Original subtitles

A mystery beneath the waves.

A lost B-24 bomber...

...shot down in World War II.

The pilot said,

"We're going in."

The remains of three brave airmen

may still be here, somewhere.

Now an elite team of divers

sent by the U.S. Department of Defense

is on a mission to bring these men home.

First team in

will be Brett, Nikos, and myself.

It's part of a worldwide effort

to search out and recover

tens of thousands of U.S. service members still missing.

We are tasked to provide that closure,

and hopefully one day, fill that hole in their heart.

Like the case of the Tuskegee airman

who vanished in 1944.

All through the years, I would ask everybody,

"Did you know my father? Were you over in Italy?"

Or the copilot of a B-17.

He flew his plane over their summer house

to say goodbye,

and then they never heard from him again.

But after more than 70 years, can any of them be found?

From the bottom of the Adriatic Sea

to cutting-edge tech on board a Croatian ship...

Possible osseous.

...to forensic labs back in the U.S...

This is where we take the unknown

and we put a name to them.

...only science can unlock this puzzle--

the mystery of "The Last B-24."

Right now on "NOVA."

Thousands of miles

from the nearest American shore,

the U.S. Department of Defense

has embarked on a unique expedition--

on the hunt for precious treasure

lost beneath the surface of the Adriatic Sea.

The Croatian navy has donated its services.

As the ship

locks into position...

Okay guys,

briefing for today's operation.

...an elite team of technical divers

and underwater archaeologists

slips into the water.

Let's go.

They will sink

nearly 135 feet beneath the surface

in search of a missing piece of American history,

a warplane lost more than 70 years ago--

Tulsamerican.

Once a fierce weapon of war...

it is now a jumbled mass of parts.

A wing.

A wheel.

A parachute canopy draped like a burial shroud.

The plane is flipped upside down,

broken in half, one wheel jutting upwards.

It looks like nothing more than a tangle of wreckage.

And yet they hope it holds

the last remains of three American airmen

who never made it home--

flight engineer Charles E. Priest;

navigator Russell C. Landry;

and the pilot, Eugene Ford.

They are the reason for this mission.

The reason for almost 50 people

and roughly 15 tons of equipment,

both military and scientific,

brought here in the hopes of finding them.

But after 70 years on the bottom of the ocean,

there are no intact skeletons, no clothing,

no trace of the missing men.

It's a puzzle--

a deep and dangerous mystery

they can only hope will be unlocked by science.

The mystery traces back to 1944,

the height of World War II.

Six months after the Allies' D-Day invasion,

huge portions of France and Italy have been liberated.

But the Germans have just begun a major counterattack.

It was the day after

the Battle of the Bulge had started.

The Germans had made a lot of progress,

had broken through our lines

around Belgium and in that area.

As the ground battle rages,

a ferocious air war

unfolds in the skies above.

Lieutenant Val Miller was there.

We sent every plane

that we could fly.

It was a large,

large bunch of planes

from not only where we were,

but from other divisions in the area.

The assault consists

of B-17 Flying Fortresses

and a newer plane introduced in 1940--

the B-24 Liberator.

Four 1,200-horsepower engines and a more efficient wing design

allow it fly faster and farther than the B-17s.

It carries ten crew, six manning .50 caliber machine guns,

and a bombardier to direct its 8,000 pounds of bombs.

The B-24 was a powerful and effective weapon,

but in the face of enemy fighters,

as much prey as predator.

The reality of air combat over Europe

was it was a very harsh,

unforgiving, chaotic environment.

The antiaircraft artillery that comes through paper-thin skins

of airplanes,

So cold that if your bare skin

touches the aluminum of the airplane, it sticks to it.

Casualty rates are high,

but suffered

as a necessary tradeoff.

One bomb salvo from a B-24,

that's probably equivalent to destroy a large

multistory building, even a small factory,

just from one airplane.

Allied planners

want to drop these high explosives

on the German fuel refineries at Odertal.

Take away the oil,

and the Nazi war machine grinds to a halt.

The flight would take nearly eight hours.

22-year-old Val Miller was the bombardier

on board the Tulsamerican.

