Missing History
More than 3,500 Air Force Museum items gone; thefts, false records mask
trail of lost artifacts
By Wes Hills
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In a ceremony attended by three of the nation's most prominent black U.S.
Air Force generals, Richard K. Reid presented to the United States Air
Force Museum the 15 medals and two badges awarded to his grandfather,
Eugene Jacques Bullard, America's first black combat aviator.
"We have now been entrusted with the responsibility for preserving and
displaying the medals and decorations of a most historic American," Royal
D. Frey, then the museum's curator, proclaimed at the 1973 ceremony at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Bullard, one of the most decorated heroes in French military history, had
remained almost a stranger in his native land. Unable to fly as a combat
pilot for his own country because he was black, Bullard volunteered to
fight for France during World War I. The U.S. Air Force finally
commissioned Bullard a second lieutenant in 1994, more than three decades
after his death in 1961.
The Air Force failed to keep its promise to preserve Bullard's medals, just
as it failed to protect uncounted other symbols of sacrifice entrusted to
it by war heroes, prisoners of war and their families.
Bullard's medals were stolen in 1990 from the Air Force Museum, the world's
oldest and largest military aviation museum.
A March 2002 audit of the museum's active inventory discovered about 2,300
artifacts were unaccounted for, the Dayton Daily News reported Aug. 24. The
museum now says all but 354 of those artifacts have been found or accounted
for.
But a review by the Daily News of never-before-released museum records
shows that at least 3,500 artifacts — ranging from medals, ribbons, flags,
badges and helmets to machine guns and air-to-air missiles — are missing,
stolen or not properly accounted for since Bullard's medals vanished.
Krysta Strider, the museum's new chief of collections, acknowledged that
that number may be "conservative."
Strider said her simultaneous review, done at the request of the Daily
News, shows 3,543 items "not fully accounted for," including 2,869
artifacts officially "coded as missing." She said the actual number of
missing items is probably higher but can't be calculated due to "poor
paperwork."
The Daily News found that one way the museum keeps its official list
of "missing" items low is through an accounting device called "inventory
reconciliation." If missing items can't be found, after several years
they're simply removed from "active collection records." Then they're no
longer considered "missing." They are no longer counted.
Auditors concluded in March 2002 that many of the museum's problems were
caused by Scott A. Ferguson, the museum's former chief of collections, who
is under indictment on charges he sold an armored vehicle in 1999, knowing
it had been stolen from the museum in 1996.
Ferguson has pleaded not guilty.
Ferguson, the auditors concluded, operated without much supervision and did
not follow established guidance and procedures to dispose of historical
property.
The auditors also concluded the museum "did not always effectively manage
museum property."
During Ferguson's tenure, records show, thousands of items were removed or
disappeared from the museum's inventory as well as from its satellite field
museums scattered across the nation. This occurred while the museum's few
safeguards were ignored, promised oversight was lacking and forms
authorizing these removals were usually signed only by Ferguson in
violation of museum rules.
Early warnings
The museum's records show no lack of warning that Ferguson needed tighter
scrutiny.
The records show that on occasion Ferguson claimed to have shipped
artifacts to places that either didn't exist or later said they never
received them. This is the method federal prosecutors say Ferguson used to
conceal the sale of the stolen armored vehicle, known as a Peacekeeper.
Records show he claimed he shipped the Peacekeeper in 1996 to the National
Air Intelligence Center (NAIC) elsewhere at Wright-Patterson Air Force
base. The NAIC said it never got the vehicle.
Similarly, Ferguson claimed on July 28, 2000, that he shipped 85 items to a
separate NAIC office at the base.
The items included highly collectable German and Nazi helmets, pennants,
buckles, armbands, a bayonet, a Luftwaffe dagger, a Hitler youth dagger,
German coins and a flag, Japanese medals, currency, ribbons and a Samurai
sword.
When Strider, who was then registrar, discovered the items missing, she
reported it to the museum's director, retired Maj. Gen. Charles Metcalf.
A handwritten document, created by Ferguson, refers to a purported
conversation suggesting Metcalf had authorized removal of the
artifacts. "Problem is solved w/Metcalf," the note read. "I had to remind
him of our conversation on the 21st."
Metcalf told the Daily News he had no such conversation.
"All those notes are bogus," Metcalf said. "We called the individual they
were supposed to go to and he said he only had 11 items."
