![]() Yet this Fortress, now entirely unmanned, had flown in formation with the other B-17s, turning and whatever was necessary to descend and tum, directly back to its home field before crashing in our backyard. This B-17 had been with the 303rd Bomb Group, and then we confirmed that the entire crew had bailed out over Belgium. To the family's astonishment, there had been nobody aboard at all. One bomber, however, its engines stuttering uncertainly, dropped low and headed right for them moments later it crashed into the trees in their back yard! Gell's father sprang into action, searching the wreckage for injured crew members. On perhaps the most memorable day of the war for him, he and his family had been outside their home in Riseley, a small hamlet in North Bedfordshire, England, watching the familiar sight of American B-17 bombers returning from the day's mission over Germany. Gell, who had been a boy during World War II. Most of his chapter on this story is quoted from a letter he received in the 1980s from a man named John T. I found one apparent nexus that ties the various versions of the story together, and it's found in Martin Caidin's 1991 book Ghosts of the Air: True Stories of Aerial Hauntings - not an encouraging title when you're trying to dig for historical fact. We even have versions where meals are found half-eaten aboard the landed aircraft, recalling echoes of the Mary Celeste. In some the crew all parachute safely in others they land behind German lines. In some, the phantom plane lands in Belgium in others it lands in Britain. That's a bit difficult, because there are multiple versions of the story floating around. Normally in a Skeptoid episode, here's where I'd tell the story as we hear it today. Books of ghostly tales now tell the story of the Phantom Fortress, and today we're going to turn our skeptical eye upon it, and we will find out how much of the Phantom Fortress's tale is fact and how much of it is fiction. The B-17 had apparently flown its mission without an aircrew. There's nothing unusual about that but when ground crews observed nobody getting out of the plane, they went to check on it themselves and found it empty. One of these concerned a famous bomber, a B-17 Flying Fortress, said to have returned from a mission over Germany, navigated back to Britain with its squadron, and then executed a perfect landing. But among these tales of adventure, heroism, sacrifice, and terror are a few other types of stories that slipped through the cracks - including ghost stories. World War II was - among many other things - the source of some of the world's greatest stories.
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