FLIER LOST IN BRAZIL

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 63, 1 April 1937, Page 9

FLIER LOST IN BRAZIL

-Own Correspondent.)

Actor Errol Flynn Plans Rescue Attempt fc BELIEVES NATIVE TALE

(By Air Mail—

LONDON, Feb. 28. When the Queen Mary docks at Southampton this week one of her passengers., Errol Flynn, the film actor, will begin his attempt to secure the help of British explorers in searching the jungles of Brazil for Paul Bedfern, an American airman. Bedfern disappeared 10 years ago on a flight from Georgia to Bio de Janeiro, and there have been several reports that he has been seen or heard of in the Brazilian jungles. If tho Irish-born actor is successful in organising a rescue party and discovering the missing airman, he will clear up a mystery that has baffle.d several expeditions. Flight in Monoplans. In lato August, 1927, I saw slim, wide-mouthed Paul Bedfern take off from Brunswick to fly to Brazil. Some 27 hours later his' single-motored monoplane was sighted 200 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Getting his bearIngs from, a ship he dashed off towards the South American coast and was later reported over the Orinoco Delta. Then he vanished. Search from the beginning was re- ' garded as largely useless becarase the regi.on into whieh the young flyer had headed was so ' vast, unknown and almost impenetrable. After five years of silence even Bedfprn's wife and father believed him dead and had given up hope that any trace of him or his plane would fever be found . . Captive White Man. In 1932, a rumour blazed out of the jungle. An American engiueer -reported at Para, Brazil, that he had heard of a captive whi£e man believed to be Bedfern. By the middlo of 1933, the air was ihiek with riimours from* a dozen sources. By the end of 1935, the .Bedfern ruiuours had grown to such proportions that the U.S: iState Department ordered an investigatioii. The Consula'r Agent at Paramaribo, Netherlands Guiana, discovered a Catholic missionary stationed in the interior, who told the following story:' — "Buring December, 1934, I dispatched a Bush Negro, with two boys, to one

of the upper rivers. He returned in •Fobruary of 1935 and stated that wliile at an Indian villago, the name of which he did not know, he was told of n whjto man who had come out of the slcy, had both legs broken, and was iiving in an Indian village only three hours from where he was." The State Department estimated from tho missionary 's testimony that it would probably take 75 days to reach the place where Bedfern was supposed to be, Four Expeditions. Such a semi-official story caused a rush of proposed rescue expeditions, and up to February of last year four had actually set out through the jungle, one of them being started by Art Williams, famous pilot, who taught Bedfern to fly. All four groups have so far found nothing convincing, but intermittent reports still come through that they are gradually forginz ahead.

The outside world was considerably startled early last year by a report in a Paramaribo newspaper from which it appeared . that an alleged member of one of the expeditions, along with two Indians, had followed a tributary of the Amazon and after several days came to a village where all the Indians were completely nude. The report stated the explorers saw an aeroplane caught in the branches of a big tree, and later they met Bedfern. He "was dressed in a ragged singlet and, underpants. He looked like a man of over forty, and was hobbling on rude crutches made of tree branches. He "told his discoverers he had been forced.dorya by a leak in his gas tank. His legs and arms were broken in the crash," but' medicine men had cured. him. He had married/ an Indian woman and had a son who looked very much like him. » The Teport conttnued that a fight took place between the expeditionary force and Indians when an attempt was made to get, Bedfern away. The solo survivor of the f ray, an illiterate Indian, was the source of the' report. Flynn hopes to solve the mystery of Bedfern 's disappearance and plans to visit his family in Belfast and then organise the expedition from London.