Long ago and far away, I flew in and out of Cincinnati a lot, but I would usually have my aircraft serviced over at Lunken. There was a story everyone would tell about the time a smuggler’s B25 flew over, somebody parachuted out, and then the airplane bellylanded on the runway. By the time crash-fire-rescue got to the airplane, the pilot had run away. Certain they would open open up an airplane full of drugs, they got quite the surprise. Not lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) but a gigantic alligator and a lot of snakes! It was a fun story to tell and I had no reason not to believe it. I believe anything I’m told. Just like Abraham Lincoln said, there’s no reason to doubt anything on the internet.
Decades later I found out that a pilot who started flying for the freight company that I had flown freight for, that he was in the region and his side gig is flying a PBY, B17, and the B25 Wild Cargo. Then last week I visited the museum of the B25, the Military Aviation Museum near Norfolk. Lo and behold, there is the B25 and a lot of old yellow newspaper articles about the Lunken event! Turns out they weren’t smugglers, they were part of a TV show of the early 1960s.
I added multiple pictures of the newspaper articles to try to get rid of glare on certain parts. Sorry I don’t have better pictures of the bomber, it was packed in the hanger too tight to really get a good shot of it.