Metcalf said he ordered all 85 items returned by the center and by
Ferguson, who brought them back in a tub.
About four months later, on Nov. 17, 2000, Ferguson reported shipping 21 of
the same items to a Maj. Ken Doyle at the U.S. Army's 371st EOD (Explosive
Ordnance Disposal) unit at the base.
"He made another run at them," Metcalf said.
Strider alerted Metcalf and, again, Metcalf ordered Ferguson to return the
items.
A base spokesperson said there is no 371st EOD and "there is no record of a
Maj. Ken Doyle being assigned to the 731st EOD," which does exist at Wright-
Patterson.
Metcalf said this incident sparked the investigation by the Air Force's
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) that led to Ferguson's indictment
regarding the stolen armored vehicle. But until he was indicted in
February, Ferguson was permitted to remain working in the museum's research
division.
"You can't just summarily fire people," Metcalf explained, citing strong
civil service protections.
Museum, court and other records show Ferguson claims to have purchased the
armored vehicle for $400 in 1996 from a woman named Elen Polorman, or
Poloroman, in July 1999. The Peacekeeper cost the Air Force $230,000 when
new in 1981.
Ferguson later sold the vehicle to Alan Wise, of Middletown for $18,000 in
1999.
"After extensive restoration, I then sold the vehicle in May 2000 to the
Cherokee Police Department, Cherokee, N.C., for $36,000," Wise said in an
interview. The vehicle remains there in secured storage as a potential
court exhibit in Ferguson's upcoming trial.
The OSI's earlier investigations into reports of thefts apparently failed
to uncover clear evidence that highly collectable artifacts were being
removed without proper authorization.
"The bottom line is nobody looked at the documentation," Metcalf said. "The
auditors didn't. The OSI didn't."
Following an Aug. 24 story by the Daily News reporting hundreds of items
missing from the museum, including the wooden pattern used to cast the
engine that enabled the Wright brothers to achieve the first powered flight
in 1903, the Air Force appointed a "working group" to "assess the soundness
of current operational policies and procedures used by" the museum.
That group, which has been meeting in secret, is expected to submit its
report to Metcalf and Air Force Secretary James G. Roche this week.
Since the appointment of that group, the Daily News continued to interview
current and former employees and to sample the museum's estimated 600 feet
of files regarding more than85,000items it maintains.
The Daily News review found that machine guns, pistols, anti-aircraft
cannons, bombs and missiles were disposed of with little or no
documentation.
In addition, the review found evidence of occasions when highly collectable
items were shipped to apparently fictitious people. Further, valuable items
were often declared "excess to collection," with no explanation of what
happened to them. Other items were supposedly tossed into the trash and
later retrieved by base employees in a practice witnesses described
as "Dumpster diving."
The museum's records are so unreliable that guns reported to have been
reduced to scrap have turned up again in the museum's collection.
"The documentation is so bad, we'll never know what happened" to many
artifacts, Metcalf said.
The records also lend support to claims by Albert Harris Jr., a former
museum worker who began blowing the whistle as early as 1993 about what he
insists was the theft of thousands of museum artifacts.
Harris claimed, among other things, that he was ordered to load into vans
operated by a museum supervisor and his friend, a collector of military
artifacts, thousands of items shipped to the Air Force Museum after
satellite museums were closed or turned over to civilian control.
Records show, for example, 1,231 items are still unaccounted for following
the April 1996 privatizing of the satellite museum at March Air Force Base
near Riverside, Calif.
Among items listed as missing are helmets, medals, ribbons, prisoner-of-war
craftsmanship, swords and a display of German medals.
Museum officials acknowledged the museum transfer was handled poorly, but
they hope some items may yet be found in storage or elsewhere.
Shipments reported missing from other satellite museums include:
• 634 items — including space suits, Nazi memorabilia and a missile —
reported missing in 1994 following the 1988 closure of the Mather Air Force
Base museum in Sacramento, Calif.
• 131 items following the 1994 closing of the Edward F. Beale Museum at
Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, Calif.
• 40 items reported missing in 1999 from McChord Air Force Base museum in
Tacoma, Wash.
Harris scoffed at records that claim that items shipped to the museum
during satellite closings never arrived.
"I personally unloaded it," he said. "That was my damn job."
