A historian’s report that the wreckage of an Air Force jet lost at sea 54 years ago has been found off the Southern California coast brought a surge of emotions for Thomas Theiler, 77, a retired executive and former Air Force pilot.

Theiler’s older brother, Richard Martin Theiler, was in the front seat of a Lockheed-Martin T-33A that went missing just after take-off from the Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 1955.

Aviation archeologist G. Pat Macha said Tuesday that he and a group of volunteers found Theiler’s plane underneath 100 feet of water earlier this month.

When Theiler, of Savannah, Ga., was informed, he was shocked to find himself grieving for his brother all over again, 54 years later.

“He was five years older than me, a good athlete and everyone loved him, so there was a lot of hero worship involved,” said Thomas Theiler, who followed his older brother into the Air Force. “He probably got his wings two years before I did. We were buddies.”

Macha, 63, is an amateur historian who collects documents about military plane crashes. He is heading up a search for another historic wreck in Santa Monica Bay, a plane flown by a female World War II pilot who disappeared in 1944.

In April, a sonar survey turned up another missing aircraft, and Macha said he identified it by matching Air Force records to the serial number on a piece of the wreckage that the salt water had spared.

The Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Command says it appears likely Macha’s finding on the Air Force jet lost at sea 54 years ago are correct, but Lt. Col. Wayne Perry says the command plans to investigate further and determine whether the water is shallow enough to recover the wreckage.

Thomas Theiler said his brother had a wife and a 6-month-old son. Both died years ago.

The younger Theiler also lost a close friend from flight school that day, Lt. Paul Dale Smith, who was in the cockpit. Smith and the elder Theiler were training to fly with the Aerospace Defense Command and practicing navigation and night flying.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Jack Ewell said his department notified Theiler.

“It’s particularly shocking because it’s so long ago. It’s not like people are just sitting and waiting for news,” Ewell said.

Divers are examining the site, but there’s only a remote chance that they’ll find personal effects, remains or any clue about why the plane went down, he said.

The plane had just departed in bad weather bound for its base in Yuma, Ariz., but the pilots didn’t make contact after they cleared the clouds.

At his base in Minneapolis, Theiler got word that his brother and friend were missing and a commander gave him a plane to fly to Yuma and wait for news.

“A pickup drove up with a wheel that a lifeguard found. It was from a military aircraft and they don’t just float up onto the beach. So we knew what happened,” Theiler said.

Macha said Theiler and his daughter got emotional when he spoke with them on the phone.

Theresa Morton, of Lake Forest, Ill., the dead pilot’s niece, grew up imagining her uncle living on a desert island with his friend Smith.

She said she was grateful to Macha for helping write a closing chapter to her family history.

“This news has rocked our world, but on the other hand, it’s really neat,” she said. “I’ve been pulling out all the family photos, my dad’s fighter wings, to show to my kids. It makes for wonderful family time.”

Red tape has kept Charlie Shapiro, treasure hunter, away from the 224-year-old wreck of the Brederode, which is laden with crated-up porcelain, tin and gold from Indonesia and China.

Centuries-old trinkets from rusty buttons to gifts destined for kings take up a room in Charlie Shapiro’s house - treasures from a lifetime spent combing the ocean floor for shipwrecks.

But the wreck diver’s trove is incomplete, as one of his richest recent finds lies waiting in the deep fathoms of the ocean a decade after its discovery, at risk from pillagers.

Shapiro found the 224-year-old shipwreck of the Dutch Brederode 11 years ago, but a series of mishaps has left him still waiting for government to grant him a permit to excavate its 120 million-rand (£10.1 million) cargo.

“That wreck was my baby, that was my life’s work,” Shapiro says of the ship which has dominated three decades of his existence.

From combing archives in Europe and South Africa, to a 16-year search and against-the-odds discovery of a ship considered an amazingly well-preserved archaeological find, Shapiro’s tale is literally of a treasure hunt.

Greed and disagreements broke up the group of salvors that he formed, and his permit to excavate the ship was lost in a whirl of law changes and a government moratorium on all permits, which has only recently been lifted.

Jonathan Sharfman, a maritime archeologist at the South African Heritage Resources Agency, told AFP that the Brederode, sunk in 1785, is a “completely unique kind of shipwreck. It has the potential to be really high profile”.

This means that Shapiro is unlikely to get his permit without in-depth excavation and conservation plans for the ship, which is still laden with perfectly crated porcelain, tin and gold carried from Indonesia and China.

“We just want to ensure everybody is doing what they should do. We can’t just allow it to be ripped out and sold,” said Sharfman.

“It’s a reasonably intact ship… it really is an amazing example. It presents a unique set of archaeological information.”

The ship, which belonged to the Dutch East India Company, is one of an estimated 3,000 shipwrecks sunk by the forces around South Africa’s unforgiving coastline, which have spawned legends of phantom ships around the treacherous Cape.

