A manila envelope stashed in the bowels of the Item archives immediately caught my eye as I began to search for the subject of this week’s column. “Marblehead Plane – Military Jet Plane lifted from Marblehead waters” it read. I was hooked. And, what luck, it just so happens the stories about said plane were published in July 1988, 35 years ago this week.
With the stars having seemingly aligned, I had no choice but to dedicate this space to recounting that fascinating story.
And so, the story goes, three Marblehead men saw a “giant sky-crane helicopter” lift a military jet from the waters near Tom Moore Rock, halfway between Tinker’s Island and the channel to Marblehead Harbor. A Hamilton man playing golf at the Wenham Country Club spotted a sky-crane carrying a jet-plane north. The only problem: U.S. military officials had no idea what was going on.
The combined accounts detailed a small plane being hoisted from the ocean on May 26, 1988 at about 2-3 p.m. First, a tug-and-barge arrived on the scene, then what appeared to be a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, and an olive-drab helicopter. Onlookers reportedly saw divers bobbing in the water about 300 yards from shore.
The sky-crane, described in the Daily Evening Item as a “huge praying mantis,” hovered over the area, creating a circle of waves. At one point, a Marblehead Police boat began riding out to the scene to investigate, but turned back toward the harbor after the two helicopters began flying in its direction. Cables were then lowered from the sky-crane and attached to the submerged jet. The plane was then lifted from the sea onto the barge, where the cables were apparently attached “more thoroughly.” In all, witnesses said, the event lasted two hours.
Yet, no one seemed to know what the men had witnessed.
U.S. Rep Nicholas Mavroules (the onetime mayor of Peabody who later pled guilty to 15 charges of bribery, racketeering, and extortion), the chairman off the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, had “no knowledge” of the incident, The Item reported. He theorized the plane may have been a small Navy or Air Force transport jet used to shuttle high-ranking military staff, but also suggested the entire event may have simply been a hoax.
Later, a spokesman for Mavroules, Richard Gregory, said military sources in Washington described the incident as “very unusual” and said if the plane were part of a top-secret black program, an incident like the one the Marblehead men saw would have gone unreported.
Spokespeople for the U.S. Navy in Boston, the Coast Guard headquarters in Boston, the Coast Guard base in Gloucester, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, and the Massachusetts Film Commission all had little answers as to what went on that May day, with no record of any such event or any filming going on in the area.
And so, the mystery remained.
Until, days after the first Item story, Raytheon Corp. and U.S.S. Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum officials solved the puzzle. This wasn’t a top-secret black-program operation, or a rescue mission. Instead, it was a Korean-War vintage plane on its way to a New York air museum. Mavroules said his phone was “ringing off the hook” following the sighting, and the Item account earlier in the week had brought forth a new spate of calls.
Among those was the call that unraveled the mystery.
A Lynn pilot, who regularly flew out of Beverly Airport, reported seeing the plane there. That report pointed to the Raytheon Flight Test Facility in Bedford, and the company confirmed that the plane was being donated to the museum by the U.S. Army after being loaned for testing purposes.
The plane reached New York on June 4.
A Raytheon spokesman, Ed Powers, said the plane, which has been stripped of its engines and parts of its wings to ease its transport, was transported from a Raytheon hangar at Bedford to Plum Island on May 24. Then, on May 25, it was flown to Marblehead, where the first attempt to load the plane onto the barge that would take it to New York was aborted because of high seas. Then, on May 26, the plane was again carried to Marblehead, where it was then loaded onto the barge.
But, Powers, Jerry Roberts of the Intrepid Museum, and Norman Peters of the Connecticut National Guard all denied the eyewitness reports that the plane was pulled from the waters off Marblehead Neck. Roberts theorized the witnesses likely saw the operation being aborted.
“The helicopter, when it [was] hovering with a cargo like the plane under it, could have looked like it was pulling the plane out of the water,” he is quoted as saying.