Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 249 - Dr. Pat Scannon

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Pat Scannon is one among the few who have earned a Ph.D. and then, separately, an M.D. His passion for both chemistry and medicine goes back to his childhood roots. His father was a US Army Colonel and his Romanian-born mother went to medical school in Leipzig during World War II. Pat spent memorable years growing up in post-war Europe. Years later, he earned his BS in Chemistry from the University of Georgia. He was in R.O.T.C and received a commission as a 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army upon graduation. Then he earned a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. A few months before his graduation, Pat realized the potential of using his chemistry training in medicine during an era pre-biotech and decided to apply to medical school. He returned to his home state and spent the second half of the 1970's earning his medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia. Pat is a board-certified physician in Internal Medicine. He completed his residency and fulfilled his military duty as a major at the Letterman Army Medical Center and the Letterman Army Institute of Research on the Presidio of San Francisco. Pat founded Project Recover, formerly BentProp, after a trip to Palau in 1993. He and his wife, Susan, a dive instructor, were invited there to help locate the Japanese trawler George H.W. Bush sunk in 1944. They found the trawler more quickly than expected and documented it had been an armed vessel. After the rest of the dive team left, Pat hired a guide to show them other artifacts from World War II. It was then that Pat first saw the 65-foot wing of an American B-24 bomber lying in shallow water along a coral island in Palau. Other than leading him to it, the guide could give Pat no information about the wing. For Pat, the wing was more than a hunk of metal. It represented a forgotten battle and brave men who had fought and died there. It represented stories lost to the chaos of war, the annals of time, and the secret stillness of a watery grave. All were stories unknown to the airmen's families. This moment marks the inception of The BentProp Project which is now known as Project Recover. Project Recover is a collaborative effort to enlist 21st-century science and technology in a quest to find and repatriate Americans missing in action since World War II, in order to provide recognition and closure for families and the Nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by wait for it. Guess? That's right. Black, rifle, coffee. If you drink coffee, I mean, if you don't drink coffee, I have a lot of questions. Like, how the fuck do you wake up in the morning? And I know there's ways to get up without coffee. But guess what?

I've actually grown to really like the taste of coffee is part of my morning routine. But maybe just don't get out of control with it. Holy cow, I'm off topic. The episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Go to blackwifelcoffee.com and dedicate some time to surfing through the website. I'm sitting here looking at it right now, and all of their different bags and roasts are right there. You can scroll through. You can go from light to extra dark.

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And on that note, how about I shout up about the advertisement and talk about my guest today. Who is Dr. Pat Scanan, MD, Ph.D., to begin with. Let's just start right there, as far as acronyms that can be associated. with your name. Those don't suck. So started off in the science medical industry field. I don't know which one is correct. Community perhaps would even be a better word. Actually working a lot with monoclonal antibodies well before people had probably heard about them associated with COVID, which is exactly when I first heard about them. But also not germane to the episode today, even though we do talk about it for a little bit. He found skydiving as a way to decompress a little bit from his day

job and then he found scuba diving. And he talks a little bit about how he got to what he does now, but met somebody who was heading over to Palau, searching for wreckage from World War II and MIAs specifically. Went on that trip and now for over 30 years has been dedicating a large portion of his life to Project Recovery. He is the founder. What does Project Recovery do? Well, I'm going to read it right off of their website. They are a collaborative effort to enlist 21st century science and technology in a quest to find and repatriate Americans missing in action since World War II in order to provide recognition and closure for families and the nation. How did I find them? Well, I watched a documentary called To What Remains and it came out in 2021 and I can't recommend people go and watch it enough.

It is very powerful and I reached out and Pat got right back to me and I couldn't be more thankful that he took the time to come up to Montana. and sit down and discuss who he is and what he is doing now. So I'm going to shut my mouth. Episode 2.49 with Dr. Pat Scanan. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. You know, when I first reached out to you was after watching the documentary, which was spectacular.

And I'm sure we'll get into that. Then when we started email communicating, comes out your skydiver. I'm like, all right, we definitely have some stuff to talk about. And then I'm digging in a little bit more into your background. He had a little MD PhD tied to your name. You've done a few things. I have zero acronyms tied to my name, which is perfect. But I don't even know where to begin, actually, because I want to talk about Project Recovery, obviously.

I want to talk about the documentary. But we've got to talk about how you got into that first. Okay. Where are you from originally? I was an Army brat. So I traveled all over the place, Europe. in the East Coast of the United States, mostly. Okay.

Was your mother or father? Father. What do you do in the Army? Armor. Armour? Yeah. Like tanks? Like tanks.

That's what I'm talking about. Right. During World War II. Ooh, I don't know if I like those type of tanks. I like the M1 Abrams. No, they were M4 Sherman's. Oh, God. That's worth of Google and a YouTube video.

I mean, probably better than running around in the open, but holy cow, Let's just say that technology has advanced since those days. Yeah, I'm trying to familiarize myself what ground warfare and the Ukraine is like. And there's a new book out called Panzer Killers. And it's about the Third Armored Division going through France and Belgium on the way to Germany. And the M4s, that's it, you know, against the German panzers. But they did okay. It's a different type of warfare.

I look back. One of my favorite movies of all time is saving Private Ryan, not only for what I feel like is, especially the first probably 10 minutes, the extreme accuracy of what they captured. But on the other side of that coin, I would not ever want to fight that type of warfare. I can't even imagine it, to be honest, let alone trench warfare from World War I. or the farther back you go, it's not like it gets any better. It's a great thing that it has evolved over time, I suppose. I think it's probably hard to say that it's a beautiful thing that warfare has evolved.

But I was very glad that in my military service digging a trench was not part of what they trained me to do, even though I think that might be taught somewhere in the U.S. military still. Probably by the engineers. Probably. Lee. Yeah, I think you're probably right about that. So where did you hit high school and your college years? High school. I went to Richmond Academy in Augusta, Georgia, and then graduated from the University of Georgia with a BS chemistry degree and then went straight from their pretty conservative university to UC Berkeley in the late 60s where everything... Known for its conservatism. Absolutely. And got my Ph.D. in chemistry there. Then I just turned around and went back

east and went to medical college of Georgia. Got my MD. And I had an ROTC commitment, which I fulfilled doing my residency internal medicine at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. So it was sort of back and forth coasts for a number of years. Was your desire at that age to pursue medicine? I mean, obviously, a substantial amount of schooling to get to that. Yeah, I started off wanting to be more of a basic scientist, which is why I went into chemistry. But I really felt the future of chemistry lay in biological applications, and I really felt that the combination of an MD with that Ph.D. would serve me well, and it turned out it did.

A lot of the science evolved over the years after I got my medical degree, but it really helped me not only learning and taking care of patients, which I really like, but also my scientific background allowed me to extend what I've learned into possible research applications. What type of medicine did you practice? Internal medicine, just general internal medicine. You're talking to a dumb medicine. right now. So is that basically anything inside the skin? It's all non-surgical problems, essentially. Okay. So you probably saw a very wide swath of patients. Which is what I wanted, yes.

What were the most challenging things that you faced when you, you're not a practicing physician still, are you? No. No. What was the most challenging situations you faced when you were? Well, it would be more challenging now. The beauty of when I was in practice is I could take as much time as I was. I wanted with patients. And I was notorious for having 30 or 45 minute histories and before I haven't touched the patient so that I really knew what I was going after. Nowadays, if you're lucky, you get five minutes

and you get to check a bunch of boxes. And that's, to me, a different kind of medicine than I ever practiced. And I look back fondly on that. But ultimately, although I practiced medicine, I started a company. a biotech company in 1980 and 81 and was there as the chief scientist for about 35 years. Then I retired from that and went on and did some other things.

What kind of stuff did you guys do with the biotech company? We were working in an area that was completely new at the time in therapeutics, developing these new molecules called monoclonal antibodies, which now probably everyone's heard of them because of COVID. I suspect they don't know what they are, though. And I say that because I have heard of them a bunch. Couldn't tell you what it means. Yeah, it's just a protein.

It's a class of molecules that the bodies makes. And it has a very specific property of having one end that can specifically target to a disease, an infectious disease, for example. And the other end has some function that when it attaches, it kills that thing. or does other things to what it binds to. So an antibody is sort of a two component therapeutic. And the big secret was adapting what the body did to doing it outside of the body. That was the emergence of that biotechnology that permitted our company to form and many, many others since then. What year did you first start messing around with the monoclonal antibodies?

1980. So even though most people are probably hearing about them for the first time, I agree with you because it has kind of been splashed all over with a variety of other medications and medicinal paths that most people haven't heard about but have been around for a while, it's nothing new. No, the technology was discovered in 1976, so we were one of the very first companies to adapt it to try and develop pharmaceuticals. But other companies picked up on it pretty quickly, and there was an evolution for about 20 years where the technology progressively improved to the state of the art now.

And so it has been an evolving field. The technologies for making an antibody have pretty much stabilized their methodologies there. Now it's trying to find the right targets in cancer and infectious diseases and so forth. I was going to ask you, do you start with the problem that you want to attack and then work yourself backwards? Different companies do it differently. That's the way we did it. We picked some targets, and we knew we wanted to use antibodies, and so we said, let's see how we can use those antibodies to attack those targets. One was in infectious disease, one was in cancer, and one was in an immune disease.

So, you know, these were just ways of getting started. So if you have that as your goal, call it a dartboard on the wall, where do you start in the actual development of that antibody and then try to connect the two? Well, you look for a target on, like in a cancer cell, for example, cancers are covered with targets on the surface of the cancer cell. But you want to pick a target that's related to the cancer, but also not related to other tissues because you don't want to kill the cancer cell and other tissues. You just want to kill the cancer cell. So you pick a target that the antibody is likely to bind. to and then it has properties that result in transforming that cell, killing that cell, or doing something to that cell that is better for the person who has the cancer.

So you really have to investigate the target. So you're right, you're not only starting with the disease, but the target for the disease that the product would bind to. How do you test it along the way? Oh, goodness, there's so many. We usually start with screening tests in the lab. the lab at the bench top, there's a variety of different kinds of assay systems that can be used. Then you go to various kinds of animal studies, which are usually okay, but the animals don't

necessarily have the same targets in humans. Then you have to do a whole bunch of safety studies. You apply to the FDA to initiate clinical trials. And this would prove true. probably heard this in the context of COVID. This is all things that are very standard now. And then you start doing safety studies in humans, and then you go into measuring does a product work. And that all takes time and lots of patience and a lot of time spent on making sure that everything's done safely. How do you find the first human test subject?

