The White Bird Mystery Deepens

Two weeks before Charles Lindbergh became the most famous pilot in the world, two French aviators may have already crossed the Atlantic.

Or at least — they may have come astonishingly close.

In Part 1 of this special Miles Ahead series, we explored the dramatic race for the Orteig Prize, the $25,000 reward offered for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris.

The story most people know ends with Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis.

But aviation history almost took a very different turn.

On May 8, 1927, French war heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli took off from Le Bourget in L’Oiseau Blanc — The White Bird — attempting to reach New York first.

They never arrived.

For nearly a century, the assumption has been that the airplane was lost somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But in Part 2 of the podcast, the evidence begins to point somewhere else entirely: Newfoundland. And the case is surprisingly strong.

When Nungesser and Coli approached North America, they were flying into a region where airplanes were almost nonexistent. Which means that when people heard one, they noticed.

Several witnesses reported seeing or hearing a large white aircraft crossing Newfoundland on the morning of May 9, 1927. Even more compelling: these weren’t recollections decades later. Many of the accounts were sworn affidavits recorded at the time, preserved today in Newfoundland archives.

The reports line up remarkably well.

• The aircraft was white.

• The sightings occurred sequentially across the island.

• The timing of the sightings jives with an aircraft traveling at about 100 mph.

Taken together, the testimony traces a possible flight path across Newfoundland — suggesting the White Bird may have reached land after all.

But something was clearly wrong.

At St. Mary’s Bay, witnesses reported the aircraft appeared to be on fire and turned west instead of continuing southwest toward New York.

That deviation may hold the key to the mystery.

Ric Gillespie — the aviation historian and investigator guiding us through this story — believes the aircraft may have suffered a coolant failure.

The White Bird used a water-cooled engine, unique among the competitors in the Orteig race. If a coolant pipe burst, it would have produced a long trail of white steam — easily mistaken for smoke by observers on the ground.

In that situation, the pilots would have had only one priority: Find somewhere to land. Fast. The White Bird was designed to land in the water; ideally, New York Harbor. But it could not safely land in rough seas. It needed something calmer.

And according to the charts Nugesser and Coli were carrying, there was exactly one place nearby that offered it: Great Gull Pond, a small inland lake just seven miles from the coast.

From the air, it would have looked like a perfect emergency landing site. Except for one problem. There is a small rocky island sitting right in the middle of the pond.

The most haunting clue surfaced shortly after the flight disappeared.

A muskrat trapper named Anthony McGrath later recalled hearing three loud explosions near Gull Pond on the morning of May 9, 1927.

When he returned months later, in winter, he reportedly saw metal wreckage protruding through the ice near the island in the pond.

In that isolated part of Newfoundland in 1927, metal was valuable. Over time, locals scavenged pieces of the wreck. Crucial fragments disappeared.

But the story never went away.

Decades later, in 1969, someone finally connected the dots: a newspaper article suggested that the wreckage in that remote pond might belong to the missing French aircraft.

That revelation would eventually draw an aviation sleuth named Ric Gillespie into the case.

Ric didn’t start out searching for the White Bird.

In fact, he was running an aviation insurance business in New Jersey when his brother mailed him a Yankee Magazine article about the mystery.

It mentioned a rumor that the aircraft had crashed in Maine's forests. The article ended with a line that stuck in Ric’s mind: “Someday someone may stumble across an old engine in the woods…”

Ric remembers thinking: Why someday? Why not now?

That moment eventually led him to found TIGHAR — The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, an organization that has spent decades investigating some of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

The White Bird was the case that started it all.

And today, the most promising lead may lie beneath the mud of Gull Pond, Newfoundland.

In Part 3 of this series, we take the story to the water.

Ric Gillespie and his team have made multiple expeditions to Gull Pond — recovering artifacts and mapping the bottom of the lake.

The evidence is tantalizing.

But the final proof — the smoking gun — may still be buried beneath the silt.

With the 100th anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight approaching in May of 2027, the race is on to solve the mystery before the centennial.

And that means going back to Newfoundland.