P-MAN X Update #08 - Police Hill revisited
28 February 2008 - Thursday

This has to be fast if I'm going to finish it before I nod off.

This morning we planned to meet Rich Wills and Matt-the-EOD-guy of JPAC at their hotel and head up to the police hill area at about 7:30. We were almost on time, but lost a few extra minutes getting the spare tire repaired (remember last night's flat?).

We still got up to Ngatpang fairly quickly, since the new West Road is so good. A few years ago the trip that took about 15 minutes today would have taken 45.

The Police Hill area, you'll recall, is the area where we believe a number of American POWs were executed and buried, and It turned out that Rich has developed a few hypotheses he wanted to test in addition to the new one that WE have, which focuses on a relatively small, very specific area.

Rich decided he wanted to survey (visually and with GPS tracks) a couple of other areas in addition to the one implicated by our latest new information from Mark and Katie.

We hiked one of the two other areas with Rich and Matt, took a lunch break, then did the other area. This was mainly to familiarize Rich with those areas; our team has hiked these and several others surrounding Police Hill on multiple previous missions of ours.

On the way back up the hill from the first area, several of us discovered a new way to greatly speed up the process of hiking up through the dense weeds: walk through an area guarded by a battalion of ground wasps. A few of us got multiple stings, and in the process discovered that we can move much more quickly through the dense weeds than any of us would have formerly believed.

We had a little lunch back at the van, then headed back out to the second area, where we entered the jungle on one side and did a rough line-abreast sweep counter-clockwise around the woods, ultimately exiting at the same spot where we had entered.

Finally, we went to the area that we're most interested in and basically followed Rich around, closely watching his thought process and techniques as he captured waypoints (with Flip's help) and jotted notes about various features in the area that match some of the characteristics of a grave site as described in several individual war-crimes tribunal testimonies. He's hoping to build a case (as a member of the JPAC Investigative Team) for JPAC's committing resources and planning a mission within the next year or two to formally investigate one or more of these areas.

After leaving the area we (including Rich and Matt) headed up to the Prison Farm in Aimeliik, to see if we could locate the man who reported last year that he'd seen a "bomb" in the area where we suspect the Allison F-4U crash occurred. We found him right away, and he agreed to take us to the bomb. We drove around to the Taiwanese demonstration farm, where the man (turns out he's serving a term for a ... capital offense) led us on a 15-minute hike back to the bomb.

It's a bomb, all right. It appears to be essentially undamaged (fins intact and not even bent) except for having had the nose cut open so someone many years ago could steam out the high explosive for later use killing fish. We asked if he'd seen any other bombs and he volunteered to take us another 10 minutes deeper into the jungle to see another bomb. We decided to go. The other bomb, slightly smaller than the first, is similarly undamaged except for having been cut open for extraction of the explosive. We started discussing the area and possible reasons for anyone wanting to dump bombs in this particular spot, and it turned out that there was a fairly large Japanese Army encampment fairly close to this area. We really need to think about this, if we're going to stand a chance of finding the Allison crash site...so we asked if we can come back tomorrow and try to gain a better understanding of this area, which, we still believe, may contain the Allison site.

The prisoner said he wasn't going anywhere, and would be happy to show us a couple more bombs and some of the caves that were part of the army complex. So in the morning we'll meet up with Rich and Matt again and see where our new information leads us.

- Reid
 

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