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Pictures beamed back to Earth showed the World War II bomber to be in near pristine condition but they couldn't answer the one question that scientists the world over are still asking: How did such a primitive airplane fly into space and wind up on the moon?
"We have absolutely no explanation for this and seriously doubt that we ever will," said Dr. Stanislav Makeyev, the Russian scientist who released computer-enhanced photos of the airplane a few weeks after it was discovered in March 1988.
"We can speculate that the plane was hijacked by extraterrestrials and taken to the moon but we have no evidence to support that theory," he added. "It really is anybody's guess as to how the airplane got there."
U.S. officials repeatedly declined to comment on the Russian photos, which led to persistent allegations of a coverup. Dr. Makeyev himself insisted that the photographs are genuine.
And there is no denying that the pictures show an American bomber on the moon.
From the very beginning, space researchers called on both the American and Russian governments to send mechanical probes, or an actual manned expedition, to the moon to investigate further.
Unfortunately, the bomber vanished four months after it was found, leaving no clue to what happened to it. At the time Dr. Makeyev said: "The airplane is gone - and there's not even an imprint in the dust to show that it was there in the first place."
Dr. Wilhelm Greder, of the Swiss UFO research group CONTACT, was the first scientist of renown to insist that space aliens took the warplane to the moon in an enormous UFO. "From the beginning we speculated that the airplane had been hijacked by extraterrestrials and the fact that it vanished made us even more certain of an alien connection," he said.
"The bomber is a big, clumsy airplane and certainly not capable of flying into space or out of a crater. It would have taken a spaceship of enormous size to move it and we're sure that is what happened."
Dr. Makeyev concluded: "The disappearance of the airplane is most mysterious and distressing. It's almost as if someone or something was aware of our investigation and took it before we found out too much."
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