The White Bird - Mystery

Mystery

The mainstream view was that L'Oiseau Blanc crashed over the Atlantic due to a squall. Nonetheless, 12 witnesses in Newfoundland and Maine claimed to have heard the aircraft as it passed overhead. Residents at Harbor Grace, Newfoundland reported sighting a white aircraft circling in haze or fog, late on 9 May 1927. With no aircraft on the island and no overflights taking place, the local newspapers highlighted a "mystery" aircraft. If these stories were true, they would have meant that the flight was far behind schedule, as they would have been in the 40th hour of flight. This delay may have been explained, however, by the fact that the aircraft was flying against the prevailing weather pattern. Fishermen off the coast of Newfoundland reported that the weather had turned cold and foul, which might have caused the delay.

Many rumors swirled around the aircraft's disappearance, including a theory that was proposed that the aviators had been shot down by rum-runners with tommy guns, as well as the belief that Nungesser and Coli were still alive and living with Indians in Canada. In 1930, claims circulated that the L'Oiseau Blanc's engine had been located in Maine, but nothing was confirmed. Later stories emerged in 1948, from reports that caribou hunters and fur trappers had found an aircraft wreck in Great Gull Pond.

A fresh round of interest in L'Oiseau Blanc began in the 1980s, after freelance writer Gunnar Hansen of Northeast Harbor, Maine, researched and published an article in the June 1980 issue of Yankee Magazine, titled "The Unfinished Flight of the White Bird". Hansen revealed how Anson Berry (d. 1936), a hermit living near Machias, Maine, claimed late in the afternoon of May 9, 1927 to have heard a sputtering aircraft fly over his isolated camp at Round Lake, Maine. Berry had not been able to see the aircraft because of fog and low clouds, but had heard what sounded like a crash or forced landing in the distance. Hansen and others did a great deal of research during the 1980s, and located multiple other witnesses who reported memories of the aircraft in a line from Nova Scotia down to eastern Maine on that date.

In 1984, the French government made an official investigation, concluding that it was possible that the aircraft had reached Newfoundland. In 1989, the NBC television series Unsolved Mysteries advanced the theory that the two aviators made it across the ocean, but crashed and perished in the woods of Maine. One of Nungesser's relatives, William Nungesser, made several trips to Maine to search, focusing his energies around the north slope of Round Lake Hills in Washington County, Maine, as well as the area around Lake Winnipesaukee.

Famed author Clive Cussler and his NUMA organization also attempted to solve the mystery, searching for the aircraft in Maine and in Newfoundland. They made multiple visits in the 1980s, and interviewed dozens of elderly witnesses: hunters, fishermen and others who said they had seen or heard the aircraft pass by in 1927. The NUMA expedition was named "Midnight Ghost", after Lindbergh's quote in his book The Spirit of St. Louis, where he said that Nungesser and Coli had "vanished like midnight ghosts". In 1992, divers traveled to Newfoundland and attempted to locate and search Great Gull Pond for a wreck, but found nothing, and were not even sure that they had located the right lake. Other lakes were also searched, from Machias, Maine, to Chesterfield, Maine.

Certain pieces were found which, though not conclusive, did suggest that L'Oiseau Blanc had made it to the continent. Little of the aircraft would have remained, since it was created primarily from plywood and canvas. The parts most likely to endure would have been the engine and the aluminum fuel tanks. In Maine, bits and pieces of struts were found, and wood similar to the kind used to build the biplane. Engine metal was also found near the town of Machias, that was not typical to the United States or Canada. Two local residents described a large metal object, a "really big motor" which had been dragged out of the woods for salvage, along a path allegedly made by a logging operation.

In 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that an unofficial French team was focusing on theories that the aircraft crashed off the coast of Canada after flying over Newfoundland.