A Maine forest ranger has found an ejection seat from the 1963 crash of a B-52C bomber in western Maine and intends to bring the seat to the permanent memorial site being created to honor the aircrew who died in the mishap, reported the Bangor Daily News May 22. “I had a pretty good idea of what it was, and it was kind of eerie finding something like this in the middle of the wilderness, knowing what happened almost 50 years ago,” said Ranger Bruce Reed, who discovered the seat on a logging road on Elephant Mountain last fall, according to the newspaper. Reed returned to it on May 19 to log its coordinates for its planned recovery on May 24. On Jan. 24, 1963, the B-52 reportedly left then-Westover AFB, Mass., on a low-level training mission when a malfunction caused the unarmed bomber to crash, killing seven airmen. Two airmen survived, according to the account.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.