U.S. pilot accounted for 57 years after vanishing during Vietnam War spy mission

An American pilot who disappeared during a Vietnam War-era spy mission has been accounted for almost 60 years later, officials said Monday. 

John C.G. Kerr, originally from Florida, was 35 when he was reported missing in 1967. Kerr had been piloting an attack aircraft on a "solo nighttime armed reconnaissance mission" over Laos on August 22, 1967, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said in a news release. He did not return from the mission, and failed to check in via radio, spurring U.S. forces to undertake an "extensive electronic and visual search" of the area where he had flown. 

Neither Kerr nor the aircraft was found, but a broadcast that same day from the New China News Agency said that an American aircraft had been shot down, the DPAA said. 

On June 4, Kerr was declared killed in action. 

The DPAA did not provide any information about how Kerr had been accounted for, but the agency typically uses DNA testing and other scientific advancements to study the recoverable remains of fallen soldiers. Since 2021, the DPAA has been carrying out the Vietnam War Identification Project, which is a concerted effort to identify missing soldiers associated with the war. 

Though there are 1,500 missing personnel still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, only about 1,000 of those missing persons are deemed "recoverable." Those recoverable persons are the focus of the identification project. 

The project currently has "170 active accessions... believed to contain possible human remains." Those items are "very small fragments of bone" that are very degraded, the DPAA said, but new technological advances have made it easier to study them with DNA and isotope testing to attempt to identify who they came from. The accessions are compared against family DNA samples that are kept on file as reference sources, the DPAA said. 

In:
• Vietnam
• United States Military
• U.S. Army

Kerry Breen

Kerry Breen is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University's Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News' TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use.

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