The plane was one of over 18,000 B-24s built during the war.

But she is unique among them.

The last B-24 to roll off the factory line in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

she was paid for by the factory workers

out of their own pockets.

Local press has been closely tracking her progress.

Now she is headed out on another extremely dangerous mission.

We were told we would not

have any fighter protection.

We had to go through very thick clouds.

And suddenly...

...we were attacked by a whole bunch of German fighter planes.

There was no conversation, but there was a lot of activity.

People were manning their guns.

We shot down two or three of them.

But they kept attacking and attacking.

The Tulsamerican successfully escaped the German fighters.

But she was critically wounded,

with damage to one of her engines,

fuel tank, and hydraulics.

The crew had a decision to make.

Below them was enemy territory.

The pilot didn't want to bail out.

He knew that if we did, we'd be taken captive by the Germans,

and more than likely they would kill us.

But home base in Italy

was over three hours away-- more than 100 miles of it

over open sea.

But there was a backup plan.

We decided we'd try for that little island of Vis.

It's a small landing area, but it's a place

where we had had planes fly down and land there before.

Threading the needle to land here

was the last hope for many Allied planes.

But it was no simple feat.

We'd already had one engine shot out.

I guess probably we were about 200 feet off the water.

It looked like we were going to make it.

At such low altitude, a parachute isn't an option.

As we were chugging along

trying to get to that little landing strip,

two more engines quit.

The only warning we had was the pilot said, "We're going in."

The crash of a nearly identical B-24

depicted in the film "Unbroken" is eerily similar.

The water came in on me.

I didn't remember seeing anything around me.

As I was just floating there,

suddenly there was a little boat that came up by me.

I have no idea who they were to this day.

Miller later learned

that six other crewmen had been rescued,

but the pilot, navigator, and engineer

vanished without a trace.

For decades, the military listed them as unrecoverable.

Then, in 2010,

an amateur diver came across a rusting wreck.

It was eventually identified as the Tulsamerican.

With the plane identified,

a little known group within the Department of Defense

called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency,

the DPAA, began planning this expedition.

Their job is to find lost service members

and provide information

to families who may have been waiting for decades.

We try to give them, as much as we can,

the theater, the campaign, the battle, perhaps even

that final hour where they lost their service member.

And that helps bring a sense of closure to them.

The DPAA

goes around the world to carry out its mission,

like the recent recovery of potential remains

of U.S. troops

from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

An estimated 82,000 American soldiers are still missing.

It may be a number, but that's 82,000 unique stories,

82,000 circumstances, 82,000 sets of memories, all unique.

But at this site,

135 feet underwater...

finding the missing men and bringing them home

will be very complicated,

which calls for an expert team led by Brendan Foley.

So there's a lot of aircraft wreckage

that we have to move around.

There's jagged metal that could easily cut us.

We have to be really careful in there.

Brendan is not a military officer.

He's a scientist

who leads a team of highly skilled

underwater archaeologists.

Shadowing the scientists is a second team

of elite technical divers led by dive safety officer Phil Short.

Now, bear in mind, scientists have real jobs,

so they don't get to dive every day.

So you're not ready with a motor reflex

to respond to the emergencies.

And that's why no one dives alone.

Each scientist, like Dr. Foley,

has got a guardian.

And their job is to ghost the scientist,

to watch them while they work.

Also joining the team

is underwater photographer Brett Seymour.

He takes hundreds of photographs.

Topside,

he stitches the 2D images together

to build a 3D model of the site.

The graphic image clearly shows that the cockpit is in ruins.

The site is quite a bit

more broken up than I thought.

I mean, I had seen some images that the tail wasn't there,

but I had no idea that the cockpit was so torn apart.

Yeah, I didn't realize it was quite so damaged.

The first dive has made it clear what they're up against--

a confusing mass of wreckage.

which means the search for human remains just got more difficult.

It looks like when the aircraft hit the water,

it was a heck of an impact, and so it's peeled open

almost like a banana.

The search will begin around the heavily damaged cockpit.

According to Val Miller's testimony,

that was where the three missing men

were positioned at the moment of impact.

I was right behind the pilot.

