If WMD-shaped computers don’t make your pulse race, how about tales of lost airplanes pulled from watery graves?

The photo above shows the remains of a vintage B-25 bomber, one of those lumbering old birds that I love so much, recovered from South Carolina’s Lake Murray. More photos can be found here. A little googling reveals that there was an Army Air Corps training base near Lake Murray during the war, and several of the lake’s small islands were used for target practice. B-25s saw a lot of action during World War II (most famously in Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor); several of them apparently ended up on the bottom of Lake Murray due to training accidents, although the exact number is disputed. This particular aircraft was recovered in September of last year.

Here is a page that provides a good overview of the Tokyo raid, B-25s over Lake Murray, and the salvage of this particular plane. From this page, you can go to a detailed news article on the salvage, and here is another, more extensive collection of photos.

In this day and age, when there are no blank spaces left on our maps and it seems like everything of interest has already been discovered, invented, or marketed, it thrills me to know that there are still treasures like this waiting to be found and people who want to go looking…