Thinking Sideways: The Mull Air Mystery

heard about until about five days ago. So I mean most of the ones that are out there, we've all heard about him, right, yeah, most Yeah, Yeah, I'd never this, This was new to me. Yeah yeah. And I just don't care about airplanes, so there's more than airplanes involved with this hole. Okay, So today we're gonna talk about the moll Air mystery. That's mall as in m U l L the Isle of Mole in Scotland, actually in the Hebrid's I guess that's what they call those all

them islands out there. Okay, So our mystery concerned. It's a guy named Peter Gibbs. Peter Gibbs was a professional musician who played the violin. He played with the London Symphony Orchestra and later on he led the Scottish Symphony Orchestra. So this guy was a serious musician. He also flew fighter planes. In World War Two. He flew spitfires and was considered an air ace he was. He flew for the r A of the Royal Air Force and after the war he continued to fly private planes for the

rest of his life along with being a musician. Yeah, he liked flying, So long story short. On Christmas Eve nine and nine pm, he was staying with his girlfriend at a place called the Glen forsa hotel on the island of Mall and at nine fifteen on Christmas Eve, he took off in this rented Cessna F one airplane because the hotel just handily happen to have an air strip right in front of it, which is really cool. Yeah,

that's not something you typically would dine. Yeah, I know, and said that they put it in nineteen sixty six. Apparently they wanted to have, you know, easier ways for people to get onto the island, and they also wanted to have a way to airlift people out if they were sick and they needed to go to mainland. That's so that's why they put it in. So anyway, he took off at and headed off over the sound of Mole, which is a big body of water to the north

of the island, and of course he vanished. Yeah, he vanished. Now, before you guys fling your iPods to the ground and yelling, not another frigging missing person's story, I have to say this particular mystery has got a pretty strange little twist in it. So bear with us for a little bit. Would you guys agree that this mystery has got a kind of twist, a serious twist. Yeah, okay, First our cast of characters. We've already met Peter Gibbs. His girlfriend's

name was Felicity Granger. Tim Howitt is the co owner of the Glenforce Hotel. David Howitt is a brother also on the hotel is He also went by the name of Scott McCadam, but more on that later. And then Pauline Howett. I'm not sure she's mentioned in the news story, but nobody says exactly who she's married to her, if she's a sister or what. Well, he won't worry about that.

It doesn't really matter, Oh, I seem I think Pauline might be one of the people who was who dealt with the air field in some capacity, because I remember reading the news article that I think you're referencing, And I believe that she stayed in the house that was next to it, and so she witnessed some of this certainly, but she the relationship is unknown, right name? So yeah, wife's sister, I don't know, I don't care. Yeah. Oh

and just just a quick fun aside. You guys remember Metaphornio. Yeah, yeah, the island that she died on, Iona is right next to Mall. Yeah, Moules the island. If you want to get to Iona by road, then you have to take the ferry to Mall, drive across Mall and to take another ferry to get to I ownA so yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, you've got a thing for these islands. I know they're kind of cool. I'd like to go out there and do a little research since we started making

some actual money on this. Yeah, okay, okay, back to our story here though. Um Peter Gibbs and Felicity Granger had flown to Moll for a holiday over Christmas time, and they were staying at the Glen Forest, a hotel of course, which has an air strip next to us. I just mentioned. So that night's Christmas Eve, they had dinner together, Gibbs and Felicity Granger, having split a bottle

of wine. He uh. He then announced that to Tim Howitt, the owner, that he was going to go do a little flying, and then how It asked him accial that that was a wise idea, but Gibbs said, yeah, I'm gonna do it whether you like it or not. And so but I mean, for one thing, it was dark, dark, cold, and you've had a half a bottle of wine and

there was a storm moving in. Yeah, there was a storm coming into So Felicity went along with him, but she does it wasn't gonna actually flash he just needed just needed to get out there with a couple of flashlights and go down to one end of the runway and lay the flashlights out so you know, you can see where he was going. Because it's a primitive air strip, it's just grass and it doesn't have like landing lights

or anything like that. So typically if they want to do a landing or anything like that at night, what they'll usually do is bringing some cars and park cars around the airstrip. People can see it that way. This is headlights on. Yeah I know. Yeah. Also, I just like what kind of guy is like, oh, it's Christmas Eve. I'm here with my sweetie. We're like in this hotel. We just had a romantic dinner. I'm gonna fly in by.

