Get you a friend with a boat.
Anthony got the army green “Steel Clover” from his grandfather like five years ago. The weight limit is less than 600 pounds and it’s small enough he can park it in the alley behind his house. He and I met at Work Hard Pittsburgh digital worker’s collective on East Warrington a decade ago and like so many of us there, we stayed friends even after the space dissolved over the pandemic.
Last year, on Veteran’s Day, November 11, we hit the water with friend and fellow Work Hard alum Justin. I was publishing Pittsburgh Independent at the time and knew that we needed more video content. I had seen other short vids of people magnet fishing on waterways and pulling up all sorts of weird stuff: I’d call it, “Magnet Fishing on the Mon.”
I grew up in the Mon Valley and I knew about the "ghost bomber" since childhood: a B-25 bomber plane on a seemingly routine transport mission crash lands in the river, killing two men, but the plane itself is never found. Newspaper reports from the weeks after the crash declare the search-and-rescue teams dumbfounded by the plane's disappearance. The missing Mon Bomber sparked a generation of rumors and never a satisfying explanation, other than "it's 'dahn there somewhere."
Our captain navigated us toward the Glenwood Bridge and where the bomber is known to have sunk, when something metallic near the shore caught our eye. Anthony said it looked like a piece of the Tinman, and the name stuck: On Tinman is welded a plate with a company name. The first result when I googled them that afternoon? “Aircraft exhaust systems."
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I’m not saying it’s from the Mon Bomber. But I’m also not saying it isn’t. It’s definitely a piece of an exhaust manifold from an engine, but the company that made Tinman also made manifolds for trains and boats, as well as the Air Force.
Since then, I’ve dived into Air Force archives outside Washington, DC. I’ve talked to eyewitnesses and filed open record requests with agencies that don’t appear to have been queried. Perhaps most significantly, we partnered Pittsburgh AUV company Aquatonomy to put one of their submersibles into the Mon at its deepest point, where the plane most likely settled, if it is indeed down there, somewhere.
A group of amateur historians performed a sonar scan of the area over 20 years ago, but came up empty. This will be the first survey that we know of since, and the first to share high-resolution video and finely-resolved sonar data of the bottom of the Mon.
We don’t know what we’ll find. This manifold could have been from some train that exploded. We might find a corroded wingtip sticking out of the riverbed, or a bunch of Spin scooters. Whatever's down there, we’ll share our findings as part of a short documentary on the 70th anniversary of the crash: January 31, 2026.
We’re going to put out official calls for pitches (for freelancers) and calls for eyewitnesses (who may have seen a clandestine late-night plane extraction) in the days ahead. In the meantime, we’ll release new content weekly from some of Pittsburgh's top independent journalists here at pittsburghmanifold.com, including a new podcast series, not all of it devoted to missing bomber planes.
We are also overjoyed to announce that we will base our business alongside fellow New Sun Rising project the South Hilltop Men’s Group, at their location at the site of the former Work Hard Pittsburgh digital worker's cooperative in Allentown. We intend to bring a fully-fledged media collective to East Warrington Ave. and partner with SHMP on meaningful programming for young men and the community at-large.
We are a group of like-minded journalists who while still “independent” recognize that the strength and opportunity in working together. We love this city that we call home and we want to produce meaningful reporting for the people who live here, beginning with a swing at one of Pittsburgh’s most enduring mysteries.
If you have any questions, please email us at pghmanifold@gmail.com.
In the meantime, please share this article and our campaign video, and please consider a tax-deductible donation to Pittsburgh Manifold to help top independent journalists tell this and other meaningful news stories in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh Manifold is fiscally sponsored by The Tiny News Collective (EIN 85-3963369), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
