3 – The P-40 Ghost Plane That Turned Up a Year after Pearl Harbor
The date was December 8, 1942; a year and a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,403 Americans and acted as the catalyst for the United States’ entry into World War II. The American Navy was on duty at Pearl Harbor when suddenly, its radar picked up an odd reading. It seemed as if a lone plane was making its way from Japan and heading right into American airspace. The radar operators were puzzled. It was late evening, and the sky was overcast; previous attacks never occurred under those conditions.
The Americans decided to take no chances after what happened just over a year previously and sent two pilots to intercept the craft. When they reached the plane, the pilots were shocked to find out that it was a P-40 with markings that hadn’t been used since the Pearl Harbor attack. Once they got near the plane, they found that it had been shot to pieces and its landing gear was destroyed. They also saw the plane’s pilot slumped over the cockpit; his suit stained by fresh blood.
Incredibly, the pilot moved slightly, saw the two planes, smiled and waved meekly. The plane plummeted into the ground and crashed in a field. When the two pilots investigated the crash site, they found the wreckage but no sign of the pilot. The search team also found a diary that showed the plane was stationed on Mindanao, approximately 1,300 miles away. The lack of landing gear made it an extremely difficult mystery to solve. How could a pilot survive the attack on Pearl Harbor for a year? Moreover, how did he manage to land and take off with no landing gear?
As it happens, most historians believe they have solved this mystery, and the answer is very simple: It never happened. The source of the tale is a work of fiction by Robert Lee Scott Jr. who fought in World War II as a pilot. The first chapter of ‘Damned to Glory’ is entitled Ghost Pilot and it is effectively a longer version of the strange tale of the P-40 plane. The main difference between the book and the oft-told story above is that the two pilots flew from Kienow Airdrome in China to intercept the plane. Decades later, Scott admitted that he was stunned to learn that his tale was still told as some kind of unexplained mystery and said he wouldn’t have written it if he knew it would be taken as fact.