But he did it, and uh, maybe he was just bored, you know, he just wanted to He just wanted to go out and do something fun. He was. He was a little bit of a daredevil. I was I was reading something that was written by one of his co musicians that he was into the symphony orchestra with. And uh, one one am using little store is that they were

hated they're going to go to a performance. They were both performing in the symphony and they were in they were the traffic was just totally backed up and not moving and but it turns out the oncoming lanes were pretty clear. And so this guy said says to Gifts, he says, what are we gonna do? We're gonna be late, and Gift says, no, we're not move over, I'm driving and so and so he puts the card care it just goes into the oncoming lanes, just just buzzes on. Yeah.

Sure not so. Yeah, he kind of was a thrill seeker. Well, he also had had a bit of a temper too, Like he seemed a bit of a hothead, because I remember reading the story about him in the symphony and evidently they had some conductor who was a total jerk, and he finally stood up to the guy, and because of that, he ended up getting fired. But he was the only one who just said, that's it. I'm saying something, Yeah,

take it anymore. And he was in the right. But apparently, but apparently that's just the cultures that you never you never talked that way to the conductor, even though the conductor deserved it. And it was yeah, and it was actually kind of funny. I mean, that's so so so upper crust. The rules are so are so subtle. Because the conductors in fraction was at the end of her performance, he didn't wait for the applause. He just turned and

walked off the stage. And that's that's considered a major insult to the audience, to the musicians, and so and you know, and and so that's what the whole dust up was about. Anyway, But we're way off base here. Let's let's get that David Howitt heard heard the plane being started, and he went out and got his binoculars, and he was watching the Cessna, and he was a little bit, a little bit worried about this being nighttime and all, and yeah, and and he he handed the

binoculars over to Pauline Howett. She was watching them set up the flashlights, and she said that she was sure that both flashlights were moving at the same time. Now she Felicity went to do the flash he was in the airplane because she could hear the plane revving the engine. The plane engine was revving, so somebody was in there controlling the plane. So if Gibbs was in the plane, how is she how is she Because the airstrip is about wide maybe, so how is she managing to move

both of these flash lights at the same time? So they were placed on the opposite ends. It wasn't like one person with like what what are they using? Airports? Now? Were there making the air motion? Yeah, the lights to

to direct the traffic. It wasn't moving like that. It was a It was placed at the end, but placed on the corners so that he knew where the end of the runway was, so that he knew he had to be airborne by that plane and he could end and he could aim between the two lights, but obviously they'd be apart, so probably it was, Yeah, it was. It was a little odd. She was under the impression that perhaps there was more than one person, more than two people down there. And Tim Howitt saw the same thing.

He was in the Apparently the hotel has an observe a lounge. Of course it does. Of course it's like a little airport, so you know, of course it does. And yeah, he also said that both let both lights were moving at the same time, but when asked, a Felicity Granger later said, no, it was just her. There's no other better than nobody else out there, is it. Then it wouldn't have been on a hill or anything. They wouldn't have been rolling. No, No, it's flat, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So so that's a little bit of a puzzler. But we'll talk about that a little bit later here, if we talked about it at all. But so he slammed in the gear and took off and flew out over the sound of ball, and David Howett was a little bit worried. So he there's a place just down the road, and you can see this on the aerial photo if you want to do Google Earth or whatever. It's just to the east, but I don't know, five six feet down the road or quartermall down the road, I don't know.

But Pennygown Cemetery is right on the sound and it's got a good panoramic view. So he drove down there with the radio so he could just sort of see if the plane came back and then listen for distress calls and things like that, because he was, like I said, worried. And of course, not long after he arrived there a nice big sleet storm rolled in which lasted for seventy two hours. So, yeah, bad luck. Nothing's worse than a

sleet store. It's not rain, it's icy. Yeah, and you gotta wonder what that's gonna do to your plane, you know. So it's it's gonna ice up your windshield, it's gonna icee up your your flaps and your wings, and it's like that bad news. Yeah, that's terrible news when you're in the air, really bad news. They waited, but Gibbs did not come back, and so next day, on Christmas Day, called the authorities in and there was a big land

