Around 9:30 on the evening of March 5, 1951, an explosion was seen on North Mountain, a few miles north of Staunton, Virginia. The police department was flooded with calls and sent some officers out to investigate, with several local journalists on their tail. The group met up with a local family on the way home home from a girl's basketball game when a burning plane crashed through the trees nearby and exploded on the mountainside.
The men followed the path of broken trees for a quarter mile, until they reached the burning wreckage. Parts of the plane were strewn across the forest floor, with two bodies tangled in the landing gear. One was horribly burned, the other mangled by the gear.
Eventually the word came in that the plane was a U.S. Air Force B-26 bomber from Langley AFB. The bomber's pilot and single crewman had been running a routine navigation-training mission. Investigators determined that the crash wasn't head on, but that the plane had been skimming the treetops, probably due to disorientation that often accompanies night-flying. Only 20 feet higher and the craft would have managed to clear the peak. The two dead airmen, Capt. Donald Belleville of Illinois and Staff Sgt. James Butler of Massachusetts were both in their late 20's and married.