You know, that's not as hard as it sounds. Many times patients are in need. Or at the end of the available rope for treatments? Right. They've essentially used up all of the existing possibilities. And, of course, we spend a lot of time educating patients, letting them know, you know, this is what we've seen in animals. It doesn't necessarily mean it's what we'll see in humans, but all of these things eventually give some comfort to the patient. Of course, the very first patient, the room is full of people watching every second, you know, to make sure that they're okay.

I don't know if I'd like to be on the receiving end of that. The patients don't mind. I think they know they're being looked out for it. Yeah, actually, I guess if you were at the end of your available runway and somebody was maybe offering to extend it a bit, yeah, and you'd exhausted all available options. Yeah. I could see how you would get there. How much did you interface with the government when you were working on that type of technology? Well, the main government agency we worked with, of course, was the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA.

We work a lot with them. other government agencies, it sort of depended. We did some work in infectious diseases and had some interactions with a National Institute of Health on these infectious diseases. We spent a lot of time working with academic centers that had areas of interest that we felt were pertainable and could be brought into what we were doing. But we, mostly our attention was paid to the FDA because it's not only the research, but we ultimately have to manufacture and learning how to manufacture on scale. All these things were new in 1980. So we were, we were blazing a trail, so to speak, of not only how do you make an antibody against a disease target, but how do you manufacture it?

How do you test it in humans? what sort of tests do you want to look for in humans? They're very exciting times. I refer to them kind of as the Wild Wild West of those days. Things are very routinized now, but they all had to be discovered back then. Yeah. What are your thoughts on how monoclonal antibodies were discussed

when it came to the treatment of COVID? Yeah, well, it became pretty important because antibodies can be made relative, quickly. In other words, they can be discovered quickly. The manufacturing process is a little bit slow, but the overall process from time of discovery to time to humans is relatively short compared to chemical antivirals, which can take a lot longer depending on what you're looking for. And we didn't know very much about COVID. The one thing we knew about COVID was the so-called spike protein. So if you could make an antibody and it binds to that spike protein, that could help

neutralize or block the virus from getting into human cells. And so it was a very good application of antibodies. They are not inexpensive. And the reason is a vaccine, you know, typical dose is a millionth of a gram, a microgram. And multiple grams are usually in. with an antibody. In the case of a vaccine, you're trying to prevent the disease. In the case of monoclonal antibody, you're trying to treat the already sick patient. So there are very different approaches, but both of them were necessary because there are already so many sick patients. And we knew nothing. Yeah. I had heard, I guess, more towards, are we officially out of the pandemic? No. Well, some people would like to declare it. And, and, you know, and, you know,

And unfortunately, and I'm talking clinically. Yeah. There is a political aspect to the use of the word pandemic, but I'm talking about a disease that is continuing. We're continuing to see variants growing. The omacrons are continuing to mutate. A new one has just emerged in the last two or three weeks, and we don't know where it's going to go. And there's this other aspect to COVID that is very bizarre, and that's the, so-called long-haul COVID or post-acute COVID syndrome, which we're only beginning to come to

grips with. We now are seeing this long-haul in adults and kids, and we don't know if it's going to end. We don't know if it's something they carry for the rest of their lives. So this is a disease that's not reached a stage of where we would hope to be that, as some people referred to it as an endemic or sort of steady state, it's continuing to evolve. And we are, we still have a lot to learn. Yeah, I was asking about whether or not we had reached the end of it, because I was about to say, you know, towards the tail end of the pandemic, now that I'm aware that we're still considered to be in the middle of it, it almost seemed that,

I guess depending on who you were listening to, that monoclonal antibodies were almost frowned upon, or their usage was very restricted? Well, it was reserved for people who were pretty sick because it's not as available as a vaccine, for example, where one gram of vaccine, and 454 grams makes a pound. So one gram of vaccine makes, a million doses, so one gram. Damn.

But one dose of a therapeutic antibody can be six to ten grams. So if you need a million people that get it, you need to make tons of antibody, literally. And so the limitation isn't because anybody wanted to restrict it. It's just the capacity of the industry. To produce without going bankrupt in their stores, essentially. How are they, is it a shot for monoclonal antibody or is it Ivy? It's usually IV. Okay.

Yeah, I know very little about them, other than I've heard the term, a substantial amount, and at some point it goes right over the top. Do you have any ties to the scientific community now, like active ties? Yeah, I still do. I have not only from my work and related to when I was working on monoclonal antibodies, but about almost 25 years ago I started working with the Department of Defense in areas related to infectious diseases, particularly related to bioterrorism, and began working with, DARPA and then I worked for other agencies within the, within the Department of Defense, and then I

worked for HHS, and evolved, you know, quite a bit of expertise taken from what I learned in the company and applying it to how do we prepare for an emergency? I mean, how do you prepare when you don't know you're going to have a disease, like COVID, for example, and trying to figure out what are the methods that one could implement to respond in a timely way. So I've been working a lot, and I'm continuing to do that. Well, I asked only because I don't want to put you into a predicament with a potential answer because I'm reading the book, you know, I want to make sure that I'm not painting into a corner that it'll be tough for you to navigate your way out of.

I'm reading the book, The Real Anthony Fauci by Kennedy Jr. I talked about it a briefly on a previous podcast so as not to repeat myself fully. I understand that a lot of works of literature come from a particular angle. It doesn't necessarily bother me that much because I can recognize that before I pick it up. I guess as I continue my way through it, and I'm curious as to your take on this, having interfaced with government organizations. it seems as if there are individuals or entities that wield a lot of power. And a lot of that could be wielded through funding as an example where you could railroad or fast track or everything in between and certain things could get recategorized to make pathways for others.

And I don't want to be conspiratorial. I prefer to be objective. So I try not to think conspiratorially. that some of the dollar figure amounts of some of these things are a lot of zeros. And I know I hear this one all the time. I hate being like, fuck the government. I hate the government. Like, well, hold on.

That's a nebulous concept. We're talking about people, a lot of people who can come together to make that nebulous organization. So maybe the organization isn't flawed. Maybe there's something flawed about the people or the reward system for those people. And the amount of money getting made, I'm just curious as. to when you were interfacing with organizations, similar to the ones that Fauci saw overseas still, did you find it to be a level playing field? Because reading the book, it would be easy

to draw the conclusion that he is the ultimate lever thrower, deciding what goes, you know, and I don't necessarily know if that's a good idea. I don't think one individual opinion is ever necessarily the best way to go. I mean, the government can structure their systems how they want to, just curious about your opinions or your experiences in that world. Well, I think you got to first reflect on, in the case, for example, of Dr. Fauci, he's the head of what's called the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. N-A-I-D, right? N-A-I-D.

N-A-A-I-D. N-A-A-I-D. There are some acronyms in that book and about 50,000 footnotes. Oh my God. And so in me. many respects, he's the leading civilian infectious disease expert. I mean, now, most of those diseases are, you know, chronic diseases. He spent a lot of his career doing work with HIV and other infectious diseases. But when COVID come along and no one knows anything about it, you know,

there's a handful of scientists of the world that have ever worked with COVID or coronavirus. Who do you turn to? You turn to your government expert. And unfortunately, Dr. Fauci was put in a position where he was speaking and learning. I can only imagine the scenario where someone's whispering and here's the latest thing. And he's trying to speak to that. And by the time his voice is done on what he thought was right, something else has changed. And that made it very tough. You know, you can always look back on hindsight and say, boy, I would have done it better.

But I just think about how many things changed so fast. I just did a recent literature review. And I just looked at some headlines over a period of about 10 days when Omicron came out. and there was the first headline was new variant here more deaths then two days later

another you know these are all civilian headlines umma cron out not as many people dying then a third one came out and said no no more people are dying this is all within within 10 days and what is what's the American people

supposed to think they don't know what to think yeah that's right I mean, but journalism didn't stop. They would take the latest soundbite, put it into print, and leave it up to, you know, the next soundbite to correct whatever wasn't right. And it made for an extremely, I was very close to it because I was trying to help, again, in terms of methods of rapidly responding to the, to. the COVID infection and I would hear stuff. And I mean, almost by the time some meetings would end, there would be some new piece of

information that was vital to whatever we were thinking about. So it really was and continues to be a crazy time. One of the things that people don't understand about a virus and particularly COVID is people are assuming now the omacrons are, they cause less disease, the mortality rate is drop. even though the total number of deaths is still high because it's the total number of sick people times the rate. There's no rule book in biology that says that virus has to keep doing that. It could turn bad again.

And that's the unknown part of this virus, COVID, that is particularly scary because we're in a global situation where mutations are still happening. happening a lot and whether some variant of that is going to find some ability to thrive by making people more sick is an unknown. How does the virus do that? How does it change like that on the fly? It's all selection. It's all viruses like COVID mutate all the time and most of them are dead ends and a few

of them will end up in a person and that person survives long enough for that virus to multiply and replicate and spread to the next person and they have to live long enough. I mean, if something was rapidly 100% fatal, that would not work. Yeah, and the virus right there because they're going to drop dead before they can pass it on. Right. So it has to be the right balance of severity and ability. to spread to the next host.

So, you know, I'm, my only statement, the only reason I say that is because I don't know what this virus is going to do. I hope it keeps doing and getting progressively less severe and having lower death rate. I really do. And maybe it will reach an endemic state, but there's no rulebook about that, which is the big unknown. Yeah. I can only imagine the pressure that Fauci was under to get up publicly and speak. I do think the message, what would be the best way to describe this?

