Derek Abbey is president and CEO of Project Recover, a non-profit organization devoted to locating and repatriating the remains of missing American servicemembers.
“I really encourage every single one of our members, whether they were involved in a particular case or not, when somebody is repatriated and identified and then the family memorializes them, to go bear witness to that,” Abbey said. “Once you do that, it’s life changing.”
Project Recover is the official partner of Cliff Sjolund, Jr.’s effort to locate MEAL-88, the B-52 bomber missing on a training mission over the Gulf of Mexico since February 28, 1968.
Like Cliff, Derek Abbey is a former military pilot. Abbey began his work for Project Recover as a volunteer many years ago, participating in field searches in places like Palau in the western Pacific Ocean, and doing things like helping search through debris brought up from the seafloor with specialized equipment.
“I remember the basket came up, we took the lid off, and I looked in, and there’s the oxygen mask for one of the aviators,” Abbey said, describing a particular search. “And I picked it up and I probably held on to that mask, just kind of looking at it for five minutes,” Abbey continued, saying that a similar mask was standard equipment every day of his military flight career.
“Every once in awhile you just find this piece of something that just reminds you of why you’re here,” Abbey said, “and that we’re doing this for people, not aircraft or other things like that. It’s for the people that are involved.”
Searching for the missing and serving the families left behind, says Derek Abbey, is “just the right thing to do.”
Cliff Sjolund, Jr. never imagined he’d have a leadership role in a search for MEAL-88.
“I thought in 2021 when I delivered my report to the family members, I was done,” Sjolund said, referring to a report on the crew of MEAL-88 and their final mission – it’s nearly 150 pages long.
“In my mind,” Sjolund continued, “I had accomplished what I set out to do, which was to tell the story and give the story to the family members.”
That all changed for Cliff Sjolund, Jr. when he met Shawn Murphy, a military veteran and amateur historian who was part of the research team we were introduced to in Season One of Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293.
“He basically said, ‘You’re not done,'” Cliff recalled, describing a pivotal conversation he had with Shawn Murphy in 2022. “And I said, ‘No, I am [done].’ And he said, ‘You will never be done until you bring these guys home.'”
Cliff ultimately agreed, though acknowledged that he didn’t have the expertise to actually mount a search for the B-52. It wasn’t much later when Shawn connected with Derek Abbey of Project Recover – buttonholing him after an informational event at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and telling him all about Cliff’s research into MEAL-88.
Shawn readily acknowledges that he is seldom at a loss for words. He is also sincere, dogged and persuasive when it comes speaking up on behalf of American servicemembers who are missing – and who no one is searching for.
After Derek Abbey spoke with Shawn at the museum that day, the partnership with Cliff Sjolund, Jr. to search for MEAL-88 was not far behind. Shawn, Derek says, can lobby with great intensity for what he believes in.
“[But] for stuff like this,” Abbey said, “it doesn’t take a lot of convincing for me to start becoming interested in what we were talking about.”
When the search for the missing bomber gets underway offshore, Cliff will set up a base camp in Port O’Connor, Texas, not far from the old Air Force Base on Matagorda Island. He plans to welcome family members of the MEAL-88 crew, as well as his own relatives and others involved with the project.
While he never set out to actually search for the missing B-52, Cliff, a retired B-52 commander, is clearly committed to this mission, and to seeing it through to a successful conclusion.
And he also hasn’t lost his sense of humor.
“If there’s anybody to blame for this, it’s Shawn Murphy,” Cliff joked.
To contribute to the effort to search for MEAL-88, please visit the project website: B52BomberDown.org.