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WAY OT "The Creature from Jekyll Island" WAY OT


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Posted
that link worked..tks

By the way..would you be confortable sunbathing, boating and swimming in an area where a nuclear bomb has been in the water (unfound) for 47 or so years?

I guess as long as it doesn't go off while I'm there, but I don't think it would be at the top of my to do list though.

I'd ask how you "lose" a nuclear bomb, but I know better.

I also heard that the Air Force has "misplaced" a KC135 tanker...they can't find it!!! :eek:

Posted

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

September 30, 2004

Team Sent To Test For Location Of Old Bomb

By Charles Seabrook

The Air Force on Wednesday dispatched a 20-member team of scientists and technicians to Savannah to evaluate new information that supposedly gives the location of a hydrogen bomb missing since 1958.

The information comes from Derek Duke, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who told the government that he has pinpointed the unexploded bomb's possible location in Wassaw Sound between Little Tybee and Wassaw islands, about 15 miles from Savannah.

Duke, who lives in Statesboro, made it his personal mission the past five years to find the lost weapon. He believes that unusual radiation readings he has recorded in Wassaw Sound mark the bomb's location.

After a preliminary review of Duke's data, "the expert consensus was that a visit to the area would be prudent," said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Frank Smolinsky.

The multidisciplinary team will take water and soil samples and radiation readings and analyze them. A report of the results will be available in about two weeks, Smolinsky said.

The bomb, jettisoned from a B-47 bomber after a training mission went awry, lacks a key component and is therefore incapable of a nuclear explosion, said the Air Force in a 2001 report.

A two-month search immediately after the accident failed to turn up the bomb, and the military called off efforts to find it.

The device is likely buried in about 5 to 15 feet of mud and poses no hazard to navigation, the government said.

Still, the Air Force said, the bomb contains about 400 pounds of explosives and an undisclosed amount of bomb grade uranium.

The Air Force has declined to say whether it will attempt to retrieve the bomb if its location is pinpointed. The Air Force has argued that the device would pose a greater threat if disturbed.

The team sent to Savannah includes experts from the Air Force, Navy, National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Laboratories.

Posted

Los Angeles Times

October 4, 2004

Legend Of Lost Bomb Resurfaces With Facts

Reports of radiation traces off Georgia spur experts to investigate for the first time in 46 years.

By Associated Press

TYBEE ISLAND, Ga. — Below the deck of his shrimp boat, W.G. Smith recounts the story of his big catch more than 40 years ago.

It was 1959 or 1960, as best Smith remembers, as he trawled for shrimp off the coast of Georgia. His net snagged on something large, an object so heavy he had to get a diving buddy to shake the net loose.

"He dived down and when he came up he said, 'That's a bomb,' " recalled Smith, 72. "I really didn't think much of it. I thought he was cutting the fool or something."

Smith's 50-year-old son, Glenn, figures his father caught the "Tybee bomb," a 7,600-pound nuclear device dumped by a damaged B-47 bomber in February 1958.

In this beach community east of Savannah, the lost bomb has been a legend for so long it's hard to separate fact from folklore.

For the first time in 46 years, the Air Force last week led a team of experts to investigate reports of radiation traces that might reveal the bomb's location.

"I thought it was over here, and then I kept hearing it was over there," said handyman Harold Michael, pointing in several directions from his seat at the bar at Cafe Loco.

"You listen about and there's probably a thousand stories out here," he said.

Islanders remain divided over whether the Air Force should recover the bomb or leave it. The government says the Mark-15 device is incapable of an atomic explosion, though it still contains about 400 pounds of conventional explosives.

Three years ago, island Mayor Walter Parker and the City Council sent a resolution to the Air Force, asking that the bomb be found before the military declared it nonthreatening. Five months later, the Air Force rejected a renewed search.

Now, Derek Duke, a retired Air Force pilot who has privately sought the lost bomb for five years, says he has detected radiation patterns that he believes might mark the bomb's resting place near the southern tip of uninhabited Little Tybee Island, which is about four miles south of the Tybee Island beach community.

So the military sent a team of 20 experts to gather water and soil samples Thursday. A final report will not be ready for several weeks.

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