I think people actually would have been less scared if he would have been a little bit more honest about what was known and unknown, as opposed to being incredibly dogmatic. And this is the way, and you can either get on board this train or we're going to suppress you. Because there was some censorship and suppression. So I'm curious with your background and your experience, what are your thoughts on people who started to have narratives outside of, hey, the vaccine is the way to get ourselves through this? And they were talking about other forms of treatment for COVID, and they were getting shut down

for it. Well, there's two sides to this. One is when you got nothing else, there is a side of anybody. included, it would say, if I got nothing else, what have I got to lose? Then there's the other side of me as a scientist and a physician that says if I, if I do it to myself, that's one thing. If I start prescribing it for other people, I have an ethical obligation to know that there's, I'm first of all going to do no harm, and at least there's a chance of doing some benefit. And so those, you're weighing yourself against your job as a physician. And what I found was

I always wanted to hear what they had to say myself. I, you know, crazy ideas have come from all kinds of different places that turn out to be right. So why not be open-minded? Unfortunately, it was an avalanche of ideas. And, you know, involving veterinary. medications that were pretty much unproven in human in work or other medications that were never used in infectious diseases before but and they were ultimately tried and most of those didn't work. Most of them didn't do any harm either. And so, you know, whether or not it should have been tried is, is, always going to be one of those things where you have to look at the specific example and say,

first of all, am I going to do any harm? And secondly, what's the chance of it doing some good? And then how do I figure out a way to ultimately get this tested and really decide whether this works or not? And this is all happening almost as fast as we're sitting here talking. It isn't as if we could sit on an idea and reflect on it a few months because particularly in the early days of COVID, there were just a great number of people dying. I mean, May 17, 2022, one million American deaths. That's a lot of people. I mean, in January of 2020, if you'd have said, you know, in 2022, we're going to pass a million American deaths, nobody. would have believed that. But they would believe that things are happening very quickly.

And one of the problems of being too sure of what you're saying, whether you call it dogmatic or whatever, convincing, is that, you know, people will buy it. And then when you have to backtrack and change it, and after about four or five times, then that becomes a lot of a problem. I can understand that these changes happen because the science said, you know, these things are changing. You can't get away from that. It's how you present it to the American people. And I think that was the cause of a lot of confusion, unfortunately. And I, and Dr. Fauci, on the one hand, is trying to be a good clinician and scientists. And on the other hand, he's got presidents and all kinds of other people talking to him.

You know, you can imagine. He really needed about four or five years, right? Yeah. And somehow he had to synthesize all of that. But I can easily see why a lot of people continue to be very upset with him. But, you know. Tough position to be in it. Very tough position.

It would be a tough position to walk a mile in somebody else's shoes. How about one foot, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, to put myself in that, I probably would have positioned it like, this is what we know. this is what we don't know. I also wonder, too, you know, if you would have told the American public in January 2020, we will hit a million deaths, put a target on the wall. The number one thing that you could do to not be one of those million people would be to get in as good a shape as possible. Take care of your body, the flesh machine that we all walk around in. Maybe let's reduce

the number of obese Americans from 60% to 55. to 50 and maybe work on that, sunlight, exercise, diet, all of those things. Somehow, I'm still not hearing people beating the drums about that. And that's something that every single person should largely be able to control. It's, I don't even know how many people would actually change their behavior if that was laid out for them. They're like, ah, it's not me. As they're eating Cheetos on the couch, maybe. Yeah, there's still Americans who, to this day, are surprised.

They haven't gotten COVID yet. and say, oh, my God, I'm invincible. And then they're COVID positive. But it's true. All these underlying medical conditions and obesity, early type 2 diabetes, hypertension, asthma, all these things are really predisposing factors for bad outcomes with COVID. Or life in general. It's going to shorten your life expectancy even outside of COVID.

Right. Yeah. So all of those things, undoubtedly would have had an impact. Maybe on, it wouldn't have probably stopped the contagion, but it might have affected the severity of the disease and your ability to handle it. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the vaccines, their rollout on the efficacy? Well, you know, when they first rolled out and had a 90-plus percent efficacy rate

in terms of reduction in severe disease and prevention, of infection. That was huge, you know, particularly since we didn't have a vaccine a year before. So in less than a year, we went from the genome sequence to, you know, FDA authorized vaccines. They were safe. And, you know, most flu vaccines right now, a given season, you're lucky if it's, 50% efficacious. 30 to 40% is pretty typical. Yeah, because there's multiple strains, right?

And they have to pick which one they think is going to be primary. Right. And they pick several months before, and it has time to change. In the meantime, they're in the production pipeline. Right. That literally happens. So, and, and then as the vaccine, as the virus continued to mutate, the, You know, the question, and where were the mutations? The mutations were on the spike protein. What's the vaccine against?

It's against the spike protein. So the more the surface of the spike protein changes, it's not surprising that the immune system's ability to handle variants might change. It's done pretty darn well up through Omicron, you know, BA5, the most recent, although there is no question that there is a reduction in protection. But the other interesting thing is prior infections, which was used to believe, we used to believe that prior infections would also give you protection. We're now finding people that were infected, even with early Omicron, like BA1, now can get a BA5 infection.

even if they're vaccinated and have prior infection. Just blasting through it all? It's just blast. Yeah, it can. Now, you might have less severe disease. But those are still reasons to think this pandemic clinically is not over. In a perfect world, if it were to continue on its path, would the reaction to it as it passed through the global population continue to diminish

until it became something that was even more, or even more less life-threatening? Does that make sense? Is that the correct way to say that? I think you know what I'm saying. Even less life-threatening. Milder disease. Yes. Well, that is one possible outcome, and maybe we're headed in that direction.

We don't know, because, again, we can't predict the mutations that might occur. but, you know, the hope is that it'll continue to reach a more steady-state, low level of disease, something that would be more manageable with future vaccines. You know, I don't know whether that's BA-9 or whatever it is, but, you know, maybe we can reach a stage where, like influenza, you can give periodic. boosters to manage it. But, you know, my mind right now, in my own mind, in my own personal opinion, that, you know, we're not there yet. Do you think it's possible to destroy the virus clinically, or is it something that we're going to be forced to live with?

Oh, you mean eliminate it from the popular? Like find some way to, yeah, just scorched earth that thing? It's here to say in one form or another. The other thing that people don't realize is that the virus, is really an animal virus. I mean, it started, it's in many, many, this particular coronavirus can adapt and grow in many different mammalial species in the United States. There are many different white-tailed deer in particular, seem to be one of the places that it can grow so that it could go off in, we call that a zoonosis infection, an infection in the animal kingdom, non-human kingdom.

And these zoonotic infections can, if coronavirus does get into the other, into animals, they can go off and live their own sort of mutating in animal species and then cross back into humans. These are all the unknowns about coronavirus that it does exist in humans. It also, the same virus can bind to the same, the analogous receptors and mammals and bats and other and other wide variety of animals all over the world. How delightful. Yeah. Now on to the important topic. When did you start skydiving? How did you find skydiving, by the way? Was this a way to decompress from the lab, from the clinical and medical world? I have a little place of my own in Davis, California, and there's a cool dive place there,

and I used to see them jump out of the airplanes and watch the canopies. Watch the canopies. I got very good at it, actually. I could follow them even before their canopies open. You're like a human bird spotter. And I said, well, I'll go try that. And so I was just about 50 at the time. What the hell?

I went and did a tandem. Absolutely loved it. And my wife thought I was crazy. But still, she had done a few skydives of her own. And so I said, I want to go get my certification. And then I'll never forget it. I think it was my sixth or seventh skydive when I think I sort of opened my eyes. You know, I mean, there's a point where you're just looking at my arms, looking at my altimeter.

And, you know, there could have been a 747 go by, and I wouldn't have seen it. And then I think on the seventh dive, I rolled on my back, and I saw the airplane. started banking and I said, oh, this is what this is about. And a lot of people wanted me to join, you know, skydiving formations and they got a big kick out of that. I really just love being in skydive by myself. Really? I don't like, I really just, it's so, like you said, it's a huge relief and I just jump out of there and look around, take it easy. and get down to four or five thousand feet, pull my parachute and glide on in.

I did a couple things that were fun. I did two 30,000 foot skydives. So that's how you know Tad. Yeah, you know Tad. So when I did the record attempt, TAB was the oxygen tech on board. Oh, yeah. Because he, I mean, so for people listening,

30,000 feet is RVSM airspace, reduced vertical separation minimums. So if you look outside of a commercial airliner, which is in those 30s, and you've ever seen one comment like a crossing pattern, and you've ever had the thought of, holy shit, that looks really close, it's because they're really close. So they stack them on top of each other really tightly so that they can get more aircraft going east and west or basically every cardinal direction, but they're compressed. It's a special requirement for the equipment to report your altitude.

the pilots have to have their RVSM certification. It's very controlled. So to jump in that altitude, you've got to have a plane that can do it, which Davis was the only one in the U.S., I believe, that had that block. They had a block out there, an invisible lines on a map

that FAA would allow them and the controllers to climb. You're going to need some O2. I guess it'd be possible to do it. Man, you're going to be on the fringes of being conscious. No, we had to go to Mace, their Air Force Base and go through the hyperbaric chamber. Oh, yes.

How was that for you? It was fun. I watched myself turn blue. Yeah. And I think we had to do that every 10 years for free fall in the military. And we would always, of course, because we're adult males, therefore, defined by our idiocy, we would sit there and just who's going to go longer and who's until you just. Yeah. Yeah.

It was, in a controlled environment, it's great. I was always, I would take it as far as I could. And the sensation of putting the mask back on and getting that first hit of pure O2, the vibrancy, it was, it's really hard to describe how when it comes back, you don't realize how far gone you were. Like, I'm completely and utterly capable. Then you take a few breaths, like, what's going on here? Okay. Yeah, so the 30,000 foot skydives were, and Skydance, you're right, had the only, uh, airspace.

It's a caravan. And it was, and they did have to get FAA clearance because we were near enough to jet lanes that we would get clearance. And I'll never forget when I jumped out of the plane, the cloth on my jumpsuit wasn't even moving. There was no air resistance. And it was just, I couldn't believe that the, everything was so quiet because there was no air. And then as the atmosphere got more dense, then it started flapping. And I said, okay, I'm used to this.

Imagine being Felix Baumgartner. Oh, yeah. It goes up in that balloon. You want to talk about no resistance? Right. Like, here we go. One, two, three, when he stepped off, because that's how he ended up on his back, spinning, unable to stop it. I mean, okay.

I mean, that guy essentially needed a capsule for himself and then an additional one for his balls. I mean, basically would drug him down to earth first because that, I mean, for people who jump, you're, I mean, you're literally manipulating your control surfaces or the drag from your wing suit to the same way. You're just cutting through that you need that to have control. Jumping out in an environment where you have no control. Yeah. Yeah, pack of lunch. So do you still jump? No, I actually reached a point where there was a crossover with what I was doing with Project Recovery and my MIA POWW search work.

And I was also thinking about getting my pilots license and I was taking some flight lessons and I said, wait a minute. A man of many hats. I can't do this all. And I learn one thing about skydiving, and I one thing about flying, and that is, if you're going to do it, you have to be very regular and consistent and be more currency. And I just, I couldn't do that and be current. And I figured there are a lot of pilots in the world. There are not as many, but there's still a lot of skydivers. But there aren't many of what I'm doing, and this is where I'm going to put my time.

That's fair. Yeah, it's not, neither of those are things that I think you should doubt. Yeah, I agree with that. You could be a hobbyist at both. And I got just over 3,000 flight hours and creeping up on about 8,000 jumps at this point. I haven't actually looked. I actually haven't owned a logbook in almost 20 years. But I can look on my didders.

But yeah, even for me, you know, for flying, I took a step away for a while and my licenses are still good for life. But there would be an immense amount of recurrency training that would occur. Yeah. I think I still understand, you know, if you push it. forward things get bigger and you pull back they get smaller but beyond that I'm going to have to recover some knowledge base when it comes to rules of the road yeah yeah and jumping I've taken good amounts of time off and I will almost always go back to square one bigger parachute very simple drop zone I've known forever very linear patterns stay away from everybody and just build

yourself back up to it but I love it too much to stop we're going to get you back in the air pat I'm sure your wife will be incredibly supportive with all your free Free time. With all my free time, right. Where did, when did you start scuba diving? Okay. I figured it was before you started working for the project recover or just the desire for locating the...

Yeah, I learned to scuba dive off of Monterey, California, which is beautiful. I learned to scuba dive off of Monterey, California as well. I was born and raised in Santa Cruz. Oh, you were? Yes. I did a bunch of pool dives. My parents got me my diving cert when I was 13, and we did the pool dives in Santa Cruz, and then we went to Monterey Bay for the open water dives. Well, I was 38 when I started scuba diving. And, again, I had been working very hard in the company and just needed to do something completely different, orthogonal to that. And scuba diving seemed like a good thing to do. I had a really good instructor, and we went down there.

And although Monterey's extremely beautiful, it's also cold. Visibility of at least several inches in the water. And so, you know, it wasn't my most favorite thing, and I did quite a number of scuba dives anyway because it was just fun. and I loved playing with the gear. That was, computers were not widely available at the time. The old dive tables were, though. Yep. I got pretty good at those.

And the, but, you know, after you go down a while, okay, I'm down, yeah, that is a fish, and that's the backside of a fish. And, you know, it just didn't do much for me. and it was really my work. I was invited in 1993, so that would be, you know, eight years later or so by a couple of fellows who were going to the Republic of Palau, and they were going to search for a ship that George Herbert Walker Bush had sunk during World War II. And the timing of this would have been, we would have been there in 1993 or four, Yeah, three. And that would have been the year before the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Pellilu, which occurred in the Republic of Palau.

And they thought it would be sort of symbolic to find this ship that former President Bush had sunk as an ensign. And I said, now that's my kind of scuba diving. Going in the water and looking for something. Now, that makes a lot of sense to me. Was this a chance just meetup, random? occurrence? No, I knew him because of my scuba diving. And I didn't, I went because they said they were going to go look for something. I had to go look where Palau was.

I'd never heard of it. Yeah. And, but it sounded really fun to go do that. And we had a magnetometer and we brought it up into this little reef area and we found it, went down and we found the ship and I found a ready box that had 75 millimeter shells in it. No way. Yep. So ready to go and the ground was littered with machine gun bullets, 5.5-6ers and and various

different sizes of machine gun ammunition. and that became really interesting. So we documented it. We had a lot of fun doing it. We had met some of the plowans for the first time and wonderful people. And it was kind of like, you know, this is too fun. I'm like, I don't want to go home.

How long were you there? Well, I was there just a couple weeks. And my wife came out, she was a scuba diver too, and she came out and joined me. And we stayed behind and we hired a guide. And Palau is famous for incredible scuba diving, really just all different kinds of coral. There are a lot of actually sunken World War II ships that are now encrusted with all kinds of underwater life. and there are the homes of different kinds of fish and so forth, a lot of different kinds of shark and so forth.

But I didn't want to do that. We said, let's take us to other. We found a guide by the name of Lucky, who, and said, let's take us to, you know, other, you know, wreckage. If you know about wreckage, let's take us there. And we dove on a few ships that had been salvaged that, you know, pretty interesting debris fields. And then he took us in the backside of one island.

And there, next to a small island, jutting out from the shore perpendicular to the island, was this 65-foot wing. And it just, you know, it took my breath. I looked at saying, so what is this? And he said, well, I don't know. I think it's part of an airplane. And it was clearly just a wing. and there was one engine there.

And there was, I looked at it pretty quickly, and I saw there was mounts for a second engine, but the engine wasn't there. And the wheel well and the landing gear was still attached. And I jumped out. And, of course, I didn't know, I mean, it pretty much only could be an American or Japanese. And I had the advantage of building a lot of model airplanes

when I was a kid. And I recognized the wing pretty quickly as that of a B-24, a bomber, a four-engine bomber. And there was part of the engine, there was what I now know is a turbocharger. And on the printed it was a little label that said General Electric. I said, that's probably American. And then I went home. And of course, nobody knew. where the rest of the plane was. So I went back and went to the National Archives. I went down to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Air Force archives are, went to the Army and Navy Archives in the Navy Art at the time, I'm sorry, the Navy and Marine Archives at the time were in the Navy Yard. And in a few months figured out whose plane this was. And I'm sorry, I'm

I had some photographs that suggested that the plane broke up and part of it landed on the other side of the island. So I just, it became, I just couldn't put it down. I mean, I was spending every spare minute trying to get caught up on the history and found out that there were a lot of planes that were missing. And this is still while you're entrenched in science as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm coming home and hi, dear. and then I'm in, you know... Get out of my way. Well, I'd never say that one.

Of course not. Obviously, much more nuanced ways that you can get to the end state. But the... But the... I put enough information together and I went back by myself. And I... There's a museum there. And I said, can you give me a guide?

And so I got another guide. And so... So I just started walking down the street, the main street in Palau, that's island called Karor, and interviewing elders and see what they knew about the war. And I'll never forget one, I sat interviewing him, and it was very hot and very humid, and they're all chewing betel nut and spit in beetle nut, which is just, you know, the national pastime. and I showed him the photographs, said, no, no, don't know anything about that, no, didn't crash into this town, don't know what you're talking about. And I got up and I said, well, and I'm doing this all through a translator. And I said, well, thank you very much. And I stood up and you said, but you didn't ask me about the wreckage that's on the shore.

You want to know about that? What a dickhead. He clearly knows what you're looking for and is just waiting for the appropriate question. Right. And so, you know, we both had a good laugh over that one, and he got a young man to take me out there. And sure enough, the nose part of the airplane was still there. And so, but that's sort of, that's sort of opened up the whole new life for me of trying to locate these aircraft. And then I started coming back regularly whenever I could get enough time away. How were you able to just through records to identify that plane? Were you able to pull a serial number off any of the parts? How were you able to do that to determine just through those written records? I knew where the wing was.

Okay. And you knew what type of aircraft? And I knew what type of aircraft. So then I worked backwards and said, okay, this wing's part of a B-24. How many B-24 units flew over Palau? and there were essentially two major ones, different times of the war in October of 44 and May of 45, roughly. And I also, and I actually found a photograph of a plane crashing. You can see the stream from the smoke from the plane.

And it's passing very near the island. Okay. And so, and I also know where the other, the nose part was on the other side of the island. So I knew where the wing was. I knew where the nose was. And this photograph perfectly aligned. And so I, then I've worked backwards, and this was part of the 307 bomb group. And then I was able to make a very educated guess as to who plain, it was plain it was.

And that's very common. A lot of the Army Air Corps at the time took a lot of bombing mission photographs, and so we had the advantage of some aerial photography to help us. But it was also time on the ground, respecting the cultures of the countries that I'm in, and politely and courteously trying to speak to elders, or anybody else who'll talk to us who might know something. And some of the islands like Palau have a very rich history of oral history, and they will pass things on through the generations and do a pretty good job of it, actually,

which I can confirm that because the stories that we've given have led us to sites that we wouldn't have found otherwise. and so then, you know, and then I think it was... Pull that microphone a little closer to you. You forgot the main rule. If you're going to travel, you have to, it's your travel buddy. That's right. So I think it was in 1996. I went into, I went back again.

Before you get into that one, I don't want to interrupt you, but once you felt like you had identified that aircraft, what do you do with that information? Do you go interface with a government agency or where do you do you? you take that? Well, at the time, I was accumulating data, if you will, and I did nothing more than just document it, take as many pictures as I could, and tried to interview other neighbors that might have seen or know something about it. And I kind of came to a dead end where I couldn't do anymore.

And I was just beginning to learn that there was a government. a Department of Defense Agency that was responsible for MIAs and POWs. But I didn't contact them directly because I wasn't sure how appropriate that would be. I just didn't know anything. You know, you just sort of, when you're doing something entirely new, I figured if I'm going to go talk to somebody, I better have my facts together. So I decided, well, I know there's a lot of other planes crashing in this area. and so maybe I should get more information, which is what I started to do,

which led me into a whole bunch of different parts of that group of violence. Yeah, I can imagine. I had no idea that there was over 80,000, or there is over 80,000 missing in action, American troops. If I would have had to guess, I'm ashamed to say I would have guessed far lower than that. actually? 72,000 from World War II. And the balance, most of the balance are Korea. And there's about 1,600 left in Vietnam now.

And so you're right. It's a big number. And most of those, or many of those, are in deep water. I mean, really deep water, and multiple thousand foot depths. And so I've heard numbers that there are probably using current technologies maybe about 25,000 or so that are really recoverable by today's technologies. But there's some incredible underwater research going on right now. I was just at the Navy dive experimental unit in Panama City and met some of the Navy. experts on deep water habitats and what they can do at a thousand feet or more and stay there for weeks

at a time is unbelievable. Immediately no, immediately no. Hard pass. If you start telling me I need to breathe helium and I have to do a multi-week decompression stop and that if anything fails, my entire body will be compressed down to the size of a pea, I'm out. Right. Again, they have to have a chamber to sleep in and a chamber for their balls.

I don't know how they go down there and do those things. It's amazing and incredibly dedicated. I met several of them, unbelievably. I couldn't be happier that there are people out there who exist like that. If I was ever given that opportunity and I'm not a fast runner, I would run as fast as I could in the other direction. For clarity, no thank you. Yeah, no, it's a, you got to have a special drive. for that.

There's another documentary. Maybe you've seen this one. This one tripped me out. Spoiler alert for people who know or know what I'm talking about, but haven't watched it. It's about deep-sea divers on oil rigs. And, well, fascinated me, two things fascinated me about it. One was the system that they created. They pressed these guys while they were still on the boat.

So they were at depth, but on a vessel. So then they could just go into a bell that are right on the bottom that they can work, they can handle their decompression stops. They're not on bottles down there, obviously. So they're on a tether. Of course, the vessel loses its hovering ability. The computer system goes down. There's, of course, a diver working on the rig who starts getting drugged by the tether,

which I'm assuming is somehow attached to his helmet or, I don't know, somewhere else on the apparatus. It snaps. there's a five minute bailout bottle. It takes the vessel 30 minutes to problem solve their navigational system because they just basically drifted off. And essentially, this guy was like, well, what if we turn everything off and turn it back on? It fucking worked. So all the lights go from red to off to green. So there's now working their way back.

They have a mini submersible. that they're able to navigate back to the rig, and the guy is laying on his side on top of the rig, twitching, seizing. They finally drag the bell over. Other diver comes out. He's basically assuming it's a body recovery, drags the guy into the bell, gives him mouth to mouth, and the guy comes to and lives.

And the documentary was so well done because it was, you know, they had his what you thought was his X, Y, and tears I'm like son of a bitch this is so hard to watch talking like I'm pretty sure he had kids and then they talk about you know they pulling him up into the bell and then from the shadows they go back to like an interview scene and from the shadows the guy sits down he's just like hello and it's clearly the guy that you could see on the video unbelievable and they think it was because he was so saturated on mixed mixed gas and it was so cold that it allowed you know All of his tissues were just hyper saturated with all of his breathing material so cold that he was somehow able to survive.

His body shunted what they needed to? And of course, what does the guy do once he recovers for a little bit? He goes right back to working on the goddamn ring. Like, what's wrong with you? But, I mean, the things that they're able to do are unbelievable. But the risk tolerance there and the danger there, like I really hope they're getting hazardous duty pay. times a ridiculous multiple. Yeah, so I forget where I was going with that.

Other than that, I had to share that story with you because it was, again, another, you would like that documentary if you haven't seen it. I think it's called Breathe because that guy wasn't. The Navy Experimental Dive Unit is actually, we're working with them on one crash site off of Papua New Guinea. It's another B-24 that crashed in about 200 feet of water, which doesn't sound very deep. but for when you're recovering remains, you can't pop down to 200. You have minutes at best. Yeah.

So they're going to put a submersible unit there and do the recovery. Interestingly, it's not far from a volcano. And the damn gum volcanoes erupted a couple of times. Of course it is. Why wouldn't? Why would it be easy for you back? No, no. But they're preparing.

We don't know exactly when they're going to go, but we're already working with them. And we're doing stuff now. For example, we work with the University of Delaware's Maritime Program and Dr. Mark Maline and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Dr. Eric Terrell. and they're specialists in robotics, particularly underwater, autonomous underwater vehicles, that now can go down to thousands of meters, and they can loiter for incredibly long periods of time. That's so crazy. So, you know, we were, as scuba divers, we did grid searches at 100 feet,

and you couldn't do a grid search very long at 100 feet. And so already there are sort of shallow water autonomous vehicles that work maybe to 100 meters or so is revolutionizing searches, archaeological searches for all kinds of things that we're doing. Oh, I can only imagine, as opposed to having a starting point that looks like the map of Palau. Right. You probably now have something, I don't know, maybe 100 meters. square, I bet you they're giving you, to start with at least? Well, we can do, I think the number is four square kilometers a day with an autonomous underwater

vehicle. And so when you have four of them, you're talking about 16 to 20 square kilometers. I don't know how many years of scuba diving that would be. More than either you or I want to do or are capable of doing it our lifetime. Right. What kind of data are they spitting back? Are they giving you, is it imagery? Is it sonar?

The primary tool is sight scanning sonar imagery, but we also have low light visibility and imagery using videos and cameras. And more recently, they've started attaching magnetometers on it so that it can start doing some, you know, looking for ferris or iron materials. materials, which these planes all have. And so we're really extending, and all of this is getting better. I mean, for example, the sensitivity of the autonomous vehicles in the documentary to what remains

was state of the art, and now it is so much better now that they can hover a larger distance above the bottom and hence have a broader side scanning sweep and cover more land with greater more bottom and with greater sensitivity of detection. So it's constantly improving. That sounds awesome for you now. Yeah. But I interrupted you many minutes ago and you were talking about 1996. What were you using then? A side scan mask sonar? No, I had, yeah, I had a standard scuba gear without a computer. And for jungle work, I had a machete and a compass. Didn't even have GPS. And were you largely going and doing this by yourself? I mean, obviously, like probably a boat driver and all that stuff.

Yeah, initially. And that's what convinced me I shouldn't do it because I went into the mangrove swamp deep into it and actually found an aircraft. But I had my share of problems getting back out of the mangrove. And... What type of problems did you have? Well, it was just... The day was getting long. I had been there, probably taking too many photographs, and it was getting dark.

You didn't want to spend the night at the night of the night. And then I ran out of water, and I was starting to get thirsty, and a lot of learned lessons there. But, you know, fortunately, the nice thing. about an island is you can go in any direction you're going to come out someplace. And I did. And I made it out fine. But I said my major learning lesson is don't do this by myself anymore. And so I started talking to some of the skydivers and one of my earliest now team members, Dan O'Brien, ran Skydance in Davis. And we started talking about what a team would look like and did a little

bit of experimenting and by about 2000 or so we'd put the real first working team together these were all volunteers we self-funded ourselves and we'd take a month off at a time and build a mission and begin looking and we started finding wreckage and we probably our biggest find was in 2004 when we located a b24 that had eight MIAs on it and The remains were still there. I mean, so we're talking 44 or 45, right? 44. Run the math on that.

I wish Mike Glover was here is my quantitative. At the time. 60-some years. What actually submerged in saltwater is left? Bonds. Just bones? Bones. Are they relatively deteriorated as well, or do they hold up to that?

No, they hold up. The bones, if they're broken up, it's from the trauma of the crash. There's, depending on how much, the deeper it is, the more you're likely to find, and that's particularly true of things like clothing can survive. If there's less oxygen, there's less degraded. I've found parachutes, the silk holds up very well. Oh, I know.

I have static line parachutes from Vietnam. when I was in the SEAL community. I was looking at the data manufacturer. I thought somebody was messing with me. Like, this clearly can't be right. And by the way, we're jumping this into the ocean. How many times has this been jumped into the ocean? Was it freshwater rinsed? Am I going to die right now? Like, what's happening? Yeah. So the, we, we, we found human remains on that site. And the U.S. Navy, one of the salvage dive units out of Pearl came and did three seasons of recovery and recovered all the remains off of that one. And we had a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery in 2010 in which the president of Palau joined us in honor to honor the families and the no longer MIAs. So we as a team,

The team grew and we started locating my, by then I had made contact with the Department of Defense's agency at the time. When I first went to it, it was called SILHai or the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, which then changed to J-PAC in 2004, the Joint P.O.W. MIA Accounting Command, J-PAC. And then in, I think, 2012, it's got its current name, the DPAA or the Defense P-O-W-M-I-A accounting agency. And it's worked its way up the hill. Now it's a joint command structure where it was originally with, I think, Army's mortuary affairs program.

It actually originated during the Vietnam era. What is it like to come upon a wreck like that? I mean, I'm assuming if you found the remains of eight on board, you said? Well, we didn't find all the remains. We just found parts of one person. Was the wreck mostly intact, though? Yes. What's it like coming across something like that?

It's a very special moment. You've been looking for that wreck. We've been looking for that wreck for 10 years, 10 years. How many dives do you think you're doing? done in that time? Hundreds of dies. And maybe, well, a couple hundred anyway, because a lot of just in search of that wreck. And so we, you come across and there's that moment where, you know, you're underwater and things are blurry and then, you know, all of a sudden you see the outline of something that's not natural and got some straight lines on it.

And then a shark eat you. That's what my nightmares are about. Is that an airplane? Nope, just inside a jaw's mouth. That's fine. Well, there are sharks out there. But I think there's so many fish that they look at us and say we're not worth it. So I saw the outline of the nose section of the plane, and next to it was one of the propellers.

And this propeller, the only thing I can think of is like a cathedral. The propeller was upright. It was embedded. Two of the three blades were embedded in the coral, and the third blade was sticking straight up vertically. And it just looked like, I mean, like somebody put it there as some sort of homage to the site or something. Like a monument.

A monument. And we saw it. And we've seen this many times now. And it does. It takes your breath away. You say, okay. The first thing that comes to my mind now is we've started the journey home for these people, and we'll start getting some questions answered.

And the amazing thing is shortly thereafter I started having interactions with MIA families. And I've gotten to know many MIA families now, and all of the ones I've ever met always. remember. They never, ever forget. And it's not just the first generation, the World War II era families. It's each subsequent generation. And they always have some place in their home for that person. You know, there's at least a photo on the mantel. Oftentimes, there's a little cabinet with flight logs or whatever they had, letters. And the kids grow up, and the grandkids grow up, hearing the stories. And my own view is, as generations, hear the story, the person is more

mythical, more mystical in some respects, because they never knew him. But when the remains are found, when you can tell a family that, you know, your great uncle is coming home, they suddenly become real. And it's no, it just adds to that rich experience of having this family history. And now for the first time, you know, you're realizing that this is a real person. And what an impact that has on the families. We've been honored to be asked to go to the, funeral memorials for a number of these MIAs, no longer MIAs, and families will come from all over

the United States. Family members who've never met each other come to these repatriation ceremonies. And not only that, but entire communities come out. I mean, every small town ceremony that we've participated in, the entire community just stops what it's doing. The fire engines have American flags on their ladders. The police come out to want to pay their respects, help direct traffic, whatever we need. The VFWs will line up on the street as the motorcade goes by, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, People with American flags, they all stand on the streets pay their respects. And a couple of the towns put in billboards like Welcome Home Bud, you know, it's unbelievable.

And we, you know, we were never expecting this. I think the, and as we've seen this around the country, this is an entirely apolitical. emotional emotion. All people come together on these. When a family member like this is returned home, the community comes together, and we've just seen it as a form of healing. It reminds people that there are some fundamental things in life that are important in family and acknowledging the sacrifices that not only that person is made,

But every single person in that family in one way or another had their own consequent sacrifices. And it's just a privilege to be part of that. I can't even imagine the closure that would bring to a family. Or like you said, the connection or the combination of those things, the connection and closure. I think that having somebody go missing would be far more difficult to deal with. than somebody being killed. Obviously, I would want an option C if there were laid out in front of me,

if it was just A and B, but did you ever run into families or have you run into families that are holding onto the hope that their family members still alive? Yep. It has happened, and there are certain characteristics

that go with it. You know, Uncle Joe, and I'll just, use that as a way of identifying a person. Number one, they have some idea that there's 99.9% chance they're dead, but that 0.1%, well, what if he actually survived? And these are not my recollections. What they dream up and hope for is that some native or natives took care of him and hit him. And he has to have amnesia.

Otherwise, he would have come home by now. So there's a whole line of parts of the story that go with this to try to cope with the unknown. Yeah. And so those kind of stories happen. We've actually had at least one family that suffered because after the war ended, someone thought they saw that individual. And he had, they were from, the families from Texas, they saw him in San Diego, and he was with an Asian wife and two kids.

Can you imagine if you start thinking about that, how that would impact you that, you know, the father or uncle you love chose not to come home. home, start a separate family and go off and how that affects the emotions of a family. It's going to be some mental quicksand for sure. Yeah. And so that person turned out to be on the B-24 in the nose turret. And he had around his neck a necklace in his wife's wedding ring.

Can you imagine getting that back after 60 years? or getting it back to the family. I was there and saw it happen. I can't even imagine what that would feel like. It was one of the things in the documentary that actually probably is what originally got me to reach out to your organization. Because I think I just went straight through the website. I know how I'll get a hold of this guy. We'll find his website.

There's a contact button on there. Sweet. I have one of those on my website too. And amazingly enough, here we are. but it was the the fact that you were able to be there for these ceremonies for that closure and connection

and you could palpably see the impact that it had on the community and that family I can't even imagine finding somebody in that in the nose cone and being able to return those effects to the family holy shit

that is it exceeds my vocabulary which is limited to be with. We had another event. We had found this Navy Avenger, which was a three-man torpedo bomber that crashed on the island of Pelliloo, and we found the location. And we reported it to that government agency, now DPAA. They sent a team out there to do the recovery. because at the time we were not authorized yet to do recoveries, and they didn't find anything. Well, they didn't find any remains, which is not uncommon.

But they did find a dog tag. And when they finished their report and everything, by chance, one of the family members reached out to us, wondering if we knew anything about this plane. Now, we never approach a family. We never want to raise their hopes or expectations. But we talked about this with DPAA, and if they approach us, and no wink, wink, nod, no subterfuge, they have to do this totally on their own.

They can go to the website or whatever. Then we'll share what we have. And we tell them, yeah, we know a lot about this plane, and here's where it is, and this is what we know. but unfortunately, you know, no remains were found, and, you know, the reports went from DPAA to them, and they got all that information. But I was speaking to one of the archaeologists at DPAA, and we were talking about this case, and said, well, we did find, you know, a dog tag. And I said, well, what do you do with dog tags?

I said, well, you know, it just goes into storage. I said, can you release it to the family? He said, well, sure. I said, you know. That would be so huge for them. And so we got the dog tag sent to them, and they invited us to a little ceremony. So Derek Abbey, who's now our CEO, and I went to Alton, Illinois, and we were invited to go to this Catholic church area, same school that he went to. and they had a little meeting room

and I think it was like where all the sports awards were and we got there and the place was packed we thought it was going to be three or four people and they had invited a camera crew people had volunteered to come in I remember people were cooking

cooking cookies and various kinds of pastry and had little American flags that they put on them and things like that. That's what I'm talking about. And there's an incredible moment. And the great niece, I think, gets up and she opens up this iconic dog tag. And I mean, I think if he would have been, you know, in a casket in front of the car. front of them, yes, that would have been special, but this is as close as the real thing. And it just, the whole audience stops. And, you know, they all want to touch it. I mean, it's, you know, that was close, right? I mean, that was next to him. And the, and it, and we,

there was one special surprise. So he was engaged at the time to be married. And when, when he would communicate with his fiancé, and they used to have these 78 RPM records, and you could record on them and send them home. And he had sent one to her just before he died. And she still had it. And her daughter took the record and had it digitized. And they played it for the first time.

No way. there was a special message to the fiance. But then I guess there was another section and he starts singing, You Are My Sunshine. I mean, is there anybody within a five-mile radius that's not just completely bawling at this point? Yeah.

I can tell you, we just let it rip, you know? There wasn't enough, there wasn't enough Kleenex in the whole house. Oh, my God. To hear his voice. Nobody had ever heard his voice in. With the dog tag, too? Oh, come on.

So that's, and this is all spontaneous. This is all, you know, this isn't like there were months of preparation. These are amazing experiences. I can only imagine. How did you know it was time to hang up the science and go full time into the MIA recovery? You know, I think I've pretty much done as much as I was going to do the company is doing well. And the company wanted to move in different directions. This was a good time.

Mutual decision, if you will. Yeah, it was fine. And I've been very happy. I still consult on infectious disease-related things. And so I can't keep your toes in that pool a little bit. The documentary, what year was that made? It actually started filming 2014. We did the field work in 2014 and 2015,

but it took six years to finish. And the reason is that we asked the producers and directors to, if you're going to do this, you really need to wait when we find things for the follow-through to see the impact on the families. For sure. And so, yeah, the field work, the underwater shots, the jungle water shots are all fun and interesting,

seeing some of the new technologies are new at the time. But it takes time. We found actually a couple of sites during those two years of filming, which we don't always do. And by the time the remains were recovered and went through the DNA identification process and notification process, it took six years. And so, and I think the strength of,

the documentary to what remains is in, is really in the families and the impact on the families. And each family is different, but the one thing they share is the impact is profound. It's on Netflix, correct? Try to remember what it's Amazon. Okay. Is it going to say that or Amazon or Netflix? I think it's Amazon and Apple. And if you go to our website, which is Project Recovery,

It tells you all that stuff. I'm pretty bad at knowing all that kind of information. Yeah. I know I watched it on the TV, not the laptop. So actually, that doesn't help because you can get both Netflix and Amazon on both. Yeah. Incredibly powerful documentary. I can't recommend enough for people who are interested in this conversation at all to go watch it.

It's well worth your time. How did you link up with Marcus LaTrell? He makes a cameo, if you will. He does. I, uh, I, uh, I, um, I, um, met Marcus through Governor Rick Perry in Texas. And I met Governor Rick Perry because of my work in biotechnology. And we were doing some stuff with Texas A&M.

And the people at Texas A&M wanted us to meet the governor. So I went up to Austin and met Governor Perry. And we got around to talking about somehow talking about, you know, our MI-A-P-O-W work. And he said, well, someday. I'd like to go with you. I said, sure, anytime you want to come. I thought that was a sure bet.

That wasn't going to happen, you know. I was going to say you may hear that from time to time, I suspect. But it calls me a few years later. There was a book written about our work called Vanished by author Will Hilton. And he got a copy of the book and he said, now I really want to go. And I said, okay. He said, well, I can't go by myself. I have to bring some people.

And I said, okay, what are we talking about here? Because our teams are small, you know. We're talking an entourage of three or third? It was more like 20 to 30, at least 20 people that he came because he had to bring his own bodyguards. And he brought his wife and daughter. But he also had met Marcus Latrell. and Marcus Latrell had been interacting with a Marine R.V. Bergen, who has now passed away fairly recently. But as Texans, Rick Perry wanted to bring Marcus LaTrell and Arvi Bergen.

And Harvey Bergen had participated in the Battle of Pellilu with the Marine there. And so it was a very special time having Marcus Littrell and RV Bergen together and sharing their experiences from completely different eras. I don't want to give too much away from the documentary, but I mean, the man came across the beach at Pellelieu, and he's literally talking with Marcus from where he crossed the beach about that experience, and I'll let the rest of it speak for itself when they go watch the documentary.

So that's how we met Marcus, and he wanted, because of our work, three of the, so we mostly work for MI, work to find MIAs, but some of the people that we are looking for are also prisoners of war, which is a separate category. They're MIA, but they're MIA because they were captured and were made prisoners of war. And there's several POWs in Palau that we're looking for. All of them were executed, and we have been searching. for one, we believe there's some evidence to believe that they were all executed in approximately

the same area, but the problem is that it's all jungle. And this is our longest search ever. Is this the article that you sent me? Yeah. I hadn't had a time to take a look at it, getting married in three days, so slightly busy. But three of them, I believe, were among the UDT. Yes. This is, was it, did you guys call it Operation Bent Prop? Or was it a... We call it the early The early name of the project was the Bent Prop Project, which now is Project recover. But we were bent project back in those days. But these UDTs are still people that we're looking for, men that we're looking for. So what was the story behind that?

How were they captured? Were they executing the course? For people who don't know, the UDT or underwater demolition teams or the origin of the SEAL community. Actually, the Scouts and Raiders probably before that. but let's just say some mistakes were made in some amphibious invasions where they didn't really do a good hydrographic reconnaissance of the area perhaps you hit a reef that's offshore drop the ramp and people with non-boiant gear go to the bottom so probably a good idea to have a force that goes in and hydrographically reconnaissance which is I was still trained to do that in the late 90s at seal team

We would, part of our Mar-Ops was getting out there with a lead line and a plexiglass and a grease pencil and just hating your life for like four days at a time. Why are we doing this? But that was the legacy task. So I'm fascinated about how these three UDT actually were captured. Yeah, there was a submarine, the USS Burrfish, that carried them. And one of them was not only UDT, but he was. was somehow a part of OSS, which is the predecessor of the CIA's.

