In 1976, in the Scottish Loch Ness at a depth of 70 meters, the remains of an aircraft that sank during the Second World War were found. It was the Vickers Wellington British twin-engine bomber. The plane was the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, the man who created the "bouncing bomb" designed to destroy dams in the Ruhr region of Germany during the Nazi war. The team that dropped these bombs was called "Dam Breakers."
The plane found has attracted great interest from military historians and aviation specialists who want to raise it to the surface. The study involved a group of submariners from the British University of Heriot-Watt. As a result of research, and also thanks to the help of the British Royal Navy, it was finally determined that the aircraft belonged to the Wellington series. In 1979, it was even possible to identify its serial number: N2980. There was nothing mysterious about the history of the N2980. At the end of 1939, he took part in fourteen bombing flights over Germany, and then was transferred to the Scottish city of Lossiemouth, where he was used to train flight crews. However, his accident, the official documents of which were always in the public domain, turned out to be an unforgettable story.
According to military reports, the plane crashed into Loch Ness Lake on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1940. During a severe blizzard, when the plane dangled over the Monadh Liat mountains, problems arose with one of the engines. As a result, squadron commander Nigel Marwood-Elton gave the crew an order to urgently leave the plane, and four people jumped out of the plane with parachutes. At the same time, unfortunately, the gunner-gunner, 20-year-old Sergeant John Stanley Fansome, died tragically. His parachute wrapped around the wing of the doomed plane.
As the crew raced towards the exit from the plane, the pilots Marwood-Elton and Slater tried to maintain control of the plane. Dusk was deepening, and, struggling with gusts of strong wind and snow, they, oddly enough, were able to land the plane on the surface of the water near the ancient castle of Arkarth. When the water poured into the plane from all directions, they managed to pull the side boat onto the right wing and sail away from the plane, and he went under the water almost intact. When the pilots reached the coast, they stopped the truck, the surprised driver of which quickly took them to the port of Inverness.
Only in September 1985, not without incident, was the main part of the aircraft's body removed from the water, and the search for numerous scattered fragments continued until 1986. Incredibly, the plane's taillights were still in working order. The well-preserved remains of N2980 can now be viewed in the hangar of the Brookland Air Museum, located in Surrey, UK.
And only now can we come to the strangest parts of this story, which relate to the world of the paranormal, the afterlife and mysterious creatures, thanks to which Loch Ness became famous.
As noted above, Vickers Wellington N2980 was recovered in 1976 and finally identified in 1979. However, in 1978, a group of submariners, using high-tech cameras designed for great depths, received clear images of an airplane and … a ghostly human figure in the form of the British Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Was it the unsettled spirit of Sergeant John Stanley Fensome who lost his life on the wing of an airplane? Did the shooting of the plane disturb his supernatural sleep? It is quite possible that this was the case.
Among several episodes associated with this story, there is the case of a man named Peter Smithson, who told paranormal researcher Bruce Barrymore Halpenny about his encounter with the ghost of a pilot. On the morning of one of the days of the same 1978, Peter saw someone rise from the water to the shore. The first and quite natural reaction of Smithson was the assumption that there was some kind of accident.
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It was easy to understand, since the man emerging from the water was dressed in military clothes and was dragging a parachute with him. But Smithson was confused by the uniform the man wore. It was clearly outdated and more related to the era of the 1940s, when the world was trying to defeat the hordes of Adolf Hitler. Peter called out to the man to make sure he was okay, but the response he received was creepy. The man turned slightly, pointed to the waters of Loch Ness and suddenly disappeared, leaving a local with mixed feelings and the suspicion that a ghost was in front of him.
“What the hell, I felt like a fool. Faced with a ghost with a camera around my neck, I didn’t even have the idea to photograph it,”Peter commented on his meeting.
And the strangeness continued. The writer Joseph Zarzhinsky was approached by a man named Murdo Urquart, who claimed that on September 15, 1985, when the operation to lift the N2980 was in full swing, almost over the place where the plane sank, he saw nothing more than Nessie sailing by. Perhaps this was due to the fact that on the very day that Urquart encountered this creature, his fishing nets, spread out near the crash site, were mysteriously torn by someone.
Voronina Svetlana