I could have reached out and touched him with my hand.

The engineer Priest,

the navigator Landry,

and the pilot Ford should be right there.

The next team prepares to descend.

Just like on land,

the excavation begins with a grid system.

The wreckage is pretty well concentrated.

It makes the job a little bit easier for us.

Their goal for this phase is to examine the area

around the cockpit, in case any remains

were ejected from the wreckage.

With the grid we can go

very, very systematically and scientifically day after day.

The team scans the sea floor with forensic lights

capable of detecting bones.

With a filter on over our eyes,

over our masks, we shine these blue lights

on the sea floor, and they cause bone to fluoresce.

so it makes detection a lot easier and a lot more complete.

Powerful dredges work like giant vacuums,

sucking up the silt.

The sediment is bagged

and sent to the surface.

Where a team including

Croatian archaeologist Helena Tomas begins sifting through it.

It has to be sieved

and processed in precisely the same way

that we archaeologists are used to.

As the bags continue rising from the depths,

Helena recruits the Croatian sailors to assist her team.

We had so much work to do,

we decided to ask sailors to help us

sieving the soil that came from the bottom

of the sea around the wreckage.

Even Captain Neven Katic joins in...

and finds the first significant personal item.

So he came to me and he said,

"Oh, there is a really shiny object inside.

What is this?"

A wedding ring untarnished by the salt water.

It's an emotional moment.

It catches me now; it caught all of us.

Something so personal as one of these airmen's wedding band,

still shiny gold.

Such a unique find

may even hint at the original owner.

That's because records show the engineer Priest,

out of Kansas, was never married.

The next man, Landry, with a brother and sister

waiting back home, was also marked single.

The only man who was married was the pilot,

Lieutenant Eugene Ford.

He left behind a wife, an unborn son, and a daughter.

And he actually saw me once--

he came home on leave.

But then he went back.

And he died.

So I don't remember him at all.

We had an encyclopedia of pictures of World War II.

and we did look for B24s,

and we memorized the number of rivets there are,

things like that.

But there was this sadness my mother had

that I just could not comprehend.

The ring suggests their father,

lost all those years ago,

may be close by.

But it's not enough to establish a positive ID.

So while the discovery is encouraging...

the work is far from over.

Okay, guys, so, briefing for today.

First team in will be Brett, Nikos, and myself.

The team works in shifts.

As one crew rises to the surface,

the next one is ready to take its place.

Our team's got 60 minutes per diver

per dive, and we're putting nine men on the bottom per day.

So we're basically getting nine hours of productivity

per operational day.

On land, archaeological digs

are measured in weeks or months.

Here, the excavation will be measured in hours.

As the digging continues...

a radio headset appears.

Divers bring it to the surface,

where the bags of silt are also yielding results.

A 50 caliber cartridge,

flight boots--

what archaeologists call artifacts.

So artifacts would be

remains of the plane, parts of the uniform,

something that can

give us an indication of identity.

But the holy grail

is osseous remains--

human bones, carrying a hidden treasure--

an individual's genetic material, DNA.

Recovered items like uniforms,

even dog tags, are usually not enough,

even when combined with medical records.

Dental records are useful.

But DNA is the best way to make an identification...

Like an investigation the DPAA recently reopened.

This is my father, Captain Lawrence Everett Dickson.

His daughter Marla was just a child when he disappeared.

My father was in the third graduating class

of the original Tuskegee Airmen.

Named for the Alabama town where they trained,

the Tuskegee Airmen had to fight

just to fly.

The basic sentiment of the country at that time

felt that black people were not intelligent enough,

they weren't brave and courageous enough.

The Tuskegee pilots proved their critics wrong,

but at a price.

They were asked to fly 70 missions--

far more than their white peers.

Marla's father was on his 68th mission,

in a distinctive red-tail P-51.

Christmas was only days away.

They expected him

to come home very soon, because he only had

two more missions to go.

Just after the new year,

they get a telegram.

It said he was missing in action.

He was never seen again.

All through the years I would ask everybody,

"Did you know my father, were you over in Italy?"

And I never had any luck.