and sea search. These r A F and Navy helicopters and a police mountain rescue unit, lots and lots of volunteers, people who knew the area pretty well, and they went over the island and searched it looking for looking for a wreckage, and didn't find any plane wreck. That's where the story ended for the time being. But then four months later, one nineteen seventy six, a local shepherd found his body up on the hillside above Pennygown Cemetery. Yeah,

up on the hillside about fo up. I feel like this is why we have our rule about five years, right, because like people email us and say, oh, there's story this person disappeared, and it's like, well, it's only been two months, but yeah, his body will turn up, don't worry. Oh no, that's the worst, you know, when the park turns up the day afterwards and we put the show

in the air. Yeah yeah, but anyway, So anyway, folks, I told you, I promise you there'd be a weird twist, and this is a So they found his body, but no plane wreck. They found his body. The only pre death injury on his body. And I say pre death because there have been some scavengers and birds kind of pecking at him and stuff like that. So he had some injuries, but the only pre death injury they could

find was a three inch laceration on his left shin. Now, if he had fallen out of the plane or or jumped out of the plane or whatever had broken bones, he would have had broken bones, massive contusions, I mean, yeah, So he didn't have any of that, no injuries to speak of. So the pathologists included the exposure was the

cause of death. Yeah, And they also they also examined his clothes and his boots and his hair and everything for any traces of salt water or marine life, you know, only little any little bugs that got and there was none. There was none of that stuff. It's it's a real puzzler.

If he I guess the question would be, like, is that something that would wash away if there was a lot of areen or sleep I would think that, you know, the hair and the clothes even possibly it would wash away, But not the boots he was wearing flying boots, like

the insides. Yeah, they would definitely they would be getting stuck in the wicking through the material, right, But that it would be saltwater versus whatever water was washing over it over the course of the four four once that he was thing, Okay, yeah, I mean so I think it's pretty unlikely. But in October of the same year ninety six, local farmer found a tire from the Sessina

washed up about two miles northwest of the hotel. Yeah, and apparently apparently they had the serial number either painted on or written on or something like that. I would imagine it be cast into the tire. And you think about your tires that you buy for your car. There's all those numbers are right along the inside of the rim. I imagine that's got to be some kind of serial number that's got a big Yeah. I don't know, but yeah. So the only way that that they were able to

match it to these to the Sesna. So that's the only thing that they found from the wreckage of the Cessna for years. In September, so that's like eleven years ten years later, Yeah, eleven years after a diver found the wreckage of a small plane in the Sound of Ball and two locations are cited in the stories that

I read. Once says that it was found out the cost off the coast of Open, the city the town of Open, about a mile offshore, and which puts it, I don't know, ten miles away, maybe to the southeast from the hotel. But another one says that it's about a mile east northeast from the hotel out the sound. So that's that's a pretty huge variation. Uh So the diver reported that the wings have been torn off the

plane about the doors were still latched and shut? Were they? Wait, let me clarify that, because I've read some things and I just want to clarify they were latched, shut dot locked. Yeah, they were latched. I don't I don't even know something about locked. And so that's why I was curious, because I did some digging about the plane, and I never saw anything that said that the doors locked like that. I would assume you could lock them from the outside

at least. I don't know why you would need them to be locked from the inside, you know, when you're flying there as long as they're latched, but you would kind of want to be able to lock it up when you like walk away from it when it's on the ground. Right. Oh. Yeah. The thing about it is if he if he crashed and then swam out of the plane, it wouldn't be latched. No, you wouldn't turn

around even if out of yeah, yeah, you're going. Yeah. Well, if he says, say he jumped out at speed, if you managed to force it would have slapped it shut again, but then he would have had broken mounds. Yeah, Okay, we're sorry, we're theorizing. But anyway, I've seen no documentation. I've tried to find something. You would think that he would. He would write down the call numbers or whatever they are on the side of the diver, if you think he would have done that, But I don't. I don't

see that he did. He's basically said he found a plane, and everybody thinks that this gives this plane, but nobody knows exactly for sure why he didn't market with the booty. I don't know, although he doesn't remember either where it is. I mean, I'm sure you could go back and search and find it somehow. It's just probably ways to find and they probably should try to figure this out. It would be they're never really going to solve the mystery

until they find that airplane. Even then they probably won't, but you know, there might be a clue in there. So anyway, years go by, then again, a lot of people are assuming, but nobody knows for sure that that's just plane. But an early two thousand floor two thousand four or three Royal Navy minesweepers were up doing stuff off the coast of Open again and they found the wreckage of a plane about a mile off of Open.

