The Lost Pilot

The Mystery of Lieutenant Jon Games — 60 Years Buried Beneath the Sky

In June 1943, the skies over northern France shimmered with war. Bombers roared. Engines screamed. But one aircraft — and one man — simply vanished into the clouds.

Lieutenant Jon Games, a 28-year-old reconnaissance pilot for the U.S. Army Air Corps, was one of the best. Calm under fire, brilliant with instruments, a man trusted to fly alone over enemy lines with nothing but his wits and a camera.

On June 7, 1943, he took off from southern England in his Lockheed P-38 Lightning, carrying secret aerial cameras meant to photograph German positions. The weather was perfect, the mission simple, the route routine.

At 10:27 a.m., he radioed his final message.

“Compass reading… off by nearly thirty degrees. Something’s wrong.”

Those were his last words. Moments later, his radar trace disappeared. No distress call, no wreckage, no parachute — only silence.

For weeks, search crews combed the English Channel. Nothing. The official report declared:

“Missing in Action — Presumed Lost at Sea.”

And that was the end of it.

But for his younger brother, Walter Games, just seventeen at the time, it was only the beginning.

The Brother Who Wouldn’t Stop Looking

Walter refused to believe his brother had simply fallen into the ocean. Jon was meticulous, cautious, always checking every screw twice before a flight.

Among the few personal effects returned to the family was a small leather-bound flight log — but the final page had been torn out. Walter noticed, but he said nothing. He kept the log hidden in a drawer for sixty years.

Life went on. Walter became an aerospace engineer in Kansas. He married, had children, but the mystery of Jon never left him. Every June 7th, he would open the box of keepsakes and whisper to the old photo, “Where did you go?”

Then, in 1973, while repairing a vintage airspeed indicator from World War II, Walter stumbled upon a memory: Jon had once written about “magnetic interference” during test flights.

He reopened the logbook. On the last surviving entry before the torn page, Jon had written:

“Compass unstable above 1,500 meters. Static in headset. Altimeter erratic.
Possibly magnetic anomaly.”

Walter froze. That was no simple malfunction — and it matched the coordinates near where Jon vanished.

He began investigating quietly, contacting the British Air Ministry under the pretense of being a researcher. Months later, a sympathetic archivist sent him a photocopy of a maintenance report.

Jon’s P-38 had been fitted — just days before his final flight — with a prototype magnetic compass model MTX-13. The device had never been officially tested and was rumored to cause severe navigational errors near strong magnetic fields.

Jon had unknowingly become a test subject.

Echoes from the Sky

For decades, Walter gathered fragments — rumors of radar anomalies, wartime records of “unexplained disappearances” near the French coast. Then, in 1981, he received a letter that changed everything.

A retired RAF radio operator named Douglas Penner had discovered an old signal log from June 1943 — containing a faint distress transmission:

“…fuel low… deviated east… forest landing… flare signal…”

The coordinates were inland — not over the sea — near a remote forest in northern France called La Chaux.

Jon hadn’t crashed into the ocean. He had landed.

The Forest of La Chaux

For years, Walter tried to organize a search, but bureaucracy, money, and age got in the way. Only in 2003, when he was 77, did he finally assemble a small team: historian Dr. Helen Barret, French archaeologists, and drone specialists equipped with ground-penetrating radar.

In the thick forest of La Chaux, the radar returned a signal — six meters wide, three meters deep. The outline was unmistakable: the twin-boom shape of a P-38 Lightning.

After 60 years, they had found Jon’s plane.

But when the excavation began, one detail chilled everyone. The cockpit canopy was open. The pilot’s seat was empty. No remains. No uniform. No parachute.

Jon Games had gotten out alive.

The Letter in the Metal Box

As the team sifted through the wreckage, a small sealed tin box was found wedged behind the pilot’s seat. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a single sheet of paper.

A letter. Dated June 6, 1943.

It read:

“If anyone finds this — I survived. Engine failure.
I am heading west.
Compass dead. Food limited.
I will signal from the cliffs if I make it.
— Lt. Jon Games.”

Walter stood frozen as the words were read aloud. His brother hadn’t vanished. He had fought to survive.

The letter was sent to the U.S. Air Force archives. Within weeks, newspapers around the world carried the headline:

“WWII Pilot Found After 60 Years — Alive in His Own Words.”

But the truth went even deeper.

The Farmer’s Testimony

In the French archives, Dr. Barret uncovered a forgotten testimony from 1945. A farmer named Jean Pourray had once told Allied forces:

“In the summer of 1943, I sheltered an American pilot.
He was tall, badly burned, said his plane had crashed in the woods.
Stayed three weeks, then left to find a radio.”

The farm was two miles west of the crash site — the same direction Jon mentioned in his letter.

Further research revealed a German intelligence report noting a “wounded American airman” seen near the coast but never captured.

Jon had survived the crash. He had walked across occupied France — and then disappeared again.

The Final Discovery

In 2015, during renovations near the cliffs of Étretat, a French heritage team discovered an old stone wall covered in moss. Etched faintly into the surface were the characters:

“MG 7/43.”

Jon’s initials. His date. His signal.

He had reached the cliffs. Perhaps he sent a flare. Perhaps he was captured. No one knows for certain. But one thing was now undeniable — Jon Games did not die in the crash. He fought to live.

Legacy

That same year, a memorial was built near the forest of La Chaux. The plaque read:

“Lieutenant Jon Games — Missing 1943. Found 60 years later.
A pilot who never gave up.”

Walter, now in his nineties, attended the ceremony in a wheelchair. He said little, only handing his granddaughter Emily, a young journalist, a note that read:

“He wasn’t a ghost. He was just trying to come home.”

Walter passed away a month later.

Emily took up his search — and two years later, she found one final piece.

Among Canadian immigration records from 1944, she discovered a name:
Richard Grey, an American refugee from France. The handwriting — the looping “G” — matched Jon’s letter exactly.

Richard Grey had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a ground instructor. He worked quietly training young pilots, never speaking of the past. He died in 1957, buried under his assumed name.

Jon Games — the man who vanished in 1943 — had lived, survived, and served again under a new identity.

Epilogue

Today, his story is taught in aviation schools across the world. His final letter rests in a glass case at the Veterans Memorial Hall in Omaha, beside his photograph — smiling, fearless, forever 28.

The mystery that began in silence ended not in tragedy, but in resilience.

Because some men don’t disappear.
They endure — carried forward by those who refuse to stop looking.