The B-36 'Broken Arrow'
In February 1950 a US Air Force B-36 bomber carrying a Mark 4 atomic bomb (without its plutonium core) iced up over northern British Columbia; the crew dropped the bomb over the sea and bailed out. It was the first lost nuclear weapon.
1950 CE · 55.95, -128.45 · status: official
The account
Twelve of the seventeen crew were rescued on Princess Royal Island; five were never found. The aircraft itself was thought to have gone down at sea, but in 1953 a search plane spotted its wreck on Mount Kologet in the Kispiox range, far inland, raising the question of how it flew so far unmanned. The site is now protected under British Columbia's Heritage Conservation Act.
The sceptical view
The bomb's core was not on board, and later expeditions to the wreck found no sign of the weapon. The mystery is one of route and missing men, not of anything unearthly.
The researched reading
A documented accident caused by icing and engine fires. The unmanned flight inland is unusual but explainable, and the lingering questions come from nuclear-era secrecy, not anything stranger.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A known natural phenomenon | 40% | Severe icing caused three engine fires. After the crew bailed out, the abandoned bomber flew on under autopilot for roughly 300 km before hitting Mount Kologet. Aircraft flying on unmanned after the crew leaves is well documented. |
| Something known, misidentified | 20% | The “mystery” of the inland wreck comes mostly from the crew’s and searchers’ wrong assumption, in the dark and in a storm, that the plane would go into the sea. The autopilot setting and the remaining engines took it on a different course. |
| Secret human technology | 15% | Nuclear secrecy is real here. The USAF quietly blew up the wreck in 1954, and some researchers still ask whether the bomb casing really went into the sea. Secrecy explains the gaps in the record, not anything exotic. |
| Undetermined | 15% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 4% | Survivors’ accounts made in shock and darkness disagree on details, which feeds speculation. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 2% | There is no sign of fabrication, though later stories about the five missing men go well beyond the evidence. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 2% | Not needed. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 2% | Every part of the story has an ordinary explanation. |
Official position: The USAF reported the dummy bomb (no plutonium core) jettisoned and detonated over the sea, and the aircraft lost; the wreck, found in 1953, was later demolished by a recovery team.