So we don't know what they were actually doing. Supposedly, the mission is still somewhat classified, but they were, they exited from the submarine off of Yap, which is a couple hundred miles to the north of Palau, and they were supposed to do something along the shoreline there. The problem was that they ran out of time or something happened and they missed the window for their egress back to the submarine and they were captured in Yap. They were then transported and we were able to find the transcripts, the Japanese transcripts of their being put on a ship and taken to – we have some very good connections in Japan who've been enormously. helpful in help in these regards. And we know they were taken by a small ship to Palau, where they were brought to the main harbor. And I have found two elder Palauans who saw them.

And the reason I know they saw them was I did no prompting. He says, yeah, I saw the three frogmen. And they used that term? They used that term. Interesting. And so that caught me off guard. And one of them was wounded and they marched them from one island up until they, it would have probably been about a 10 mile hike, I think.

And they were last seen getting into a car with Japanese officers with their sabers and, or There were swords and it was near sunset and they drove off and the elder saw the car come back and they weren't in the car anymore, just the officers. And we have all this documented on various videos that I took and we've been looking ever since for the grave sites. The problem is unlike an aircraft, the grave sites. in a jungle is really tough. It's one of the most, if not the most inhospitable environment I've ever been in.

It's either trying to bite you, sting you, trip you, steal all your gear. I don't know how many pockets I have had opened on my equipment from just jungle foliage. Yeah, that's really true. And it grows fast, it's hot, it's humid. I can't even imagine, man, what could you even find remains-wise? It grows so fast. Well, if we, you know, we... Maybe gear?

Maybe gear. There's some evidence they may have been cremated. Actually, cremation can help because it'll calcify the bones and make it harder for them to degrade in that environment. Teeth would be the Holy Grail in the sense that DNA tends to be preserved in teeth. I hear you say that, and I'm thinking, let's find a tooth in the jungle. Right. That's the single best metaphor for a needle in a haystack that I've ever heard. Yeah, well, that's why we've been looking for over 20 years.

And we know those jungles now extremely well. We've found all kinds of Japanese bunkers and all kinds stuff. And we actually have interviews of the, Japanese who did the execution because they were all captured. But each of them tells it slightly different story, which makes it really hard to interpret. But, you know, we're going to keep looking. It's one of those that we're not putting down. What's the most shocking thing that you guys have found?

Shocking, maybe. Different S. I'd have to think about that. Well, every one of every, every crash site we find is a surprise. I know the one that was the most surprising. We were in the jungle on the big island, Bobbledop. And we had one guide who said he thought he knew where some airplane wreckage was. Very often it'll turn out to be a boiler or something else. But, you know, you got to...

I know where something metal in the jungle is. Right, right. One time, honest to God, it was a barber's chair in the middle of a jungle. To an untrained eye, perhaps that is an ejection seat. Right. Which I don't think they were using in World War II. No. That's not an important point, though.

No. So we went to this site, and it was a corsair. It was a Marine corsair. Those are badass airplane, by the way. Yeah. And we started investigating it, and it clearly had smashed into the side of the hill and was scattered sort of in a little valley. And we found an ID number, and I would carry the numbers in the field.

I would, you know, if it had a bureau number and it was known to have crashed, then we could look it up. And it turns out that this was. one of the planes that we were looking for, but it was about 15 miles from where it was last seen. In other words, we would have never found it. And so we were stunned that we found it. It was much further south than where it was supposed to be.

And so those are the kinds of surprises you run into. What we now know, I wouldn't be surprised now. What we now know is when you're in combat, this will be no surprise to you. Your memory is not necessarily focused on, you know, when someone is lost, it's focused on saving your own life and the ones that are still around you. And this is a very recurrent theme I got in interviewing air crews that they were busy, you know, firing their machine guns and they would, oh, there they go, and, you know, they just glad it wasn't them and, you know, all kinds of streams of emotion go through.

But there's not a great deal of reliance you can put on the exact location from after action reports. Well, the aircraft, those people have such a vastly more difficult job trying to describe where they were. I was limited largely where my feet could carry me. So, I mean, we would cover long distances to get to where we were going, but the operational area was pretty contained. Like, in this courtyard over on the eastern wall, I can't imagine being over relatively unknown terrain in an aircraft in a gunfight, trying to remember one island that probably looks a lot like the ones that are next to it and pinpoint where somebody went down. That is substantially harder. Yeah. And you're at different in altitudes.

So your projection of how far offshore is going to be, you know, can be an order of magnitude different. It was 100 yards offshore. Well, maybe it was 1,000 yards offshore, really. And without that technology, that's, you know, that's only 100 or so dives for you guys. I'm sure you guys from around the edges on that. Yeah. Just fill the tanks up. 60 for 60, Pat.

Yeah, we'll be fine. 60 for 60. Yeah. Or 30 for 90. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So when we first were communicating over email, you were actually. getting ready to head back not too long ago. Tell me about the most recent trip you had over there.

No, we've been looking for another Marine Corsair fighter pilot who we knew went down in a mangrove swamp, a big one. And of course, it went down in the middle of it, right? Not on the edges, but in the middle of it. And we actually have interviews with an elder who saw it go down. And we've gone into it. This was our third time. And we have found good parts of the plane. But it's a very unusual site in our experience because we have located everything except the fuselage. I mean, no, the cockpit area of the fuselage.

In other words, we found good parts, you know, engine smashed in smithereens, parts of the wing, parts of the tail, but the whole cockpit area is missing. And so we were going to go in and really try to hunker down and do much more work in the swamp. And we had, fortunately, a new team member who really knows aviation parts. He works with the commemorative Air Force and takes these planes apart and puts them back together. And so he was able. Corsairs?

Yeah. Oh, man, you wouldn't talk about a valuable player right there. Yeah. So he could look at this mangled mess and it was unbelievable. We had another new team member who's a woman who is a very experienced scuba diver, but we invited her to come on the mission even though it wasn't scuba diving. And she turned out to be, I don't know how to describe it. She could go through a mangrove swamp like I have never seen anybody.

I mean, I'm pretty good, but she would just slither through the mangroves and like, how did you get there? Like, did you beam over there? And she would say, I don't know what this thing he is, but look at it. I found this. And she would be finding stuff all over the place. So the expert guy who is a big, burly guy, which is just not really compatible with mangroves. That's not going to work out well there. You know, he's trying to keep up with her.

And, you know, it was a great time. And we really found a lot of the plane, but we're still missing a key part of that plane. And we're going to be going back probably next year again. How spread out is the area that you're finding this stuff? In this particular instance, it's about, I think now, maybe a football field long and half football field wide. Makes sense. Probably is a relatively good airspeed if he was shot down. debris field

We actually think he was hit and may have actually been killed because it looks like he flew straight over the mangrove swamp and then stalled or went into a very steep decline and then that's why the field is more long than wide

it's spread out but we still don't We still don't understand parts of it that, frankly, make no sense. But we always like to say it'll be completely obvious once we find it, you know. Yeah, in hindsight. Yeah. How big is your team now in Project Recovery? We have about 30 volunteers.

Any given search team is no more than eight people, six to eight people. and we select for expertise. And so everybody has a function. That's one of the early lessons that I learned was everybody needs a job. And so whether they're photographers, mappers, aviation experts, everyone has a function. And so we'll have a mission. plan when we go into the country, we brief every day, come back from the mission, debrief every night, get our gear ready for the next day, and this goes on seven days a week during

a mission. So it's people use their vacation time, but we warn them. These are not vacations. It's a working vacation, if you will. What's the travel like to get to Palau? Fly to Hawaii and then from Hawaii to Guam, Guam to Palau, or you can go through Tokyo, Narita direct to Palau.

So it's a hike just to get there. I'm sorry, Narita to Guam to Palau. So it's a long, it's 18 to 24 hours door to door depending on what part of the United States you're in. And then when you guys are going out, say you're in that mangrove swamp looking for the Corsair that's spread out. Are you guys

staying out there? Are you okay, you're going back to at least some semblance of civilization to recharge and reset? Yep, yep, yeah. No, there's So it's pretty, you get pretty dirty and, you know, you do have to. The jungle will drain you. Yeah, it will. It will drain you for sure.

How long are you going to do this for, Pat? Well, I'm coming up on 30 years, and I'm going to keep going as long as I physically can do it. I mean, I actually, one of the things I, it turns out I'm good at is interviews and interviewing in different cultural settings. And so some of my expertise I think I can continue when maybe I'm not as physically capable. I'm 74 now, but I stay in pretty good shape and try to take care of myself. And I'll function, you know, if I'm going to be part of it, I'm going to be doing something. And so whether it's plowing through mangroves, for official diving, we put a rule of 65 years old. And so anyone over 65 can't scuba dive anymore.

Well, I certainly meet that one. But we only implemented that a couple years ago. But there's a lot of work to be done. interviewing. For example, I was on a mission in Italy where by chance by simply interviewing someone who said, well, you got to talk to somebody else and about the third round this person knew had come across a fuselage of a B-17 off the East Coast of Italy and nobody knew anything about it. He was a scuba diver that did other things, came across it, didn't think about it and you know we started

talking to him about it. I had another experience in in Papua New Guinea. I was part of a live-a-board boat that the scripts and the University of Delaware teams, they were doing their

underwater robotics and I said, well, I'm not contributing very much to this, so I got one of their Zodiac boats and took it ashore and with an interpreter who spoke pigeon which is the universal language in Papua New Guinea,

and we started going village to village, and I wound up interviewing elders in 11 villages. Three of them had credible MIA stories. No one had ever asked him about them. One of them, one of my favorite stories, is we came up to this village, and we always stop at the edge of the village and asked permission to interview the elders,

tell them why we're there, and they said, wait a minute. And about 30 minutes later, we were wondering, well, I wonder what wait a minute means. And they came back and invited us in. And the whole village was around this giant tree. And they were all circled around this giant tree. And there were two chairs. And in one chair it was an elder.

And they took me to the second chair and said, please sit here. and this elder the whole you could hear a pin drop and the elder says donna I look at the guide and the guide shrugs of shoulders and I didn't does that mean we're going to be eating for lunch or you know I had no idea you're now an appetizer so you know and he said it three times and I said okay asked him to tell us about Dona. And the story was that the village had been taken over by Japanese during World War II, and most of the villagers had run away and were living in the jungle. And he and his father had snuck back into town or into the village, just as an American plane on fire went screaming over the top of the village and crashed into the water, which was next to the village.

