The remains of a US fighter pilot have begun their long journey home from a deep jungle ravine in Fiji, 64 years after his airplane disappeared during a World War II sortie.
A 12-member team from the Hawaii-based Joint POW and MIA Accounting Command on Wednesday accepted the remains of the man -- whose identity the US Air Force has yet to reveal -- from the men, women and children of remote Naivucini village, on Fiji's main island, Viti Levu.
"There is a family back in the United States that's been missing a family member for the last 60 years," Ambassador Larry Dinger, US envoy in Fiji, told the villagers during the emotionally charged handing over ceremony that left a number of villagers teary-eyed.
"Thanks to your effort, this family will now be able to close a sad chapter of their lives and that's very important," Dinger said.
When the pilot and his single-seater P-39 Airacobra fighter disappeared during a wartime mission on April 22, 1942, no traces were found despite an aerial search that lasted four days, US officials said.
Some 62 years later, Sailosi Delana and his cousin Paula Cagidomo stumbled on wreckage while hunting for wild boar on Aug. 28, 2004.
"We were following the Dokosamaloa creek deep into the jungle when Paula showed me the remains of what we then thought was the tail of an aircraft," said Delana, 33.
"We didn't see the remains of the pilot but I did see magazines of ammunition on the ground," he said.
He took 17 bullets back to the village and two days later reported their find to the police.
Team commanding officer Major Albert Tabarez and anthropologist Joan Baker agreed that from the wreckage and position of the pilot's skeleton, he could not have survived the crash.
His dog tag wasn't recovered but personal effects including a ring and a wallet containing a washed-out photo, were found at the wreckage site, according to locals.
US officials believe they know the identity of the missing pilot but aren't releasing his name or other details until the remains found in Fiji are identified through DNA tests and the family informed.
Tabarez said the identity of the pilot would be confirmed at a laboratory in Hawaii.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons