Catalina affair
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
On June 13, 1952 a Swedish military DC-3 flying over the Baltic Sea, clandestinely carrying out signals intelligence operations for the USA, disappeared east of Gotland. Three days later two Swedish military Catalina flying boats searched for the DC-3 north of Estonia. One of the planes was shot down by the Soviet airforce but the crew ditched near the West German cargo ship "Münsterland" and was rescued.
Aftermath
The USSR denied shooting down the DC-3, but a few days later a liferaft with Soviet shell shrapnel was found. In 1956 while meeting the Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted that the Soviet Union had shot down the DC-3. This information was not released to the public at the time.
In 1991 the Soviet airforce admitted it had shot down the DC-3. In the summer of 2003 a Swedish company found the DC-3 by using sonar. Some time later the Catalina was also found, 22 kilometers east of the official splash down point.
Conclusion
Bullet holes showed that the DC-3 was shot down by a MiG-15 fighter. The exact splash down time was also determined, as one of the clocks in the cockpit had stopped at 11:28:40 CET. To this date the bodies of 5 of the 8 man crew have been found.
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