So that sort of supports the divers location as being a mile off of Open unless it's a different wreck and there's no reason it couldn't be a different ren. I was gonna say it could be any plane. Yeah, that set out of speculation in the papers that they thought this might be Gibbs as plane that the rf IT found. They said that they found a submersible of cameras down there and stuff like that to get pictures

of it. And they analyzed it, investigated, and they figured out that the recage they found was a Catalan a flying boat. Familiar with those things, those amphibious planes, Yeah, they're they're kind of they're kind of big, and they've got the bottom of the hull is shaped almost like

a boat, and then they've got overhead wings. Okay, so except for without the pontoons, right, yeah, I doesn't have the because like a normal seaplane would have like the pontoons instead of like wheels, and they just like take off and land that way. These are more like boat planes.

They still have small pontoons, right, but it's not the same. Yeah, it's not like you know when you see to be right right, Yeah, yeah, it's probably it's probably nice to have some pontoon, you sort of floaty thing out there, just in case a wave catches you on the side. Yeah, yeah, but they'd be on the wings, not on like legs below the plane where running gears supposed to be running gear. Thank you planes, not your No. So this rect was

a disappointment, Yeah, unfortunately. Um so the location is still a mystery, and who knows, maybe the plane didn't even crash. I mean it's possible, yeah maybe he just but I'm not going to theorize about this yet. We'll talk about that later. Uh. There have been two two books are written about this, The Great Mall Air Mystery by Scott McCadam, whose name actually is David Howitt, the co owner of

the hotel. So he was ghostwriting, yeah he was, yeah, yeah, maybe maybe he was afraid that if the book came out and turn out to be really lame, and all everybody would make fun of him, so he was a name. And the other book is fictionalized account to the whole thing called These Demented Lands by Alan Warner, who lives in Oben. I remember seeing the cover of that, at least the cover of the one that I saw. I had a really cool cover. All Right, you're ready to

swing in to the theories, Okay, alright, good enough. So I've got several theories here. One is that the plane crash into the sound of Mall and he managed to escape and swim to shore. And once he was on shore, he could have from where he was at he could have walked to the road, made a right turn and walked down the road a little waste to the hotel. Wasn't that far? This is This is based on if he crashed a mile out to see from the airfield, not if he crashed near open correct. Yeah, okay, yeah,

Well it's it's conceivable even that. I don't know how well assessment one fifty flies without a pilot in it. I don't know how far it would have gone. It's conceivable he didn't crash a mile out. Maybe he bailed closer to shore and the plane went out and then

crashed further out. I could see that. Yeah, but the plane crashed, he manages to escape somehow, and apparently the windshield was broken, so he maybe swam out through that then, because since the doors were locked, I can't imagine he'd swim out from a sinking plane and turn around and shut the door. No, but I couldn't the water pressure have shut the door. I mean it's possible, you know. And the other thing to keep in mind is that the plane wasn't even like maybe discovered until like ten

years later. Right, maybe it was and fish shot, So it's always a little bit. It's always possible, you know, that the currents are when it tumbles to the bottom and the wings are snapping off, because the wings were snapped off in the the one that was found that I said, the wings were broke off, So I could see conceivably, if the plane goes down and it tumbles across the surface of the water and the door is

not latched, it's probably going to get slam shut. And even if it came down gently, I could see as it sinks and it hits the bottom, if it happens to land, right, I mean, this is circumstantial, and god knows if we're even on the right track here, but we don't even know that this actually gives us plane right. Yeah, but it is possible that an open door can be shut. So he swims the shore. Once he's on shore, he apparently maybe had hypothermy. In fact, it probably did swim

through that icy cold water. So he gets to the or and gets confused because all he needs to do is walk up to the road, make a right turn, like I said, go down to the hotel, and he's home free. Instead he wanders up the hillside and then just probably got overcome with hypothermia and died of exposure. That's one possibility. The reason is not to like this, is it again to know salt water that we mentioned potentially could have been washed off, but probably not, probably not.