From the Shipwreck Coast on the west of the country all the way up to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, these waters have struck fear into the hearts of sailors and many have perished.

Through the damp mist, the famous sea phantom the Flying Dutchman has been seen from time to time, steered by a Captain van der Decken, cursed to sail the seas for eternity after he insisted on rounding the Cape in foul weather.

Some beached ships have become popular tourist attractions in places like the tiny Northern Cape mining town of Koingnaas, but those that sank are difficult to reach, making the South African coastline an underwater museum.

Shapiro and his company have excavated ships such as the British Birkenhead, which sunk in 1852 and which became famous for starting the tradition of allowing women and children to save themselves first.

A section of his home holds perfectly preserved porcelain plates, weapons and valuable statuettes destined for kings of Portugal, France and England as a gift from the king of Siam aboard the Portuguese ship Milagros in 1686.

From a hoard of bloated wine bottles, an old vintage soured by sea water, to scary-looking medical tools encrusted with rust, Shapiro feels the rich historical legacy of shipwrecks is better kept where people can see it.

The permit tussle is a result of the Unesco convention on underwater heritage, which prevents commercial exploitation of ships over 60 years old, and which South Africa’s parliament has still not ratified.

“They want wrecks left in situ for future generations - what’s wrong with our generation? Wrecks are not there forever,” says Shapiro.

Now, he can only wait as his treasure lies on the ocean floor off the coast of Struisbaai, 220 kilometres (135 miles) from Cape Town, where he has already spotted people searching for the wreck site.

A team of divers is set to plunge into Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont., next week in a bid to confirm the discovery of a legendary Canadian-built ship from the War of 1812, the HMS Wolfe.

In collaboration with marine archeologists from Parks Canada, the divers plan to take detailed measurements, drawings and photographs of a sunken wooden sailing vessel that appears to match the size and last known location of the famous 32-metre sloop: the flagship of British naval commander James Yeo and star of a dramatic 1813 battle west of Toronto that helped thwart the U.S. invasion of Canada.

The suspected discovery comes just three years before the 200th anniversary of the war, adding urgency to the efforts to identify a possible new showcase relic for bi-national commemoration activities.

“We’re hoping it’s the Wolfe,” said Dianne Groll, a Queen’s University psychiatry professor and avid diver who made a preliminary inspection of the wreck site in May.

“We’re 99 per cent sure it is,” she told Canwest News Service on Wednesday. “With any luck, we should have the formal survey done by the end of July.”

The underwater probe, to be carried out by the Kingston-based heritage group, Preserve Our Wrecks, with support from Parks Canada, will include making bow-to-stern measurements of the rotting hulk, producing sketches and photos of joints, ribs and other telltale features of the ship’s construction, and taking core samples of the wood to determine the types of trees used by the builders.

Groll said the wreck has been known about for years and has been studied by federal archeologist Jonathan Moore. Last summer, Kingston diver Kenn Feigelman generated media attention after taking sonar readings and pictures at the wreck site.

The potential find follows the recent discovery in Lake Ontario of the Revolutionary War vessel HMS Ontario, and last year’s Parks Canada-led high-tech probe of the sunken Hamilton and Scourge, two American ships from the War of 1812 that went down in a storm near Hamilton.

The ship, renamed HMS Montreal later in the war, was built on the Lake Ontario shore and played a brief but important role in the crucial struggle against the Americans for control of the Great Lakes.

In a famous 1813 engagement known as the Burlington Races, a damaged HMS Wolfe was under intense fire near present-day Toronto, but just managed to escape the enemy assault by retreating rapidly westward to a gun-protected shore near Burlington Bay.

A defeat in that battle — which came just days after a major U.S. victory on Lake Erie — could have given the Americans free rein over the lower lakes and, according to a leading War of 1812 naval historian, made certain Ontario became “a state of the American union.”

The ship, which was involved in numerous battles throughout the 1812-1814 war, was scuttled years after the war in waters off Kingston, along with several other vessels that had outlived their usefulness in peacetime Upper Canada.

Naval historian Robert Williamson has called the Burlington Races “a pivotal engagement that would determine the outcome of the War of 1812.”

In a 1999 essay published in the journal Canadian Military History, Williamson reconstructed the events of Sept. 28, 1813, using the logbooks of the Wolfe, which had only recently been opened to researchers by the U.S. national archives in Washington.

The historian debunked a popular tale that the British ships had actually vaulted a sandbar to escape their American pursuers, but Williamson concluded that the survival of the Wolfe and the other vessels was a true turning point in Canadian history.

“Yeo’s Lake Ontario naval squadron survived the scrape of 28 September as strong as ever,” Williamson wrote. “In fact, it went on the offensive in the following spring and helped to capture Fort Oswego. . . . By maintaining the integrity of his squadron, Yeo played a far more important role in the events of the War of 1812 that shaped our future than generations of historians have been prepared to grant him.”

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