The Press: The Mysterious Picture

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The picture came to the Ashland (Ky.) Daily Independent (circ. 15,512) last August from Mrs. G. E. Dobbins, a reader. It showed two bombers flying in a cloudy sky. Clear as could be in the foreground was a likeness of Christ, hands outstretched in a gesture of peace.

The picture had an equally interesting story, according to Mrs. Dobbins. A young Air Force man, flying over Korea, had snapped a dogfight between a U.N. plane and a Communist plane. He had sent the film home to his mother in Chicago to be developed. When it was, she was amazed to see the image in the clouds. She sent the copy to her brother in Ashland, who made more copies. Mrs. Dobbins had got her picture from a neighbor, who got it from her daughter-in-law, who bought it for $1 from a woman who got it from an unnamed man.

When Independent City Editor Tom Gallagher first saw the picture, he thought "it was a job of trick photography." But the Independent printed it anyway because "it was an unusual picture and worth printing."

The issue with the picture sold out. Two weeks later, the Independent reprinted the picture and again sold out. Readers sent clips far & wide, and letters poured in. Wrote a Fifth Air Force sergeant in Korea: "Pilots especially [got] a reminder that 'God is their copilot.'" Wrote another soldier: "The picture gave us all a spiritual and moral uplifting . . ."

The Religious News Service and N.E.A. distributed the picture, and in the next two months it was widely reproduced in the U.S. press and abroad. Reprints were given away, or sold at $1 apiece in the Bible belt. But despite all the publicity, nobody seemed to be able to track down the mother in Chicago, the brother in Ashland, or the photographer son in Korea.

Last week Air Force Staff Sergeant Roy C. Burnham walked into the Savannah Morning News, sister paper of the Savannah Evening Press which had run the picture that day. He branded it a fake. With him, Burnham had an identical picture in color, which he had obtained from an Air Force photo laboratory technician in England in 1944. The technician, whose name Burnham did not remember, had told Burnham he had taken a picture of a B-17 bombing mission over Europe and painted in the picture of Christ. He planned to sell pictures to airmen as souvenirs. Said Burnham: "I thought it was time people found out the truth. The thing has been carried too far. Some people are actually beginning to believe that stuff about the picture."