Beach Bombs

A modified Bell 206 helicopter equipped with an "undercarriage-mounted array of magnetometer-studded limbs" brings new meaning to the word beachcomber.  It's currently being used in a $5.6 million effort to find unexploded ordnance left behind on Martha's Vineyard beaches from WWII training missions.

According to today's Vineyard Gazette:

"Since December the Army Corps of Engineers has been engaged to close the books on one of the more peculiar chapters in Martha’s Vineyard history, methodically surveying Tisbury Great Pond, South Beach and Chappaquiddick by land, sea and air for potentially dangerous ordnance. Seventy years ago, while the world was at war, the Vineyard was a Naval proving ground and the three sites all served as aerial dive-bombing target ranges for the screaming Grumman F6F Hellcats that emptied their practice (and not-so-practice) rockets all along the Vineyard coastline.

"Although it is designed to find metallic objects, on Thursday, after a project supervisor saw a local ad for the lost Chilmark black Labrador retriever Olive (and its attendant $5,000 reward) Mr. Christie joked that the ordnance search was doubling as a high-tech dog hunt."

Not mentioned in the article is nearby Nomans Land, an uninhabited island three miles off Martha's Vineyard that's closed to the public due to unexploded ordnance.  In addition to old bombs, Nomans Land has the disputed rune stone some claim as proof Vikings visited hundreds of years before the Pilgrims.

"Joshua Crane, the former owner of Noman's Land, first discovered the strange lettering on the large black rock late one afternoon when the setting sun sank low on the horizon in 1926.

"Mr. Crane took the oldest known photographs of the inscription in 1926, which were published in a book by Edward Gray titled Leif Eriksson, Discoverer of America. The stone was later examined by E.B. Delbarre in the New England Quarterly in 1935 and again by Hjamar P. Holland in the same publication in 1944, both of whom dismissed the rock as a hoax.

"Both scholars found it highly unlikely that an engraving could withstand the constant wave action and erosion of the ocean, and questioned the use of the Roman numerals because such enumeration was not used for dating until the 14th or 15th centuries in Scandinavia.

"But perhaps the most damning report of the authenticity of the rune stone came on August 31, 1954, when the Gazette reported that "over the past weekend Capt. Martin Dahl said he saw a Norwegian cook chisel the message into the rock in 1913."