‘After a long and fruitless search,’ O’Dwyer continued, ‘one of our members stumbled on a book, Dreams of Wings, in which were reproduced the missing photos as they had appeared on the 1906 exhibit wall. The photo, by the exhibit cameraman, was shot from at least 40 feet away and at an angle to include a large part of the wall. The blurred picture was visible tucked partly under the top right corner of a frame surrounding the four static views of Airplane No. 21. Ironically, the book’s author was Thomas B. Crouch, then the Smithsonian’s curator of early aircraft [who later directed the aeronautical department], and the photos were credited to the Smithsonian.’

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O’Dwyer admits that it is impossible to identify the blurred object as an aircraft from a long-range shot of the wall-despite the research committee’s use of blow-up and modern computer studies of the picture. But, he emphasized, Stanley Beach saw the picture close up, examined it and fully described what was discernible-Whitehead in successful motor-driven flight.

The investigating committee’s more recent research has established for the first time the location of the claimed flight of August 14, 1901. The route taken by Whitehead and his helpers to reach the flight site from Bridgeport (as described in Howell’s Herald story on August 18), the testimony of at least two witnesses and the illustration drawn by Howell all combine to place the site at Turney’s Farm, about a half mile north of the Long Island Sound.

‘From all indications,’ said O’Dwyer, ‘Whitehead made his takeoff run diagonally across the farm, corner to corner, heading southwest into the prevailing wind. This gave him a potential flight course of at least a mile before reaching Fairfield Beach. Howell’s drawing depicts Whitehead aloft in Airplane No. 21, a line of elms and chestnut trees atop a knoll in the distance, and two stone walls intersecting near the trees. Today, the walls are still there, easily found and identifiable as those that Howell sketched almost a century ago!’

Members of the CAHA and the 9315th Squadron went door-to-door in Bridgeport, Fairfield, Stratford, and Milford to track down Whitehead’s long-ago neighbors and helpers. They also traced some who had moved to other parts of Connecticut and the United States. Of an estimated 30 persons interviewed for affidavits or on tape, 20 said they had seen flights, eight indicated they had heard of the flights, and two felt that Whitehead did not fly.

‘Look, I never knew Whitehead personally or anything about his aircraft. All I did was watch him fly.’ So spoke Frank Lanye, 92, on June 15, 1968, at his home in Waterbury, Conn. He was describing an autumn flight near Fairfield Beach in 1901, a year he remembered because it was a year after his 1900 discharge from the Navy. Present at the taped interview were the Smithsonian’s Garber, the CAHA’s Lippincott, O’Dwyer, and Don Richardson, the latter a Sikorsky Aircraft engineer.

John Ciglar, a Pine Street neighbor of Whitehead in 1901, told a Bridgeport Sunday Post reporter in 1940: ‘I was nine years old when I and a group of other boys saw Whitehead fly in July or August 1901. I vividly recall the flight in a vacant lot at the corner of Cherry Street and Hancock Avenue in the West End of Bridgeport….Whitehead put every nickel he earned into flying machines, but as far as patents and recognition were concerned he didn’t seem to care.’

Ironically, several flight experimenters who later dismissed Whitehead as a fraud showed a strange curiosity about his work. Testimony exists, for example, that the Wright brothers visited Whitehead’s Bridgeport shop in 1901 and 1902 and had discussions with him. Among the witnesses were Anton Pruckner, Whitehead’s young machinist and engine assistant, and Cecil Steeves, another of Whitehead’s young neighbor helpers. Asked in later years how he knew the two men were the Wright brothers, Pruckner replied, ‘They had to introduce themselves.’ He said the pair visited ‘more than one time.’ Steeves, in a recorded interview in 1937, said he remembered a visit by the Wrights. ‘They came from Ohio,’ he said, ‘and under the guise of offering to help finance Whitehead’s inventions, actually received inside information about his work…. After they had gone away, Mr. Whitehead turned to me and said, ‘Now that I have given them the secrets of my invention they will probably never do anything in the way of financing me’-a good prophesy, as it turned out.’

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