Thefts From the National Museum of the United States Air Force

I accidently found a newspaper article from 2003 that I'd "lost" on my computer for several years.  It describes massive theft from the then USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio and I thought this might be of general interest to aircraft enthusiasts.

Some years ago, I borrowed some original negatives from the former commander of a WW2 fighter squadron.  When the AF Museum found out I had them, they asked to borrow them to copy.   The former squadron commander said, "Since it's the AF Museum, they're safe enough. Go ahead" (or words to that effect).  Needless to say, the negatives were "lost."  That squadron never again talked to me. Go figure. 

Anyway, here's the article.   I hope it's not too long.

Ed

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DDN | Missing History

Missing History

More than 3,500 Air Force Museum items gone; thefts, false records mask trail of lost artifacts

By Wes Hills
whills@DaytonDailyNews.com

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, Dayton, Ohio]