As John F. Kennedy was telling inaugural crowds not to ask what their country could do for them, Staff Sgt. Lionel Terry lay alive but slowly dying on frozen Utah rangeland.
His Strategic Air Command B-52 had disintegrated and crashed in violent winds near Monticello, Utah, the night before on Jan. 19, 1961. Two other survivors saw Terry's parachute land, and one even drew a map to show where.But Air Force searchers would still not find him during the 36 hours that they kept nonmilitary rescuers out of the area. When other volunteers finally came in, they quickly found the corpse of 25-year-old Terry right where the map said they would.
Terry's body was still warm - showing he had finally given his life for his country just before his delayed discovery.
New developments and documents now - 32 years later - suggest the delay may have come because the Air Force was searching for or even cleaning up a nuclear bomb that may or may not have been on board (depending on whom one believes).
The plane's co-pilot and the Air Force deny the plane carried a bomb. But conflicting documents, Senate testimony, military censorship, comments to Terry's family and sometimes strange silence still give some basis to the possibility.
It would solve some three-decades-old mysteries - which Terry's parents tried hard to unravel, but they died before they did.
The beginning
It all began at Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso, Texas. Flight registers show Terry was penciled in as a last-minute replacement to the doomed flight that departed at 5:15 p.m.
"He was off duty and didn't have to go," his brother Glenn said from his home in Athens, Ala. "They said he drove up in his car just as the plane was starting to taxi off. He wanted to get in his flight hours for the month."
He was one of seven on board. The only cargo listed on documents later released was 960 pounds of "chaff." No mention was made in censored documents about a nuclear bomb. But the Strategic Air Command was known for keeping bombers with nuclear bombs in the air at all times during the Cold War.
Flight plans show the jet was supposed to be on an eight-hour training mission - but it would actually last only 64 minutes.
The crash
"We knew we would have some bumpy winter weather. I had been over the same course the day before, and it was bumpy then," co-pilot Thomas A. Stout recently told the Deseret News.
The huge eight-engine bomber was cruising at 36,000-feet altitude near Farmington, N.M., when it hit turbulence. The crew decided to climb to 40,000 feet to try to escape it. It reached that height when it neared Monticello at 6:19 p.m.
"Then we hit the roughest air I have ever been in - and I have been in some rough air," Stout said.
Although censored accident reports later would not disclose the official reason for what happened next, Stout said, "The cause of the crash was clear-air turbulence. It's rare, and a phenomenon associated with the jet stream. We didn't understand it much then until we later lost more planes to it. Essentially, it's like flying right into a tornado.
"The shaking was horrible, and the plane just started falling to pieces. We were trying to fly the front section but didn't realize it had already broken off," Stout said.
Stout lunged three times for an ejector seat lever before he was able to pull it. He was blown clear of the craft just before an explosion ripped through it. Navigator Jerome Calvert and Terry also managed to eject.
Pilot John Marsh and crew members Harold Bonneville, Ivan Petty and David Forsyth plunged to their deaths with the disintegrating fragments of the plane.
As Stout and Calvert parachuted to earth, they saw a third canopy - which turned out to be Terry's - and watched where it fell. Stout would soon draw a map that rescuers would say was "right on the money."
The search
Stout was picked up by law officers quickly and said he told then-San Juan County Sheriff Max King there was no nuclear bomb on board, asked help to call in Air Force rescue operations and asked the sheriff to keep everyone out of the area to preserve the crash materials to help reconstruct what happened.
Former Deseret News reporter Bob Mullins, who would later in his career win a Pulitzer Prize, rushed to cover the crash and remembers, "It was hours and days until we got in, and we had to get the help of a congressman to do it then. They didn't just keep the press out, they kept everybody out - and it was an area several square miles large."
The news media waiting outside the area were told that no nuclear bomb was aboard and that two survivors and four corpses had been quickly recovered. The military was still looking for the seventh crew member: Terry. The Air Force said the third parachute seen by other survivors may have been a cargo chute and maybe not the one used by Terry.
The Air Force never found him.
"To our understanding, they kept the whole area cordoned off and wouldn't let in Jeep and horse patrols that wanted to help. When one guy on horseback finally got in there, we were told he found him in 20 minutes," Glenn Terry said.
News stories from the time verify Lionel Terry was found by a horseback volunteer in a ravine near a tree where his parachute was still hanging - and exactly where Stout's map said he would be.
Early controversy
Delays upset at least one would-be rescuer at the time. He was Paul Strong (who San Juan County sheriff officials say has since died), who was commander of the San Juan County Jeep Patrol.
News stories quoted him saying he had told Air Force officials on Jan. 20 - the day after the crash - that he could put Jeeps 50 to 100 feet apart and patrol the entire area for Terry.
Instead, he said the Air Force told him no assistance was necessary and that it had a helicopter coming in from Hill Air Force Base for the search. The Air Force also told newsmen a helicopter was coming.
If it arrived, it didn't find Terry. Maybe it was looking for something else.
After Strong's complaints were reported in newspapers, the Air Force told reporters that the helicopter had never arrived at the site.
Mullins wrote at the time, "An inquiry Tuesday morning to Hill AFB to determine what happened to the helicopter was closed with a `no comment.' The public relations office told newsmen that all inquiries should be directed to SAC. They would not comment on the rescue and search operation that was handled by Hill AFB personnel last Friday."
The Air Force also attacked Strong for saying it had turned down his offer for help. Col. Carlos Cochrane said Strong was the only one complaining about rescue operations, and that Sheriff King told him that many men on horses combed the perimeter of the area right after the crash.
Cochrane said, "The sheriff said that Thursday night, he passed within 150 yards of the ravine where the last survivor was found. It would have been impossible to have found the lone airman by using a Jeep."