Harris said that on one occasion he refused to assist a museum supervisor
and a friend of the supervisor load items shipped from other museums into
vans. He said the two men claimed they were taking the artifacts to an Air
National Guard station in Cincinnati, but were unable to produce documents
authorizing the transfer.
He said other museum employees witnessed this, but have remained silent,
telling him they didn't want "to dry the dishes." Harris said that after he
came forward, his claims were ignored and he was reduced in 1998 to washing
dishes at the base hospital.
Metcalf said most of the items missing due to museum closings occurred
before he became director in 1996.
"The quality of the records in the field (museums) was absolutely shoddy,"
Metcalf said.
It is often difficult to determine the value of missing items because the
Air Force did not permit the Daily News to learn the identities of their
donors, citing privacy concerns. Artifacts linked to major military and
aviation figures are considered much more valuable than artifacts of
unknown background.
‘Excess to collection’
While roaming the Black Hills of Wyoming in his youth, Clyde F. Autio said
he collected military patches from veterans at two nearby military bases
and stitched them onto a "true GI blanket."
Over the years, Autio's collection grew to 100 World War II-era patches,
including "an awful lot of division patches. This was at a time when the
only patches available were authentic patches."
He said the blanket, covered with patches, "was the top blanket on my bed"
and it went off with him to college.
What followed was a distinguished career in the Air Force, where Autio, of
Xenia, rose to major general before retiring in 1989. Autio, 72, is
currently president of the Aviation Hall of Fame.
Many years ago, Autio said, he gave his blanket of patches to the
museum, "altruistically thinking it would fill a hole" in the museum's
collection.
No one ever told him it was declared "excess" in 1993 and disappeared
without any mention of what happened to the now highly collectable patches.
"These are just astounding facts," Autio said of items missing from the
museum. "There's a big market out there for this stuff. That's why I
probably don't enjoy gun shows as much any more."
Military artifacts are commonly sold at gun shows.
Autio is stoic about the fate of his donation to the museum.
"You just walk away and you just trust that the organization that you're
dealing with has the integrity that you expect it to have," he said.
Between 1992 and 1998, museum reports show at least 807 items declared
excess without any record of where they went. They included World War I and
World War II-era British, German, French, Japanese and Nazi badges,
armbands, belt buckles, flags, streamers, flash-blindness goggles to
protect pilots from nuclear explosions, bayonets and other items. Many of
these individual items are sought after by collectors willing to pay
thousands of dollars for them.
Alex M. Spencer, museum specialist and curator for the materiel collection
at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, said the practice at his
and other major museums is, whenever possible, to offer to return items
declared excess to their donors or their relatives.
Failing that, Spencer said such items are offered, at no charge, to
educational institutions.
The Bullard medals
On Oct. 30, 1998, Tom Koenig, a military collector in Cincinnati, wrote
Metcalf to advise that he had obtained replicas of two of the missing
Bullard medals and would be writing "my friend in Paris to see if he can
get the third."
"You have another set of wings like the last time, that would be fine,"
Koenig stated, apparently suggesting he expected a trade.
On Nov. 16, 1998, Metcalf sent Koenig a letter thanking him and describing
the medals as a "gift."
But they were not a gift.
On Nov. 23, 1998, Ferguson wrote that eight aviation badges at the museum
were declared excess and given to Koenig in exchange for the replica
Bullard medals.
On Jan. 4, 2000, Bullard advised Metcalf in a note that he had obtained a
replica of the fourth Bullard medal and said, "I'll take wings as usual."
Metcalf disputed that note, and said he made cash payments to Koenig
ranging from about $15 to $25 for all the Bullard medal replicas. He said
he doesn't know what Ferguson was trading for the aviation badges or where
they went.
And he said he told Koenig, "We don't do business that way."
"There's only one person in the museum system with authority to exchange,"
Metcalf noted. "That's me. Period. No person has . . . authority to
unilaterally do some things under the table."
Koenig said he doesn't recall if he got cash or badges for the Bullard
medal replicas.
Spencer, of the Smithsonian, said his museum will not authorize such an
exchange unless the donor of the items that are to be declared excess "has
given the museum specific permission to do so."
Spencer noted that such replicas are worth a fraction of the value of the
genuine article.
"It can be, and I'm not exaggerating, it can be thousands of dollars,"
Spencer said.