The other reason I don't like it is he was that he was wearing his clothes and his boots. Because if you guys ever tried swimming with clothes on and water, especially shoes. Oh yeah, So I mean that's the first thing to do, is you cut your clothes off, take your clothes off, whatever you do, you got to they put they waste so much and they put so much drag on you. So that's the other reason I don't like this. There that this idea that he crashed and

got out of the plane and swim shore. The next theory is that he bailed out of the plane over water and swim to shore. Felicity Granger did that before he left on a slide. He said that the things went south, he would just throttle the plane way back and just open the door and bail out. That's what he told her, and maybe that's what he did. But of course the reasons not to like this theory is

the same as above. Stall salt water and yeah, and also I checked the stall speed for Assessa forty eight miles an hour, and I'm not sure how easy it would be to open the door forty eight hour. So this is the point where I geeked out a little bit, because he was in a Cessna F one fifty h I think was the model. I think that was the

newest model. And I started reading through the changes that they had done to the planes in ten years, looking specifically at like the doors and all of that, and the doors had they had upgraded him to a simple latch handle, much like you would see in a car that's the seventies model, you know, the inside doors, they're just a simple her rather than anything that's a little

more difficult to get your hand on. But the other thing that they did, because Cessnas are so small, is they added three inches of shoulder room to the door for the pilot and the co pilot whoever's in the passenger seat. So I got the impression and I could never really see an easy profile, but I think we've all seen pictures of Cessna's and when you look at them dead on, they're not flat on the sides. They kind of flare out at the top a little bit,

you know what I'm saying. They're kind of a V shape. So I could see and I'm not nuts about this theory, but I went down this road anyway. If he's getting close to a stall speed, you know, this fifty mile an hour threshold, it is possible in my mind, not easy, but possible too because he's got that leverage room now because the door is kind of cammered over to be

able to push it. And that's one of those things to me that once the once he gets it far enough and the wind starts pulling in through that gap. It's gonna help him. That air pressure that's rushing into the cabin, to me, would help pull that door aid you and pushing so you're not pushing against all of the wind because the oncoming wind is now rushing in and rushing out that gap you've created. It's it's not perfect. I don't think that's a perfect theory, but I see

how it's potentially plausible. Yeah, I think it would be hard. It'd be hard, but if you're determined enough and desperate enough, you can probably do. The Other thing that makes me wonder about that is when you start pushing, and so you're going out the left hand side, you're sitting on the left hand side. When you start pushing that door out, what's the plane gonna do? It's gonna start making a

left turn right? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I go. Of course, at this point you're abandoning ships, so maybe you don't care. I don't. There's an experienced pilot and actually find that, Well, how bad is this gonna be? Is it just gonna slowly start turning? Laughter? Is it just suddenly gonna start like whipping around laft going to a stall and then just starts, you know, spinning madly down to the earth.

And we do we know if he if the plane was equipped with the parachute as far as I know, and it didn't have a parachute in And I don't think those planes are pretty small. I know. That's that's why I was asking is I didn't think that would be something that you would standard have in assessina. But you know, he's he's x RF. He may you know, he may have insisted on something and I never saw anything about that. But he rented it. I think they

would have mentioned that's right, he didn't. It wasn't his personal plain. Yeah, another fun fact about him. Yeah, you know his flying license wasn't valid. I know it expired. Was flying with a suspended license. Yeah, the cops were going to pull him over, Yeah, go to his grave side and run him a ticket. I don't see that happening. Yeah, I don't think so. So bailing out, bailing out of the plane over the water, No, I don't. I don't know.

It doesn't really cut the mustard from me. Now, So next theory is that he bailed out of the plane over land. I kind of like this theory. Yeah, it's bails out the plane just goes on and crashes in the water somewhere, because obviously they never found the wreckage on the land. So let's say he bails out and as he hits the ground, he's knocked unconscious and before we can regain caustiousness, he's overcome by by hypothermia and exposure.

