Moore plans to dig-up fighter plane wreak

Businessman-historian Kenneth Moore plans to unearth an American fighter plane after finding some wreckage from the aircraft on Pagan recently, the Historic Preservation Office disclosed yesterday.

HPO director Epiphanio Cabrera Jr. said Moore met with him twice and vowed to work with the agency in recovering the World War II aircraft, believed to be the fighter plane flown by Lt. Roy Bechtol, who was reportedly gunned down by Japanese counterparts near Pagan on June 23, 1944.

Moore has provided the HPO with a map pointing to the location where the plane has been buried, disclosed Cabrera.

The HPO director also said that Moore has assured his office of a copy of the report that the Honolulu-based Joint Prisoners of War-Missing in Action Accounting Command would come up in connection with the find.

Moore said Thursday last week that members of the military’s forensic laboratory would soon go to Pagan to confirm his discovery. Moore disclosed that his team discovered wreckage from the ill-fated plane following a 10-day trip to Pagan.

Cabrera said the meeting with Moore turned out positively, adding that the HPO required Moore to obtain the necessary permit from the agency before starting excavation work sometime in March 2006.

“We’ll be there to monitor the excavation of the plane,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera said, though, that a concrete plan has yet to be laid out regarding what to do with the plane should the excavation yield positive results.

The Arizona-based Moore, the chairman and chief executive officer of Azmar International company that had wanted to extract pozzolan deposits from Pagan, earlier said that he found his way to the CNMI to find the fighter plane of his uncle, Lt. William Webber, who also perished during the war. He said the plane and his uncle’s body have yet to be found after his 27 years of looking for them.

According to Moore, he then became interested in finding WWII artifacts and missing American servicemen. He said he has collected thousands of documents about WWII and would like to work with the HPO and federal authorities. He said his company has not been actively pursuing the pozzolan project anymore, although the Azmar mechanism remains in place.

Regarding his recent find, Moore said he learned about Bechtol’s fate when he met with war veteran and Navy Cross medallist Rudy Matz in a recent meeting of members of the Fighter Pilots Association in San Diego, California.

Moore said Bechtol’s body has never been found since his plane was gunned down during World War II. Matz reportedly recounted that he was flying another fighter plane above that of Bechtol near Pagan when the latter’s plane went down.