And they didn't think anything about it. And a little bit later, this American all bloody comes up on the beach and crawls into the village. And he dies. But before he died, he kept saying Donna, or what this guy thought was Donna. He was saying Donna, wasn't he? Maybe saying Donna, I have no idea. Mama, Donna, could be something. And we looked at every name, what sounds.

like Donna, Tom, you know, we never could figure anything out from an MIA list. And so he tells his story, and it's a very dramatic story. And he says, I've always wanted to tell somebody, but I didn't know who to tell. And so my next question is, okay, where did you bury him? And he said, yes, I will tell you that. And so we're sitting in two chairs facing each other. He points to the space in the middle of us and says, right there. So he chose the chairs because that's where he buried him.

And so I wasn't prepared for this. You know, I was on the liverboard. I came back a few months later on a second mission. and brought a metal detector and where he said there was. There was metal, and he said he buried him with a metal necklace, and it had a metal thing on it, so I'm assuming that's a dog tag. And then, so I mapped the area out with an archaeologist, and we were going to come back the next day.

We went back into, it's a long, long trip to get there, and we had to forge rivers to get to it, and we bought the gear for the excavation and got the permits lined up. And this horrendous storm came up and flooded. The rivers flooded and we couldn't get back. So Don is one of our ones that we still have to do. But that's what interviews can do. And it's opening a lot of doors for us and learning a lot about things that otherwise will go missing

and never understood. What percentage of the recs that you estimate could be found? Do you think that you guys have found? We have a database of about 600, what we would call, high priority targets. That means, you know, if you put a blindfold on and just went down the list, any one of them has enough information to justify going. And that involves about 3,000 MIAs. And so, you know, we're at about, you know, total now would be about 60 or 70 of these, maybe 10%.

Wow. So. What's your limiting factor? A number of people that are interested in available to go. Is it funding? It's always funding. It's resources. We do have some contracts with the.

DPAA, but I know this will come as a shock to you, but DPA, like any federal agency, has a lot of bureaucracy. I know that's... This is the first I've heard about that when discussing government agencies. Yeah. It's amazing. Hopefully it's not a widespread problem. Yeah.

But the... So they can only do things at certain speeds. And we like to campaign an area, like for example, if there's four, four, four, five crash sites in a given area. We'd rather spend our time because then we get to know the people and there's a lot of efficiencies and that's more difficult for the way DPA is structured. So we're going to be doing a fundraising campaign later this year to try to raise money to help sustain us. we're putting that together now. But we have a very growable program because we know that these teams of six or eight people, how well that works.

It works very well. And, you know, we could do seven or eight of those teams as opposed to two or three of those teams. And we've been mentoring all of our team members. Some of them we mentor as technology experts. Others we mentor to take leadership positions. And so we have a very growable operations system for this. It's just the number of missions that we can do in a given year. COVID really hurt us, like everybody else.

I mean, there's nothing unique. But we couldn't, even if we could have traveled, the countries wouldn't let us in the country. But we're back. I'm going to be going back to Denmark in next month. A B-24 crashed in the Baltic Sea there, and one of our team members located the plane, and I'm going to be part of a team doing recovery on the site, and I'll be in charge of the screeners looking for remains and personal effects. So I'll be going from the Childs of Palau to the Baltic Sea in September and October,

which is not going to be warm. Trauma mean. Yeah, dramamine, right. What percentage in the Palau region of the wrecks are on land versus in the water? Most of them are in the water. There's a few on land. And there's we, we, and there's really, it's three parts. There's a barrier reef around Palau.

And the planes that crashed outside of the barrier reef are 2,000 feet. Super deep. You know, Bob Ballard country, you know. then the ones inside the barrier reef maximum depth about a couple hundred feet most of them in a hundred feet or less and they were usually in proximity to the targets they were bombing or strafing or whatever so they tend to be in shallower waters and so I would say it's probably more like 75 in the water 25 in on land what's the most pristine wreck that you've come across in the water Anything that is just like, holy shit, that's an airplane.

Oh, my God. Yeah, we do. It's perfect. There's a corsair that was flown by a Marine, and he was strafing a, I think, a munitions dump, and it blew up. And some of the fragments hit his oil cooler. And so he started losing, you know, his engine was starting to season. and he headed back out to sea. And he was inside the barrier reef,

but still far enough away that the Japanese couldn't get to him easily. And he crashed, threw back the canopy, got into his life raft, and the plane just slowly sank and untouched. And he actually got... got picked up by an amphibious aircraft that one of ours had picked him up, brought him home, and he was flying maybe even the next day. And his name's McCullough.

And he stayed in the Marines, I think, through Vietnam. And his family had always heard the story about his plane going down. And so we called the family. His dad was too old to talk to us. But I remember one of his sons said, you mean that story's real? Because he thought, you know. He thought his old man was crazy.

He's like, Dad, shut up. You don't need to tell that every Thanksgiving. And it's real. And we did a whole book and sent with all the photographs and everything. And well-preserved, Corset. Oh, it's unbelievable. Yeah, it's unbelievable. We had one warbird pilot looking in the canopy, and all the instrumentation was intact.

It wasn't stripped. He knew exactly the maneuvers. He looked at where the throttle was, all of that. He knew exactly. He could tell what the pilot was trying to do when he crashed. To set it down, the configuration that it was in? Yep. Unbelievable.

Yeah. It's the most perfect wreck. There's nothing. The oil cooler. You could tell the oil cooler's messed up. That's it. From bombing the ship. shit out of people.

Right. I mean, if you're going to lose a plane, that's one way to go. Yeah. I was so good at bombing shit that it blew up and hit my oil cooler. Yeah, if my dad was telling me that story too, like, uh-huh, sure. Oh, here we go. Dad's had a few cocktails, time for the oil cooler story. Right.

But it's true. In that instance, it's true. Yeah. I think my dad's got some wild ones. God, those journeys seem so fascinating to me. And I can't express enough to people. It's easy to talk about the impact because you're there and you get to experience it. It was impactful me just watching the documentary, which is, again, to what remains.

How can people help you guys, your organization, continue doing what you're doing to provide that closure to families? Well, I think, number one is of being aware that there are many thousands of people. of MIA families across the United States. And you made a very, very important point that an MIA family is very different from the unfortunate family that has a KIA or killed an action member, but at least there's a certain amount of closure. We know where that person is. The unknown here haunts the families across generations.

And getting to understand that, I think, is important. Like we said earlier, resources. You can go to our website. There are ways, you know, if you want to contribute and be a part of keeping our America's promise to bring these people home, you can do that. We are always, we have an open door in considering volunteers. It's not easy to become a volunteer, not because we're mean or anything, but, you know, when you're in the middle, of a swamp or 12 days into rigorous diving or something, you want to know that that person's still going to be there and getting a sense of how they work in a team environment, how well they

work in austere settings, all of those things are important to be a member. But we also have members who have never held a machete or put on scuba tank either, and they help us with our archival work, because we do everything. We do, we start at the archival end. We do interviews. We do searches, we do documentation. Most recently, we've been cleared by DPAA to participate in recovery operations so we ran our first underwater recovery operation this last fall. We do everything except the final DPA, I mean the final DNA analysis and identification process, which is the responsibility of the DOD agency. I feel like them allowing you to do that recovery is going to speed up the process a little bit.

I hope so. You can get out in front of a government organization because of this alleged bureaucratic meshing of the gears, if you will. I think that will probably help. I hope so. We want, you know, like we said, we'd like a balance of working. in conjunction with DPAA and DOD and in parallel with. There are several operations that we know we could do more expeditiously.

DPA has been very supportive of us and like to work with us. At least that's what they tell us. And we will always keep them informed as we always have, and we will always continue to keep them informed about what we're doing. Is ProjectRecover.org the best place for people to go to probably narrow their focus? Yep. Figure out ways, one, to get even more information about what you're doing, but two, to support from a financial perspective. Yes, although, and I don't do any of this, but we're on Facebook and Instagram and probably Twitter.

What are he is tweeting about? I have no idea. Since I don't do any of those, we must do something, but, you know, we have at least, we have. But the best way is to go to the website, project recover.org. I cannot thank you enough for coming up and taking a few hours to explain to me

what you guys are doing. I will let you close it out. What would you like to end with, Dr. Scanlon? Well, I really appreciate you're bringing me out to Montana. This is the first time I've ever been to the great state of Montana. That's shocking. You said you're 74 years old. Yes, I know.

What other states have you not been to? Alaska. I haven't been to Alaska. You're missing out. Have you been to the Dakotas? I think I've passed through them. I can't say I've spent any time. So you can skip those. Montana and Alaska are way more important than the Dakotas. I don't know shit about the Dakotas. I'm just saying that. No, this has only made me want to come back and learn a little bit more about your great

state. It's a real pleasure. I like the open-ended discussion that we've been having. Had no idea what direction it was going in. Neither did I. That's the beauty of it. We figure it out along the way. I really appreciate what you try to do and causing these stories to be told and sharing what different people are doing to perhaps make a difference. I don't know that we feel it's not like we get up every morning and say we want to make a difference. It's just that's what that's what we do happens to make a difference. I say it to myself in the mirror every day. I'm joking. I don't do that at all. That would be super awkward. Yeah, it would be. So I think I know some people who

probably do though and I avoid them. The and we will we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, We have a pretty active program. We have one team in Croatia right now. As I said, we'll be going back to Denmark and Palau. We had another team that was just in Tinian recently. So we're going to continue. We're definitely making progress, and we'll be busy with our fundraising campaign.

Whenever we have a question, all we do is look at our mission statement. Our mission statement says we're going to go look for MIAs and bring them home. And that decides all of our decisions get easy once you start looking at what our mission is. And that's what we'll do. It's noble for sure. I can't thank you guys enough for what you are doing. Like I've said many times, I can't even imagine the closure that that brings to those families and can end that generational just question mark. And I can't either tell you the truth.

I can't describe it. I'm okay at it. But the movie, the documentary to what remains does more to tell the story of the families than I ever could put into words. And we're very appreciative to imperative entertainment for funding it. And it's not typical, I think, for a documentary to take six years and to get the quality that was put into it to tell the story. So we I think Project Recovery is very special

It has some of the most dedicated people I've ever met Very much believing in the mission And want to use all of their resources That they've ever learned To help us with our mission For which all of us are very grateful I appreciate you're having me And maybe sometime I can update you down the road

But I would love that Let's just call this round one of many more in the future. Okay. Awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Yep.