Another piece of a 62-year-old military aviation mystery was discovered in a gully in Squamish, B.C. earlier this week. A volunteer for an environmental group was picking up garbage along Government Road when he spotted a piece of aluminum sticking a couple of feet out of the ground. The area had been recently brushed so it was newly exposed. Carl Halvorson and some friends dug it out of the ground and ended up with an eight-foot section of an RCAF T-33 that likely crashed in 1956, miles from where it was found.
The T-Bird was a frontline fighter in the Cold War at the time and ready to shoot down Russian bombers off the West Coast. It is likely that the wing belonged to a plane flown by Flying Officers Gerald Stubbs and James Miller. They took off from the RCAF base at Comox for a short training flight and never returned. Other wreckage from that aircraft has been found miles away in Callaghan Lake. Halvorson told the Squamish Chief that one of the searchers at the time of the crash lived in the area where the wing was found and may have taken it home as a souvenir. A local historian says the wing part may also be from a 1957 crash that occurred in the same general area.