But he didn't have serious injury, I guess my serious injuries. My thought is that perhaps, you know, he could have bailed out, like if he was having a hard time getting altitude for whatever reason or when he took off, Like nobody really says like what happened immediately after he took off, but maybe he like was miss gaging because it was dark and all that. You know, maybe he was miss gauging and he was he found himself very close to the ground and you know, about to crash

or whatever for whatever reason. So he bailed all doubt, but he was a little confused. I mean, you know, you don't have to have a serious injury to like become confused and disoriented after something like that. So if he bailed out close to the ocean, turned around and said, oh, I'll just walk back to the hotel, you know, his gash on his leg because he hit it when he jumped out, So he starts trying to walk back to the hotel, and then his overcome by exposure because it's

leading horribly. He dies on the mountaintop where he thought he was supposed to be for whatever reason, and then the plane continues on and crashes into the sea. That's my theory, and I can dovetail right off of that, because that doesn't exactly explain what happened to the assessment itself. But if you go and you look at the map of this area, there's a pretty decent sized road there, so it is possible that he could have landed on the road. So nobody saw him come back to the airport,

but he could have landed on the road. Okay, we're still saying that he's you know, he's he's injured himself somehow, he's disoriented and he just steps out of the plane. He didn't turn it off, and it's a big storm. It will keep the truck forward. And that road is pretty close to the edge of the coastline. I don't know if it's that close. Well, I mean it's close enough. And you know, an airplane if you leave it at a decent, a decent RPM, it'll keep walking forward and

eventually drive itself right into the water. Seems like somebody would have noticed it wouldn't go very far. But if it's, But if it's, if the doors are closed and it's covered in ice and it hits the water, it's not gonna sink super fast. We've got a crazy windstorm going on. It's possible that it got drug out to see I mean, and and this is that we're operating under the presumption that this wreck that was supposedly found is real. I mean again, this is we're pulling this out of nowhere.

But I'm just saying it's I think it what Devon came up with. This entirely possible that he failed close to land and then you know, I think it probably stayed. I don't think he probably landed. I think it probably probably bailed for whatever reason. Maybe it was getting icy and he realized, like crap, I can't actually keep flying. I'm going to take it as close as I can to the ground and then bail. Yeah, and it just you know, he would he would have been a lot

better off bailing over water. And I'll tell you, why did you go? I did you go on Google street View and look at the island or stare at you know? Well I did. I drove up down this road a little bit, the hotel and everything, and I looked at the countryside and there are a lot of rock outcroppings there everywhere in this island. So bailing over land really bad idea. I mean, if you have a nice smooth meadow, maybe, but if you're gonna smash your you're gonna smash yourself

to pieces on it. Well, he couldn't ran it right. Well, he's been he's been hanging out there and he knows what the countryside looks. You know, there's a lot of rocks sticking out of the ground. Yeah, I don't know, man, So yeah, I think that jumping out over the land would have been the like the worst I since New Coke. There's another popular theory out there. You guys have probably seen seen this one. Peter Gibbs was an m I five agents. Yeah, I'm sorry. Maybe he was. I don't know.

I don't. I don't see any evidence of that, but he was doing cloak and dagger stuff in Northern Ireland. Perhaps Northern Ireland is actually not that far away from mole. So if he jumped in the plane and at the at the air speed of assessment one fifty, he could be in northern Ireland and I don't know what forty five minutes. It would also explain why he was like, oh, you know what I'm gonna do right now, leave my girlfriend and go on an airplane trip in the middle

of the night. Yeah, after some wine. And it's gross out because that's great cover. Well, I mean it's a it's a cover. You do what you're assigned to do and trying to maintain your cover. Yeah, so anyway, that's that's so he got over there. But when the sires the sere goes, his cover was blown. The IRA murdered him, and he brought his body back and dumped it on the hillside to send a message, and the plane was

never found and the plane was never found. Maybe, and this is not plausible, I mean, you know, it's a if the IRA had murdered him, I doubt that they would have taken the trouble to bring his body back to mall. But what if he flew Okay, wait, dovetailing on theories here. He flew and he picked somebody up and they went to have their clandestine meeting in the graveyard, or maybe it was the owner who like was like, oh, I'm worried about him, so I'm gonna go to this

one random place, the graveyard, because that makes sense. And they met, they had some something, right, they met, and the somebody else took the airplane and flewed away, and they knocked him over the head, knocked Gibbs right, his kids we've been talking about, got knocked him over the head and sent him wandering, and he wandered up the hill and passed out. And you don't again, you don't have to have that serious and injury to like pass out.