For 50 years,

Marla had little more than his medals

to remember her father by.

It's the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Until 1998,

when she got a letter from her father's wingman, Robert Martin.

The letter revealed that over the mountains

between Italy and Austria, her father's plane

began to give him trouble.

He saw my father having difficulty with the engine.

It sputtered out one time, and he got it started again

after trying.

And then it sputtered out again.

And he got it started again.

But the third time, it didn't work.

Neither of the two pilots

flying with Dickson saw if he got out.

They went back and they circled

what they thought was the area.

And I could tell from the letter how...

...how awful he felt.

For almost 70 years,

Dickson was gone-- vanished in the mountains.

Until a DPAA researcher uncovered a handful

of eyewitness reports recorded in 1944.

They described the crash of an Allied fighter

on the Austro-Italian border near the town of Hohenthurn.

Working with the University of New Orleans,

the National World War II Museum,

and the University of Innsbruck,

the DPAA launched an investigation.

Archaeologists quickly found wreckage

matching a downed P-51 fighter...

And fragments of bone.

All of a sudden, for Marla Dickson, there was hope.

I got a call

from an Army representative, and her specialty was genealogy.

And at first, I said, "Oh, gosh.

"I'm going to have to hang up on this person.

This is some kind of scam."

But it wasn't a scam.

It was legitimate.

I didn't know how to handle it.

And I know that sounds silly, because I'm old enough

to be able to handle almost anything.

The remains that were found

were sent to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System

for analysis.

Here, one at a time, DNA transforms the missing

into the found.

The DNA is extracted from bones and teeth,

and then sequenced.

Which is a way for us

to determine the actual base pairs.

So, when I talk about DNA, DNA's made up of four base pairs--

G, A, T, C.

The base pairs

are simply chemicals arranged in sequence--

the blueprint for what makes each person unique.

That difference in that individual

that makes that his DNA sequence--

that difference is what we're looking for.

Searching through

the three billion base pairs found in human cellular DNA,

the laboratory utilizes three different testing methods.

One approach focuses on small repetitive sequences

known as "short tandem repeats,"

which are compared to reference samples from family members.

The Army asked for my DNA,

and they asked for my father's brother's son's DNA.

The work is painstaking;

it will take some time.

I am not a patient person.

One day, I'm for finding him

and one day I'm for not finding him.

Because it's... I can't explain it to you.

It's...

It's...

It's emotional.

It takes a while.

There's a reason for that.

For better, for worse, people may think

there are ways to do this faster.

Sloppy science means bad results.

The families have had enough heartache in their life

that we do good science.

Only time will tell

if the remains found in Austria belong to Captain Dickson.

Uncertainty is part of all of these investigations.

Back on the Tulsamerican,

the archaeologists have reached their primary target--

the cockpit where the missing men were just before the crash.

But it's a jumbled mess,

and they don't find much.

I spent the whole

65 minutes of my dive just working an area.

Dug carefully

and found the other headphone, but we didn't find

anything else at all.

This is an evolutionary process.

We've done that sort of easy part-- we thought maybe

the most likely place for the remains to be found.

Now it gets more difficult.

What's most perplexing is that, so far,

no human remains have appeared.

I wasn't really finding anything under there at all, so...

Yeah, I think there was just nothing there.

Yeah, I agree.

If the airmen ended up

outside of the cockpit,

the team could be wasting precious time.

The job here isn't to remove sediment.

On day 17, they find something

that lifts everyone's spirits--

Oh, my goodness.

A set of wings.

I was really hoping

we were going to find that.

The center shield

tells them they don't belong to the pilot

whose ring may have been found.

But could they belong to one of the other missing men?

The job here is to

bring these three men home,

bury them in the National Cemetery

with the honors that they're due.

And every day, we're thinking about that mission entirely.

These unsolved cases

can be agonizing for families back home waiting for news.

I'm here representing my cousin,

Flight Officer Samuel Wilson DeSoto,

lost May 15, 1946.

I was 16,

and I got to kiss him goodbye that morning.

We have two other sisters also, so Daddy had five girls,

and we're all... we're all waiting.

My father was Private Rodolfo Velasquomeza.

