Meg Jones

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Fifty years ago this November, a B-52 Stratofortress bomber crashed into a hill in Wisconsin's Northwoods, killing all nine people on board.

Residents and hunters gathering for the gun-deer opener the next morning heard and felt the low rumble and crash. A forest fire watcher named Roger Langham, whose farm was just west of the site, climbed a lookout tower to help searchers locate the wreckage.

Langham's great-nephew, Tom Sybert, wasn't born until six years later, but he grew up hearing stories about the tragic crash when he visited family living near Hauer in Sawyer County. Sybert is still curious about the plane crash of the gigantic bomber but couldn't find anyone who remembered exactly where the B-52 skidded into the earth.

After years of searching the internet and scouring Google Earth, Sybert, of Northbrook, Ill., filled out an online request form for a map library in Madison.

It took Jaime Martindale just two hours to do what Sybert couldn't — find the crash site.

The Arthur H. Robinson Map Library in Science Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus has a half million items in its print collection, including maps, globes, charts and atlases. The print collection includes 250,000 aerial photographs dating to the 1930s.

When Sybert emailed a Google map with a rectangle of the general area, Martindale, a map and geospatial data librarian, requested more information. As she waited for a response, she began to do what librarians do best — dig.

"I found some newspaper articles that had been scanned online and local histories of Sawyer County that all described the event and provided details, not only the details of the location but what happened," Martindale said in a phone interview.

She learned that a B-52G bomber from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was on a low-level terrain avoidance mission on the night of Nov. 18, 1966, when it clipped the tops of trees and crashed northeast of Hayward. She began looking for hills in aerial photos taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has regularly snapped photos since the 1930s to manage and assess cropland.

It didn't take her long to find it — a 1970 USDA photo showing the still quite visible gash in the forest.

"I ended up finding a photo from four years later but you could still see it because it left such a big mark. I pulled a reference photo from 1962 to make sure it wasn't there," said Martindale.

Sybert was ecstatic to learn Martindale had solved the mystery. The remote spot where the plane skidded and crashed is partly owned by a friend of Sybert's family and partly Lac Courte Oreilles tribal land.

Sybert paid for a plaque honoring the Air Force members who lost their lives: Capt. Curtis E. Robertson, pilot; 1st Lt. Darrick R. Negron, co-pilot; Capt. Edward E. Kamph, radar navigator; 1st Lt. Jerome P. Calligari, navigator; Capt. Michael J. Dunlap, electronic warfare officer; Airman 1st Class Gerald D. Turney, gunner; Lt. Col. Jack Atherton, instructor pilot; Maj. James H. Crook, instructor navigator; and Master Sgt. Lonnie Woodard, electronics and maintenance engineer.

Bulldozers were needed to clear a path to the wreckage in 1966, and artifacts have occasionally turned up since then because the crash site was hundreds of yards long.

"It's always been in the back of my mind. My kids and I are rebuilding an old Willys jeep and we figured it would be a good thing to use to get into the woods and plant a memorial piece," said Sybert, who is seeking permission from the landowner to install it.

Sybert, 44, is planning on a private memorial the weekend after Veterans Day, which would be a few days before the 50th anniversary of the crash. He plans to film the memorial and put it online in case family members of the crew want to see it.

He grew up in the Chicago area, but spent summers visiting his mother's family near Hauer, and his folks have a house on a nearby lake. He remembers visiting Langham, though he never talked much about the crash to his great-uncle, who has since died.

"I remember one summer when I was 10 or 11, driving around in my uncle’s jeep with my cousin and we saw a wing leaned up against a tree. I found some information from the Stone Lake Historical Society, which has a few artifacts of the crash," said Sybert. "The whole idea behind going up there and planting a plaque stemmed around just wanting to remember the crew that perished."

The map library is named after a professor who taught cartography at UW-Madison from 1947 to 1980. Arthur H. Robinson was director of the map division for the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, during World War II, and the library has a nice collection of World War II intelligence maps.

The service Sybert used is popular among members of the public who may not be able to drive to the Robinson Map Library in Madison, said Martindale, who has been a map librarian at UW for 13 years.

"This was a highlight for my career. I just became so engrossed and caught up with this request," said Martindale.