of sightings of unidentified flying objects and other unusual occurrences had been reported all over the world. Clearly something had been going on.

  When the Russians launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957—a month before Romance of the Skies perished—the Cold War took a frightening new twist, as the space race began in earnest. Would the Russians or the Americans end up controlling the skies above the earth? Who would be the first to put a man on the moon? The launch of Sputnik 1 ushered in a period of exhilarating scientific and technological advancement, but also heightened military and political tensions worldwide.

  The man-made satellite circling the earth created excitement, fear, hysteria, and shock among many Americans, who began to believe that Soviet space technology was outpacing American, and that the resultant “missile gap” might lead to Soviet domination of the planet.

  Everyone, it seemed, was tense, nervous, and looking skyward.

  The first week of November 1957 has come to be known by many UFO enthusiasts as “The Great Sighting Week.” Close encounters were reported in every corner of the world, and when the Russians launched a second satellite into orbit, Sputnik 2, on November 2, reports of sightings increased.

  An Army patrol at White Sands, New Mexico, reported an “orange, apparently controlled luminous object” near the site of the first atomic bomb test explosion.

  Two guards at an Army base on the coast of Brazil observed a similar-looking luminous orange disk racing toward them at fantastic speed. Waves of heat crossed their bodies as they unleashed screams into the night sky. Those screams were alarming enough to send sleeping soldiers in a nearby barracks rushing outside just as the military post’s entire electrical system shut down. The UFO streaked away, and the guar
ds were taken to a hospital, where they were treated for first- and second-degree burns.

  What had everyone seen? What caused the soldiers’ burns? What shut down the post’s electrical power? Those events were real. They were documented by perfectly sane people with nothing to gain by exposing themselves to public ridicule or worse.

  Were visitors from beyond our planet trying to make contact? Were they trying to learn more about humankind? Or perhaps warn us—all of us—that we were verging on catastrophe if we continued to build nuclear weapons at breakneck speed?

  Was the US military conducting supersecret air-and-space experiments to keep America competitive in the space race? Were new supersonic experimental aircraft zooming across our skies, hovering above our houses and somehow shutting our power off?

  Whatever the UFOs were, from rural Texas, where the two stunned farmworkers had encountered a UFO that disabled their truck, to Elmwood Park, Illinois, where two policemen and a fireman reported a “weird, glowing thing” that dimmed their car lights, it was a week of wonder—and worry.

  And let’s not forget the frightening episodes that same month where two Varig airliners nearly plunged to earth after encountering UFOs over Brazil—UFOs that the pilots claimed knocked out their electrical power and almost sent them to their deaths.

  I have spent many hours researching electromagnetic interference and UFO sightings, and the reports are credible and numerous, continuing to this day.

  Could the electrical systems of Romance of the Skies have been paralyzed by electromagnetic interference from a UFO? Could the crew have lost control of the plane and been unable to radio a distress signal while struggling to keep the powerless plane in the sky? Could something—or someone—have intentionally or accidentally shut down its electrical system? That might explain why it was flying perfectly on course, problem free, at 5:04 p.m. and sinking to the bottom of the ocean less than thirty minutes later, at least ninety miles off course. That might explain why there was no proof of a major in-flight fire or explosion, but there was a blaze after the plane hit the water in what might have been a failed ditching attempt. That might explain why the four-engine plane might have become a huge, powerless, out-of-control missile falling from 10,000 feet in the sky into the waves of the Pacific Ocean.