That lends credence to the why we're both flashlights moving at the same time, because there was that third person. Yeah, there was a third person. Maybe there was another person in the plane, and you know, they pushed Gibbs out at a low altitude and went on or you know whatever. Well, that's that's what I was going to get to, is my next theory, which is that he never got into plane to begin with. Let's say he was involved with

m I five and anything. Let's say M I five needs to um as quiet and discreet away as possible get to somewhere, we'll send Northern Ireland and x Field trade one of their guys bring him back home. So this is a two seater plane. And so what they did is they just had Gibbs positioned himself at this place which is commediately located not too far from Northern Ireland,

with a plane. And that way the guy who's going to fly the plane to Northern Ireland, collect the cargo bring it back, is he just he could just drive out there. He's not seen getting out a plane or anything like that. He just you know, takes off and heads the ball and quietly meets up with GiB Gets. The airplane takes off and unfortunately doesn't come back. So this puts gives and kind of a pickle because he's outside. You can't go back inside the hotel because he's supposed

to be in the plane. Sure, and your idea of somebody knocking him over the head as plausible. That's occurred to me that perhaps that happened there was yet other people hanging around. But another possibility is that he had some time to kill so he decided to go for a little hike and in the middle of the night. Yeah, not much else to do this, so he decided to, like, you know, hike up the hillside. And maybe he went up the hillside to see if he can catch sight

of the plane coming back. I don't know. I just you know, it's still the thing that like a little outlining to me continues to be the fact that the inn owner or the hotel owner was like, oh, I was worried about him, so I went to the graveyard, Like was it a particularly open meadow area where somebody might make an emergency landing? Like was there something special about the graveyard that made him say this is a reasonable place to go? Or is it that you know,

Gibbs was there or he knew something about something. I mean, you know, Gibbs was found close to that area, Like, well, I don't know that if you look at it on street view again, I drove past the graveyard, and it does have a nice clear, unobstructive view of the sound, isn't it. It's not real high, but it's a bit, but it's a little bit higher than most of the ground around it, Yeah, a little bit. And and so you know, he maybe his thinking was it he'd have

a better view from out there. I mean if he wanted to covertly meet with Gibbs. I mean, if he could just talk to him, chat with him at the hotel. He didn't really need to do that. Yeah, you couldn't knock him off at the hotel though, done. No, that's true. Yeah, back to my theory that he he was not actually in the plane. He goes for a hike and you know, remember you got a three inch laceration on his left shin he fell tripped perhaps, you know, and it could

be just an amazing coincidence. The guy on the plane had a terrible run of luck and wind up crashing because of the sleeve storm. And then Gibbs was out there just wandering around wondering how he Who's going to explain this when he gets back to the hotel and uh, and then he trips over one of those rock outcroppings I was just talking about, hits his head and immediately, you know, there's unconscious for a while and dies of exposure.

It could so it could be just something like that, or the guy doesn't crash, you know, like maybe the guy doesn't crash, but he's unsuccessed. You know, there are lots of things that could have happened to the pilot if there was another the third person pilot, Yeah, maybe he didn't crash, Maybe he just abscounded with the plane. Yeah. I guess that theory would mean that his girlfriend would have had to be in on it too. Yeah, that's the that's the problem I'm having a hard time with

is that she would also have to be an agent. Yeah. Now another possibility, if you want to look at it this way, Yes, if she's in on the whole thing. And another possibility is that this was a super super secret operation. List but let's presume, right, okay, because there was this run of bad luck because the plane took off and didn't come back, that means that Gibbs is supposed to be dead. And no, she doesn't kill him.

But what happens is gives gives him her phone phone, M I M I fiber or in my six or whatever whoever their handlers and they just say, hey, look, we're in a bit of a pickle here. If I confess that I was not in that plane we were blowing, we're going to blow the secret operation. So you guys need to find me a new identity and come up

with the corpse that we can plant somewhere. That's true, although and again, but that doesn't really make sense either, don't you think about it, Because if the plane disappeared and crashed at sea, they don't really need a corpse, so it probably was his corpse. You know. Well, I mean that's that's man, we're really getting off track here.