"I couldn't even put a specific dollar value on something like that,"
Spencer said of Bullard's authentic medals. "With Bullard — the only
African-American pilot that served (in World War I), I mean it's just
kinda, in the collector world, like one of those incredible items that just
doesn't come along. It would be highly sought after out there in the
collector world."
Records at the museum indicate hundreds of guns were destroyed by cutting
them into scrap that was turned in to the Defense Reutilization and
Marketing Offices (DRMO) at Wright-Pat. The guns ranged from rifles to 20
mm and 30 mm anti-aircraft cannons.
In May 1999, for example, Ferguson wrote off 33 weapons ranging from flare
guns to .50- caliber machine guns, saying they were "cut up, destroyed
(and) turned in as scrap."
But other records show that nine of those guns turned up years later in the
museum's inventory, including six that were sent to an Australian museum
under an agreement Metcalf signed in May 2001.
In preparing the six guns for shipment, Terry Aiken, now the museum's
senior curator, advised Ferguson in an undated memo that the guns "should
be crated as a single unit and banded. Nobody is strong enough to steal
them that way."
Harris said he had refused to cut the guns into scrap, citing regulations
that they were to be cut into three pieces that would not destroy their
identity.
"I brought them the DoD (Department of Defense) manual and showed them the
proper way to cut them up," Harris said.
But he said Ferguson refused to do this and had another employee cut them
up "into unrecognizable scrap."
"He didn't give us a list of the guns to be destroyed with serial numbers
that could be compared to the guns actually being cut up," Harris said.
Harris said he believes that many of the guns were stolen and that they
were operable.
Bombs and missiles disposed of in a similar and undocumented fashion,
Harris said, were demilitarized and not operable.
Metcalf noted that most of the weapons destructions occurred before he
became director and were often reported years after the fact.
"You should expect an independent observer recording there as they're cut
up," he conceded. "There are rules on how it's done and it wasn't,
unfortunately."
A museum official noted that "to preserve the historic integrity of
weapons," they are "rendered temporarily inoperable through the removal of
critical internal components" in a manner consistent with regulations.
Harris said it would have been easy to restore the weapons and make them
fully operable.
Receipts of the claimed destruction of guns from the DRMO office generally
list the weight of the scrap without further identification.
Records regarding the disposal of missiles are no better.
On Oct. 18, 2000, for example, records state 22 bombs, a canister and
bombsight were cut into scrap with no DRMO documentation supporting the
claim.
Other documentation shows that claims of destroying weapons weren't
reported until several years after the alleged events.
On July 18, 1997, for example, the museum reported 11 items, including five
AIMair-to-air missiles and one portable TOW anti-armor missile were
disposed of at the base.
Again, there is no supporting documentation, just a note by Ferguson
stating the items were "destroyed and put into the scrap metal bins at the
back of building 4C" in 1994. "This is what I remember to have happened."
In another strange case, the museum reported Dec. 22, 1997, that two
trucks, including one described as "rare," were "turned into salvage." No
record identifies the rare vehicle or documents that it actually was turned
into salvage.
Dumpster diving
Several sources at the base, including Harris, described a practice
called "dumpster diving" in which base employees recovered potentially
valuable museum items tossed into trash bins.
"It got so bad that I walked out the door and I thought it was rats in the
Dumpster," Harris recalled of an incident around 1994. "And it was men, who
were civil engineers, diving for the artifacts."
Records show some evidence to support such claims.
On July 17, 1992, for example, the museum reported 174 items tossed into
trash bins or turned over to security police for incineration. They
included German insignia pins, Nazi armbands, aviation badges and clothing,
a high-altitude flying helmet, boot assemblies for Apollo-Skylab, and
German and Nazi flags.
In further evidence of the unreliability of museum records, some of these
items were discovered in later inventories.
The ‘unmissing’
One way the museum reduced its list of missing items was to prepare
an "inventory reconciliation."
On Aug. 2, 2000, for example, five items, including a leather flying jacket
and bomb, were removed from the museum's active inventory.
"These items were last located on exhibit in 1990," states one
record. "Since that date they have not been found during inventories and
have been listed as missing. Therefore, they are being removed from the
active collection records."
Also removed from the missing list is a trailer-mounted 37 mm Viet Cong
anti-aircraft cannon the museum had loaned in 1987 to a field museum at
Kadena Air Base at Okinawa, Japan.
Efforts to locate the gun in 1998 included a check at a Japanese junkyard.
