P-MAN VIII Update #5
18 February 2006

To paraphrase the "Smart Man" approach to what we do, we keep reminding ourselves that "it's smarter to act on the basis of real information than to just blunder around and hope you'll find something."

Today began with the realization that we need to refresh our stash of information - there are presently too many loose ends among the info sources we've been counting on. We still have a couple of things we need to do at Police Hill, but we're running short of new leads to pursue there. It's a huge area, and although we're becoming quite familiar with it, it's unlikely that further undirected searching is going to be productive. We're close to exhausting the list of things that make sense to do, until we can find someone who knows where the execution/burial sites are.

Our friend Bena, who has promised to take us to an island south of here where he's seen what appears to be undocumented aircraft debris, is due back from Hawaii next week.

We still need to track down Max, who spent a day with us last year and who knows the approximate location of some wreckage near German Channel (but couldn't find it last year when he went there with us).

Roddy (of three-trips-to-the-lighthouse fame), who knows where there's some interesting stuff on another island, has changed jobs again and we haven't yet tracked him down to get him to show us.

We did track down Abby, a gentleman who used to own a popular restaurant on Malakal Island. Last year when we were all here, and again when Pat visited in November, Abby had said that he'd found something in the water that he wanted to show us. When we met up with him today he said that he'd seen us yesterday, but that we were all wet and muddy and he decided not to come over and say hello. And today he couldn't quite remember what the big find was that he'd wanted to show us, but he said he was confident that it would come to him in a day or so - so we're going to meet him for breakfast on Monday and see if he's figured it out.

We stopped by for a short visit at the crocodile preserve with Joshua, who knows about a crash site on Ngeruktabel and accompanied us there last year, without finding anything. He had said he'd try to get back there and search on his own, to try to find the site before we returned this year. That hasn't happened, but we've made a plan to go back there with him in a couple of weeks to take another shot. He's confident that the wreckage is there - he's just having trouble remembering exactly where. It's a story reminiscent of Roddy's. We still believe that Roddy saw something, but we think that his recollection is so faint that his searching was almost random (and possibly even on the wrong island). We're not quite that discouraged about Joshua yet, so we're not quite ready to throw in the "smart man" towel..

We stopped by to talk to Fuana, on whose property lies the Avenger wing in Aimeliik that we examined last year, but she was out of town for the day. We told them we'd come back this evening to talk to her, since we want to go back to her property and do some exploring around the hillside where the aviator was said to have been executed. We also want to try to interview her siblings, who likely heard from their father the same hair-raising tale of watching the execution of an airman who bailed out of that Avenger. It's always good to get other people's versions of the same story.

Last year we interviewed an elderly man in Koror who claimed to have done a little "informal salvage" (stripping out one of the machine guns to try to get some parts for his air rifle...) at that same Avenger crash site in Aimeliik. This year we have some excellent aerial photos of that area and feel that they might help him to pinpoint for us the location of the wreckage that he saw and partially stripped during the war. We went to see him, but he was also out of town, and we told them we'd drop by this evening to talk to him, too.

When we returned around 6 p.m. to visit with the man in Koror, he had just returned from his trip to Airai and was sufficiently tired from the trip to need a nap more than he needed to talk to us, so we'll come back another time.

Fuana, however, was just back from her trip, and was more than ready to hang out with us and talk. Neat lady. Very helpful. Told us a little more about the property in Aimeliik, and also indicated that she has a nephew who may know where some part or parts of the aircraft are located (although there's about an even chance that what he knows about is the same wing in the mangroves that we saw last year).

In any case, we secured her permission to go and explore the hillside where the airman is reported to have been executed. We're planning to go up there by boat tomorrow - it should be quicker to get there by boat than by car, and we should be able to tie up right at the base of the hill. By car, the closest we can get to the hill is about a kilometer away, over some pretty hilly jungle terrain. We had also wanted to interview any of her siblings who might have heard the story of this site from their father. It turns out that all four of her brothers have passed away, and of her two sisters we've already interviewed one and the other lives in the U.S., in South Carolina. So off we go in the morning to explore the hillside for evidence of an execution/burial site.

- Reid