I never knew my dad.

He turned 19 on October 12 in Korea.

There are tens of thousands

of such families around the U.S.

People are just looking for that closure.

They're looking for answers

as to why their loved one was lost.

And having the closure to bring them back home on American soil

is what they strive for.

The U.S. military

began this work in 1947.

I didn't realize either that how difficult it was for my mother.

She cried herself to sleep

quite frequently, so that hole was getting bigger and bigger.

To provide that closure,

to provide answers,

and hopefully one day fill that void,

fill that hole in their heart as to why their loved one

hasn't been home in 70 years, in the case of World War II.

Back in Croatia, the team keeps

that mission foremost in their thoughts.

Slowly, slowly, go, go, go, go.

But there is still little sign

of Ford, Priest, or Landry.

The team has fully excavated the cockpit area and come up empty.

Is it possible the men were ejected

by the force of the crash?

I don't know.

They were right where I could have touched them when we hit.

But I never saw them again,

and never heard of them.

I don't know what happened to them.

With much of their dive time burned,

the team must move quickly.

Unfortunately, foul weather is moving in.

They must seek calmer waters.

We are moving now,

because state of sea is not good for anchorage,

and we are going in the harbor Vis,

because wind not blow.

But even with the divers out of the water,

the archaeological work can continue.

Come on!

The team has a new piece of technology

which acts as a larger version

of the forensic flashlights used earlier.

They call it the blue light special.

So that's ready to roll.

The idea is

we load the material onto this top conveyor,

and it passes underneath a diffused laser.

And that laser is set for 450 nanometers.

And that frequency causes bone and teeth,

osseous material, to fluoresce.

The scanner picks up protein

in human remains-- something that rocks and shell

lack in significant amounts.

This test bone, for example, rich in protein,

glows like a spotlight.

I'd say that's an advance.

Yeah, that's cool.

It's like an x-ray.

You see things that are not of interest,

and this, that is of interest actually pops out.

After hours of scanning,

it appears the blue light special

has found something important.

Possible.

Possible osseous.

What might be a tooth.

I'm not a specialist what this could be,

but this is exactly what we were looking for.

It is tagged and bagged

for further analysis.

That's not our determination.

That's what the lab is for.

We'll send it on home.

But it's highly encouraging.

It means there may yet be

human remains at the crash site.

And there's another piece of exciting news.

A local diver has information

on another U.S. warplane with another missing airman

possibly on board.

I can show you where he is.

The second plane is only three miles away,

but the currents are much calmer.

We've got poor weather over the B24,

which gives good conditions over the B17,

and we're using this weather window

to do a reconnaissance dive on the B-17.

She sits at

72 meters of depth on the sea bed.

It is deeper than the Tulsamerican.

A darker, more treacherous dive.

The downed plane is incredible.

It is a B-17 Flying Fortress...

The workhorse of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

First deployed in the 1930s,

the B-17 had a reputation among its crews for its ability

to take a beating.

Not surprisingly, in contrast to the Tulsamerican,

the B-17 appears completely intact,

resting on the sea floor as if on a runway.

It's just laying there on the seabed.

And it just appears out of the mist

like this ghost plane wreck.

It's like they drained the ocean,

landed a plane, and put the ocean back.

After his first trip to the wreck,

the local diver, Danijel Frka,

researched the story of the plane.

I know, because I got a letter from the pilot and the gunner,

and they explained in detail everything what happened.

The plane was on a bombing mission

similar to that of the Tulsamerican

when it was hit by anti-aircraft fire.

The B-17 attempted to make an emergency landing at Vis.

It fell short, but all crew survived except for one.

So all ten of the crew were saved,

except of the 11th guy-- that was the copilot

who was left in the plane.

His name was Ernest Vienneau.

Wounded in the attack, Vienneau couldn't be

pulled from the plane in time.

His family has been searching for him ever since.

My name is Chelsea Carbonell,

and I'm here to remember my great uncle.

He was the only one to die in that plane.

What do we think?

Especially smile Brendan.

Because he has that smile.

Chelsea Carbonell and her son

have inherited the search for their long-lost uncle.