That's that's presuming that the plane did crash and that whoever took off didn't change their mind or double cross and get murdered by somebody at the other end of the flight. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you know that. I mean, that's that's presuming all of that. So it could be that they realize, uh, Billy has just turned to the other team and it's just totally hosed us here. What do we do? The one thing that's the and I like the idea of dumping a body, of planting replacement body.

What gives that a little bit of teeth for me is that when they searched for him and everybody was out and about, they were searching right near work right there. It's now it's possible that they were not looking for a body. They were looking for areage. Yeah, but you see a body. I mean, it doesn't seem like, I mean, it doesn't seem like this place is so gigantic that like, you know, you don't also notice that there's a dead body. But the thing about it that's sense it is wreckage.

It's a it's a fairly large item. You don't need to like, you know, line up, line up in a file five ft apart stuff. So yeah, and I don't know, I don't know what. You could probably stand an entire hillside from the road, and so, you know, I don't know how close he got to where his body was. All right, I'm liking somebody did come back in a later day and put the body there. I don't, I don't. I don't know why you'd go to the trouble maybe like maybe why not? Yeah, who knows. Gosh, this is

a big home mystery. And this is one of the first times I think that Joe's don a mystery that he has not claimed to solve. I think that, Well, it's because it was had that crazy twist he didn't want anybody to throw the iPod down. Yeah, exactly that. You gotta admit that was a pretty good twist. It's real good, really good. Yeah. Yeah, and it's still a puzzler to those people out there, I'm still puzzling the heck out of me. Yea, I am considering that that.

I don't think he crashed the plane and climbed out and swam. I don't think he'd be able to over water. I don't think he'd be able to over land. I don't think he was an m I five agents. I think that my theory that somebody else took off with his plane is probably more plausible than any of those theories. Really failing thing is just no, it's it's really really screwy. He just didn't have enough injuries. I mean, like you

get injuries from like the most mundane things. I mean, you know you can I don't know, twist and ankle because you've walked weird on a path. I mean, when you jump out of an airplane, you're gonna have injuries. Well, yeah, that's like let's assume you get it down to like, say, fifty ft off the ground. Even that like kill you. But also remember if he's thrawled back to to stall speed, he's going about fifty horizontally. Also, he's going to be

bouncing enough, but just bouncing down the road for a while. Yeah, I mean, and even even on the water, you're gonna be skipping like a stone over the water. It's gonna hurt well, And we need to we can't avoid the fact that, yes, there are stories of people who have bailed out of planes and survived basically unscathed. But normally they bailed out and they landed on an incline that had some kind of soft surface snow or whatever it is, and they slid for a while, so they burned that

kinetic energy. They didn't just land flat. Yeah, and there's something to be said for like soft tissue, Like if you live through something like that, you're like, oh, I'm basically unscathed with like so much muscle damage therapy for like you know, five years or whatever. And that sort of stuff shows up on autopsies just as much as you know, broken bones and things like that. So they would have said, like, yeah, like he didn't have any broken bones, but his back was real messed up, like

you noticed after four months. Will that be as obvious when the critters are using him for he assume so, I assume, so, I think so. But I think that if he had if he'd bailed to said with your theory, he bails, figuring that he'll get a softer landing if he's going out to sea, and so when he hits the ground, the ground is sloping down away from him and the problem, and and that I thought that occurred to me that would be would be one way to solve or to yeah, one way to sort of like

mitigate the whole issue. But um, the problem is you still going to roll for a while. And he is absolutely guaranteed in that countryside to hit at least one rock out cropping. It only takes one. Yeah, it yeah, it's it's pretty much guaranteed. So yeah, I think he wasn't in the plane, and uh, because it could be that he was just hanging out somebody killed him, or or he just had an accident and just coincidentally died.

I mean, I just don't know any way. You guys having more theories, No, I think we've gone through just about every possible theory, yeah, and the impossible. And yeah, I don't another way ever going to know the answer to this one. But it's an interesting little story, you gotta admit. So that's it for this week, folks. Um find us you can actually find our episode odes and all sorts of other fun material on our website, which

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like those. No keep downloading, but also also keeping out Yeah yeah, sorry, I didn't you know what I mean? Okay, And that's it any last serious from you, guys. No good. I'm out. Well, okay, I am out too, So alright, folks, So for Thinking Sideways podcast. We'll talk to you next week. We'll talk to you next week. Yeah. Bye,