"Suggest you just do the report of survey and write it off the books," said
a memo to the field museum's director from the Pacific Air Forces history
office.
OSI misses a clue
Scattered throughout the museum's records are repeated mentions of reports
of thefts or missing items being turned over to the Office of Special
Investigations, the Air Force's major investigative service.
While the Daily News was denied access to the OSI reports, there is no
indication investigators ever noted obvious irregularities at the museum.
For example, the newspaper examined more than 1,000 pages and did not find
a single deaccession record removing museum items from inventory that had
the required signatures of both the museum's curator and director during
the period Ferguson served as chief of collections from 1995 to February
2001.
When Metcalf became director in 1996, he signed an Air Force instruction
that states that he and the curator "must both sign an Inventory Adjustment
Voucher (IAV) prepared by Collections Division personnel" when disposing of
museum property.
Yet Ferguson prepared hundreds of IAVs disposing of thousands of historic
items. They generally contain only Ferguson's signature.
Auditors didn't discover this until 2002, when they sampled 123 IAVs used
to document removal of museum property. They found that 122 lacked proper
authorization.
This went undetected for so long, auditors concluded, because the
museum "had no established procedures for periodic internal reviews of
deaccession transactions" removing items from inventory.
"Specifically," auditors noted, "the chief of collections could
unilaterally complete and authorize IAVs, complete transfer papers, package
items for disposition and record association inventory adjustments."
Metcalf said he ordered, "after I took over, that nothing will be
deaccessioned (removed from inventory) until we can get this baseline" of
the museum's inventory, a process that wasn't completed until Ferguson left
the collections division. Therefore, he said he wasn't expecting any
documents regarding removal of items from inventory and never checked the
books to see what Ferguson was doing.
He also noted that the problems occurred during explosive growth at the
museum amid efforts to beef up security and move the museum's inventory to
a single site.
Metcalf further noted that after reports of thefts to the OSI, "they came
back and said they could find nothing, to my frustration."
The museum also lacked oversight from its advisory board, which hasn't met
since 2001.
William Heimdahl, the deputy Air Force historian, said a new regulation
mandates the board meet annually.
Heimdahl said that theft and loss of artifacts are "a problem for all
museums," and that the museum remains "truly a national treasure that is
unmatched by any other museum in the world."
Its collection, however, appears to be getting yet another review by OSI
and the museum's staff. Attention will focus on an IAV signed by Ferguson
on Oct. 19, 1995, reporting 19 German edged weapons transferred to the U.S.
Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C.
The weapons included a WWI Prussian officer's sword with scabbard, WWI
German saw blade bayonet with sheath, a Nazi officer's dress sword and
scabbard, a pre-WWI German saber with scabbard and an 1871 German bayonet
with scabbard.
A recent, but undated, note to J. Terry Dougherty, deputy chief for the
army center's museum programs branch, from Terry Aitken, the Air Force
Museum's senior curator, asks if the Army ever received the edged weapons.
On Jan. 14, Dougherty wrote Aitken: "I checked our database and could find
no record of a transfer of German edged weapons or similar type items to
the U.S. Army Center of Military History."
A bright spot
At a recent meeting between the Daily News and senior Air Force officials
headed by Lt. Gen. Charles Coolidge Jr., the Air Force Materiel Command's
vice commander, the newspaper was promised the museum would open its
records.
The newspaper, in turn, agreed to withdraw its request for records under
the Freedom of Information Act.
Since that meeting, museum personnel spent several weeks providing records
requested by the newspaper. Most investigative records were withheld after
review by Air Force attorneys.
"We are not at liberty to discuss details or processes of ongoing
investigations," stated Capt. Alana Casanova, chief of public affairs at
OSI headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base in Clinton, Md.
A review of the museum's records since Ferguson's departure also discloses
major changes.
Strider said that a deaccession committee of eight people must now sign off
on the removal of any item from inventory and that an "outside party
reviews all deaccession vouchers on a quarterly basis."
No guns have been destroyed during Strider's watch, and far fewer items are
removed from inventory.
"A lot of what we've done is to reinforce procedures that were already in
place," Strider said.
Metcalf, while not specifically addressing the allegations in Ferguson's
indictment, said he wishes he had known earlier about the problems.
"I think there's nobody more distressed over this whole event than myself
and my staff," he said. "They feel violated."
[From the Dayton Daily News: 11.16.2003]
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