When Ernest left,

he flew his plane over their summer house in Twin Lakes

and tipped the wings to say goodbye,

and then they never heard from him again.

Like the Tulsamerican,

Vienneau and his plane were long considered unrecoverable.

We have been trying to find his remains and bring him back home.

Now, unexpectedly,

Vienneau may be within reach.

If this is his plane, he may still be here somewhere,

or in the silt nearby.

So I think basically

there's a fairly high chance of some remains being found.

But there's a problem.

There is no official permission to search further.

They have to stop here.

The DPAA cannot approve a new mission

without proof that this is indeed Vienneau's plane.

For now, they must focus on other cases.

Meanwhile,

the wreck raises an intriguing question--

why is the B-17 so intact?

No crew died in the crash itself.

It's probably the most intact aircraft wreck I've ever dived.

While the Tulsamerican

is a mangled wreck that took three airmen with it.

Why are the two planes in such different conditions?

Even stranger, Frka has dived on other B-24s

with similar damage.

They're in exactly the same condition.

Always the front part of the plane

is upside down, and the back, the tail part,

is tangled with it,

or very close to it. Yep.

It's a striking detail.

Did the B-24s have some kind of fatal design flaw?

The B-24 was nicknamed

the Flying Coffin by its crews,

because it's very hard to get out of the airplane.

The B-17 bombers,

despite being an older design, seemed to enjoy

a better reputation.

The B-17 was a much more robust aircraft

in the combat environment.

It was able to take combat damage.

It was able to get back on less engines, less than four engines.

An obscure but startling

piece of test footage offers insight.

A controlled crash of a B-24.

Despite the optimal conditions, the plane still comes apart.

The front end is mangled,

just like the Tulsamerican.

Only 25 percent of B-24 intentional water landings

were successful, and that's due to the construction

of the airplane.

The body of the B-24 rests below the wings,

exposing it during a water landing.

So as the airplane hits the water,

it could break in half very easily.

In contrast, the B-17 had a low wing,

giving it a broad landing surface.

Which allowed the airplane to be set down into the water

much more easily.

As the dive team gets back to work on the Tulsamerican,

they've come to terms with the fact that the cockpit is empty.

They decide to investigate a feature

that they had seen earlier-- a parachute.

With time running out, this may be their last best hope.

Divers typically try to avoid underwater obstacles

that can snag and tangle.

The parachute is trapped, snagged on, wrapped around

this part of the aircraft wreckage.

We need excavate underneath that.

They have just a few days left

to make it happen.

Moving the parachute

generates dangerous clouds of silt,

obscuring jagged metal and tangling wire.

But through the haze, divers see something...

...that may be just what they're looking for.

For hours, the crew says nothing,

keeping the sensitivities of the families

foremost in mind.

Finally, permission is granted to reveal what they've found.

We're under very strict guidelines

as to what we can say and what we can't say,

but I am authorized to say that today we recovered

possible human remains.

And it's extraordinarily emotional.

This hit me in a way no other dive has ever hit me.

It was the most worthwhile thing I've ever done under water.

After repeated dives on the parachute,

the team recovers a significant number of intact bones,

teeth, and numerous other fragments.

For now,

they can only hope it will be enough to answer the question

on everyone's mind-- whom have they found?

I hope that we fulfill

the biggest promise of the mission,

which is to bring closure to a family or families.

The fallen are finally returning to U.S. soil.

And waiting families

will find out who they are.

The DPAA operates

the largest forensic anthropology lab in the world.

We process the site like a crime scene.

There's never a day in which you don't remember

that these are somebody's son.

The work is done

entirely in the blind

to ensure no bias is introduced.

So there'll be anthropological analyses, dental analyses.

there could be histological or DNA analyses

as well as material evidence analysis.

Larkin Kennedy is a forensic anthropologist

assigned to analyze the artifacts.

In addition to the wedding ring,

Larkin can glean some detail from the flight wings--

they're definitely not the pilot's.

So we would expect if those wings belonged to the pilot

that they would have

this shield shaped central motif.

The object that we do have

is more specific to an air crew member.

We can be fairly sure that that would have belonged

to a different individual.

