The Dead Pilot Search Story You Don’t Know (Hint: It’s Not Amelia Earhart)

“We must be on you, but cannot see you—but gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.”

With that, Amelia Earhart gave one of her last transmissions, then her and co-pilot Fred Noonan disappeared somewhere in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean.

It was July 2, 1937. People have been searching for her body ever since. They have looked in the Phoenix Islands, Christmas Island, Tabuaeran Island, the Gilbert Islands and the Marshall Islands. This week a new search has begun, on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral island near Papua New Guinea. “Everything has pointed to the airplane having gone over the edge of that reef in a particular spot,” Ric Gillespie, head of the group leading the search, told the Associated Press. “Maybe it’s there…there’s no way to know unless you go and look.”

Earhart’s story is legend but she’s not the only early pilot who failed to land and has never been found. Among the many aviators who disappeared on early fights is Paul Redfern, a virtually unknown 25 year old who aimed to fly from the coast of Georgia over the South Atlantic and the heart of the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro.

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On August 25, 1927, Redfern took off in a single-engine monoplane from Sea Island, Georgia. Charles Lindbergh had become a celebrity overnight after his transatlantic flight from New York to Paris and the world was abuzz with pilots trying to set records. Hoping to put their small city on the map, the Board of Trade in Brunswick, Georgia agreed to pay $25,000 to the first aviator who could fly nonstop to Rio de Janeiro. “It was 4,600 miles as the crow flies,” reads an article on Redfern in the magazine, Garden & Gun, “half of it over empty ocean and half over the impenetrable jungles of the Amazon Basin, which were occupied by headhunters and cannibals, in case he had to put down.” But Redfern was ready, he had packed a rifle, revolvers, ammunition, various knives, fishhooks, flares, and baubles and beads “for trade with savage Indian tribes.” Other than that the cockpit was filled exclusively with spare fuel tanks. The only way to see was through a small periscope in the fuselage, or out the side windows.

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Redfern’s flying experience included the following: at age 16 he built a plane of cardboard and spare parts and flew it around a cow pasture near his school; later, he earned money by doing acrobatic stunts at county fairs; he reportedly used his aircraft to spot illegal whiskey stills and once in Texas he was jailed for buzzing a train. Nevertheless, more than three thousand people saw him off, his Stinson SM-1 Detroiter was painted green and yellow, Brazil’s national colors. Going against him was the fact that it was the height of hurricane season, and it was a new moon. We know he made it as far as Trinidad because a Norwegian steamer spotted him there the next morning. Later that day, an American engineer named Lee Dennison reported seeing his plane over Venezuela’s Ciudad Bolívar, on the edge of the jungle. It was “trailing a thin wisp of black smoke,” said Dennison. In Rio, a boisterous crowd waited, among them was the president of Brazil. But Redfearn never made it. More than a dozen searches were undertaken, many just an excuse for an adventure in the Amazon.

Alfred Harred, a freelance newspaper reporter claimed to have spotted Redfern amongst a tribe of Indians in the area around the Tumuc-Humac Mountains, in French Guinea. “He was dressed in a ragged singlet and underpants,” Harred reported in a Brazilian newspaper. “He looked like a man over forty, hobbling on rude crutches made of tree branches and liana.” Apparently Redfern had broken his arms and legs in the crash, been cured by a medicine man, married an Indian woman and had a son who looked just like him. When Harred tried to take Redfern away the Indians threatened him with poisonous spears. It’s a fantastic story, unfortunately it was later revealed to be entirely false.

If Redfern somehow did survive a crash in the jungle, and somehow lived on through whatever harrowing set of experiences came next, and somehow kept living, he would be 110 today. And who knows, maybe he did. “Don’t lose hope if you don’t hear from me for two or three months,” he told reporters before the flight. “If I should be forced down in the Amazon Valley, I believe I can survive and will be able one day to walk out of that jungle.”