One family's vigil
Terry's parents, Mr. and Mrs. W.L. Terry of Athens, Ala., heard about the delays in finding their son from news reporters. They told them they hoped the Air Force would launch an investigation into the delays. If it did, the Terrys never learned about it.
"They're both dead now, but they tried for years to find out what happened," Glenn Terry said.
"I had an uncle who was a colonel in the Army stationed in Albuquerque at the time. He said he would try to find out what he could by talking around. He told us he thought the Air Force had been looking for a nuclear bomb," Glenn Terry said.
He added that his father also asked Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama - who was a family acquaintance - to research what happened. "But nothing much ever came of it, as far as I know," he said.
For the next 30 years the Terrys would be the only ones to think much about the crash and wonder about the delay in Lionel's discovery.
Spotlight 32 years later
That changed last April in a crowded hearing room in Washington, D.C., when the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee released report prepared for the Environmental Protection Agency that showed thousands of areas with possible radioactive contamination.
It listed the Monticello crash site as one of 29 possible "weapons accidents" or "nuclear weapons carrier accidents" locations nationwide.
The report said it did not know how many of those 29 sites actually involved nuclear bombs. But it listed any accident involving Air Force planes or missiles that sometimes carried them as possibilities.
But a top Pentagon official seemed to remove doubt when he testified that day that indeed 29 Air Force accidents had involved nuclear bombs through the years, plus three by the Navy. But he did not mention the Monticello site by name as being among them for sure.
Thomas E. Baca, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment in the Bush admin-istration, did testify that three Air Force accidents (at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J.; Palomares, Spain; and Thule, Greenland) "involved serious plutonium contamination."
He added, "Of the remaining 26 Air Force accidents, only nine within the United States had minor contamination identified at the time. These have been closed out, and there is no current monitoring being done."
The Deseret News wrote a story at the time saying the report and Baca's testimony suggested that the Monticello crash may have involved a nuclear bomb - which the Air Force had always denied.
Over the past half-year, the Deseret News requested an interview four times with Baca to ask whether a bomb was on board in Monticello. An interview was scheduled once, but Baca canceled it - and it was never rescheduled despite repeated requests.
The closest to an answer from Baca came when a Pentagon public affairs official handling one of the interview requests said the military usually will neither confirm nor deny whether a bomb was on a plane and said she did not expect Baca to do differently.
Censored data
To try to find out for sure whether a bomb was on board and whether that helped delay finding Terry, the Deseret News requested through the Freedom of Information Act the old Air Force crash investigation report and related documents.
The information came back censored in key areas. It deleted large chunks of narratives about the flight's history - and appears to cut out what happened immediately after the crash.
It deleted all references to possible causes of the crash, saying it would violate confidentiality given to witnesses.
It deleted references to what actually killed Terry and others, saying it would invade their privacy. It did that even though back in 1961, the Air Force released a statement that its autopsies ruled that Terry had died from head injuries and not from exposure during the delay.
And while Baca's Senate testimony had seemed to suggest that a nuclear bomb was involved in the crash, the Air Force again denied it - or at least finding any record of it in the documents requested. "The microfilm record does not indicate there was any nuclear material aboard the aircraft," wrote Col. Charles W. Parker.
About other censorship, Parker wrote, "Release of these portions of the safety report, even though the report is old, would jeopardize a significant government interest by materially inhibiting its ability to conduct future safety investigations."
The Deseret News is not the only one having trouble obtaining answers to questions about nuclear weapons in accidents. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is have trouble, too.
"We haven't printed the hearings yet (on radiation contamination) because we've had a tough time getting the Department of Defense to answer our questions, like where did they wash down aircraft that took samplings of (open-air) atomic tests," said Bob Alvarez, a committee staffer.
Co-pilot says no bomb
The Deseret News tried for months to locate the two survivors of the flight, who obviously would know whether a bomb was on board. Calvert could not be located. Stout, after initial hesitation to give an interview, said again no bomb was involved. The Veterans Administration had sent a letter to Stout from the Deseret News through a "blind mail" service, meaning the newspaper was not given Stout's address and he could decide whether to respond. He did not.
A month later, the Deseret News found a relative who gave it Stout's phone number. When contacted, he said he had been thinking about responding but was busy during the Christmas season. He said he was again too busy for an interview and asked that the newspaper call back later.
Stout later gave a short interview to describe what happened in the crash and said, "There was no bomb. That was the first thing I told the sheriff when I was picked up.
"I don't know why the (Senate) report would suggest anything different," he added. "The plane was a nuclear weapons carrier but had no nuclear weapon on board that day. I hate to ruin your big story, but that's the way it was."
No clear conclusion
The evidence is mixed and confusing. Stout and the Air Force say no bomb was on board, and they would know.
But why did Baca's Senate testimony on the EPA report suggest maybe a bomb was there? Why didn't Baca respond to interviews to clarify his position? Why were non-military rescuers turned away during those 36 crucial hours after the crash? Why didn't the Air Force itself find Terry, especially with the map it was given - which later led others to the body? What happened to the helicopter that was to have searched for Terry, about which the military would not comment? Why did the colonel who was Terry's relative conclude after talking to others in the military that a bomb search caused the delays? Why didn't the Air Force ever explain more fully the reasons behind the delays? Why did it censor documents even after 32 years about the crash and causes of death?
Glenn Terry said, "All we really know was that the Air Force seemed a whole lot more interested in the wreckage than they were in finding my brother."
But for his family, "We always believed that they were looking for a bomb and not for him." They would like to know for sure. It may be a way the country could show what it can for the family of Staff Sgt. Lionel Terry after he gave his life for it.