So it looks like we have

at least two individuals represented in this assemblage.

As Larkin continues her analysis of the artifacts,

forensic anthropologist Tyler Dunn

conducts his assessment of the bones.

But he and Larkin do not trade notes.

It's my job to do a skeletal analysis blind,

so I don't bias myself.

We were presented with 11 teeth,

a right humerus that's relatively intact

compared to everything else, a fragment of a vertebra,

a handful of sort of non-diagnostic

long bone fragments.

We can more or less just tell that they're bone.

Some fingers, a bit of a toe,

and then most of the lower right leg, so a tibia and a fibula.

The first question I generally ask is

the minimum number of individuals.

So we try and figure out if this could, or is,

more than one person.

The recovery team had hopes

that they had found more than one airman.

But this is not what Tyler sees.

Based on this case,

the skeletal... it's called MNI,

or minimum number of individuals,

the skeletal MNI is one.

So I have good reason to think that this is one individual.

This is backed up by the dental analysis.

So I can tell that this is all teeth from one individual

based on tooth shape, the size of the tooth,

and more or less what they look like.

It appears that only a single airman was recovered

based on the skeletal evidence.

But is it Pilot Ford?

Or one of the others?

Based on condylo-malleolar length of the tibia,

so we more or less measure how long the tibia is,

and the stature for this individual that we estimated

was right around 5'10".

Growth patterns also give an estimate of age.

So this is called the epiphysis.

And right about 23 years of age,

the epiphysis is firmly attached.

So we have some idea that this loss incident

was of someone who was at least 23 years old at time of death.

Yet neither the skeletal remains

nor the artifacts allow them to make

a definitive identification.

Their only hope to sort it out now

rests with the DNA.

The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System now takes over.

This is where we take the unknown

and we put a name to them.

First they extract DNA

from the bones and teeth,

and then sequence many different regions.

They then compare the sequence

against family reference samples,

until, finally, a match is confirmed.

Is it the pilot Ford?

Or the navigator Landry?

Or the flight engineer Charles Priest?

How do you do? So nice to meet you.

You want to go on into the meeting room?

Yes.

Get started-- I know you're anxious to hear this.

More than 70 years ago,

three airmen disappeared

beneath the waves along with their plane.

Now one of them has been identified.

So based on that, the laboratory analysis

established remains of those as

First Lieutenant Eugene Ford,

serial number Oscar 8-0-5-8-0-4,

U.S. Army Air Forces.

The DNA reveals the definitive truth:

Lieutenant Eugene Ford has been found.

Ford's daughter Norma was just six months old when he died.

Her family told her little about what happened.

I knew nothing about what happened to him.

When I was 13 and my brother was 12,

that's when I first saw a picture of my father.

And I found a packet of letters.

And I immediately knew what they were,

but I just put them back.

Now I can't find them.

I can't find them.

But now her father has been found.

And she can put him to rest in a way that her mother never could.

Mrs. Ford, 49 years later,

she said, "I would give all of my life

to have 15 more minutes with Gene."

I thought that was remarkable--

give everything she had

for just 15 minutes with him.

In a ceremony like this,

Eugene Ford will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The DPAA is still reviewing

whether flight engineer Charles Priest

and navigator Russell Landry could be recovered.

But 82,000 more missing American soldiers are still out there.

Like Ernest Vienneau, possibly still inside the B-17

that crashed near the Tulsamerican.

I'd like to talk with you

about how we're moving forward

on trying to recover his remains.

I'd love to hear it.

And Captain Lawrence Dickson.

Of 27 Tuskegee Airmen missing since World War II,

he is the first and so far only one to have been recovered.

In July 2018, the DPAA notified his daughter--

Captain Dickson had been found.

Because he wasn't treated properly when he was alive,

I'm taking him first class to Arlington.

I want to take my CD of Donald Byrd, the jazz trumpeter,

because that is so cool.

He would really, really like that.

and he'd say, "Thanks, Marla.

You know how to send a person off."

There remain 26 more airmen

from this storied command still to be found.

For their loved ones, as for all families of the lost,

hope remains, but time is the enemy.