Word: scharf
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Despite persuasive evidence that U.S. Air Force pilot Charles Scharf died when his plane slammed into a Vietnamese mountainside, Barbara Scharf Lowerison remains convinced that her brother survived and is being held against his will in Asia. She has only fragmentary evidence to support her belief, like a fleeting glimpse of someone who might have been her brother in an old East German film about POWs, and a CIA report that lists him as a prisoner. "I know my brother's alive," she maintains...
...that her brother was captured and shipped to China. She reasons that he would have been valuable to Beijing because, she says, he told her that during the Vietnam War he undertook secret reconnaissance flights over China. Lowerison says when Air Force officials told her and her mother that Scharf's plane had gone down, they added a strange command. "We were told not to talk about him or give out his name to anyone," she recalls, "not even our neighbors...
Members of Scharf's family believe they spotted him in an East German film of American POWs made during the war. A figure who appears onscreen for perhaps one second has what they say is Scharf's characteristic waddling walk. Lowerison also has a paper, found in her brother's service records, that she has been told is a "CIA report." It lists her brother as one of 12 POWs identified by the agency in the same film...
...case, the one the Pentagon lists as 0158. The joint team had interviewed witnesses who had seen a jet explode in midair, others who found two dead bodies at the crash site and others who claimed that they had buried the two pilots. The Vietnamese investigators concluded that Scharf and Massucci both died when their plane crashed into Suoi Pai Mountain...
...visit to the American Office for POW-MIA Affairs, set up last summer in Hanoi's Boss Hotel, cast some doubt on that conclusion. Bell, head of the office, said the pilot of an F-4C flying in formation with Scharf's had reported that he saw a parachute fully deployed. That meant one of the crew could have survived and may have been taken prisoner. Because Scharf's body was never located, said Bell, "our conclusion was that further efforts are warranted." But one of the office's investigators later insisted, "Both of them are dead...