AS THE search for the US Air Force aircraft and pilot missing for two weeks resumed in Colorado yesterday, investigators tried to find an explanation in the personality and background of the pilot, Capt Craig Button.
He left a training mission involving two other aircraft over Arizona on April 2nd and flew 1,360 kms (850 miles) towards mountains in Colorado, where witnesses have reported hearing explosions and seeing flames.
The A-10 jet carried four bombs which were to be dropped on a practice target.
His father has denied reports of family problems following a recent holiday which might have caused Capt Button (32) to disappear while on the training exercise. Mr Richard Button, a former second World War pilot, told reporters at his upstate New York home that there were no problems and "anything that implies that he's dishonest is a lie".
Newsweek has reported that investigators are grilling Capt Button's fellow pilots to find out if he belonged to an extreme right wing militia group.
Conspiracy theories are circulating. One is that he landed his A-10 bomber in the mountains in Colorado, where it is being hidden in a secret bunker for an attack on the courthouse in Denver where Timothy McVeigh is on trial for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
There have also been reports that Capt Button was upset because his mother had joined the Jehovah's Witnesses religion; but it has now emerged that she has been a member for years.
Six days before he vanished he had arranged a holiday for his parents in Arizona. They said they had left their son "in good spirits".
An airforce spokesman, Lt Gen Frank Campbell, said yesterday that following about 200 interviews no information which would help to recover the pilot or the plane had been uncovered. There was also "no evidence that he was anything but a model US air force officer", he said.
The American public has been fascinated by the strange tale of Capt Button, which resembles the plot of Broken Arrowe. In this recent John Travolta film, a pilot steals a nuclear equipped aircraft and disappears with it.
No suicide note had been found in the belongings of the missing pilot described by lifelong friends as an "all American boy". "All the way up to the flight the young man's behaviour was impeccable," Lt Gen Campbell said. "There was nothing to suggest anything unusual.
Improved weather conditions have allowed rescue crews to examine several of the sites which U2 reconnaissance planes had pinpointed as indicating metal objects under snow. The area where the missing plane is presumed to have crashed is remote, and mountainous conditions and bad weather have prevented search parties from gaining access until last Sunday.
An SR 71 Blackbird spy plane was assigned yesterday to fly over snow covered mountains in an attempt to detect the missing Thunderbolt.