The storyteller is Michael Stowe, a father of two whose fascination with old airplane crashes runs so deep he keeps a silver heap of metal plane wrecks in his back yard, just beyond the horse barn.

In the 1990s, Stowe took his hobby a step further and amassed more than 100,000 declassified American military airplane accident reports -- including every one from 1918 to 1952.

Each report tells a story of different men on different missions gone wrong. One of those missions, dealing with a secret project called Banshee, killed an RCA engineer from Haddon Heights.

The secrets in this accident report provide more than details about a plane crash that killed nine men in 1948. They expose the roots of American secrecy law, the very essence of "state secrets."

And they would never have been revealed without the storyteller.

On Oct. 6, 1948, it is now known, Albert Palya flew in a B-29 bomber to test secret electronic equipment. The plane crash killed Palya, three other civilians and five Air Force personnel.

The crash ended Palya's life, but it began a lifetime of questions for his daughter, Judith.

Why did the B-29, the same model plane trusted to deliver the two atomic bombs, disintegrate over the skies of Georgia?

How is it that only four of 13 men aboard were able to parachute to safety?

What information was the Air Force trying to hide when it refused to produce the accident report, even for a federal judge?

The answers would provide a cautionary lesson, particularly relevant today, about governmental accountability at times when America feels most threatened.

And they would turn a daughter's search for truth into a search for justice -- in a case that could be decided as early as this week in the nation's highest court.

A top engineer
It was around the birth of her first son in 1975 that Judith Loether began thinking about the father she had lost when she was just 7 weeks old.

As a kid growing up in Haddon Heights, Haddonfield and Cherry Hill, she would tell friends at school she was proud of her father. He had worked on secret stuff.

But as a young woman, she grew resentful of his absence. What had she missed out on? she wondered. Why did he have to die?

"I think about if he had been there to give me away at my wedding, if he had been there at my swim meets," says Loether, who now lives in Berlin, Mass., 40 miles from Boston. "If he had been there to play the sax -- would it have influenced me on music? If he had been there to take photographs of me . . ."

Albert Palya died at the age of 41. He had grown up in Minnesota, the son of Austrian immigrants. He was an engineer with an artistic bent, a photographer and musician who owned an early film company and made trinkets out of wood.

Palya began working at RCA, a major government contractor, in 1945. He was an engineering supervisor when he left for Georgia to take part in a special Air Force mission.

His secret projects included SHORAN, a short-range navigation system which used radar for bombing. An advertisement that ran in National Geographic magazine after the project's completion described the equipment as "one of the most important geographic inventions since the compass."

The SHORAN technology was used in Palya's secret flight in 1948. But the primary purpose of the planned five-hour mission was to test a secret, pilotless, aircraft-guided, surface-to-surface missile system.

Project Banshee required the B-29 to drop bombs. In Irish and Scottish folklore, a banshee is a spirit whose wail or appearance warns family members that one of them will soon die.

Palya's role in the development of SHORAN and Project Banshee showed he was one of America's best engineering minds, a man whose work would help lead the country to its new status as a post-war superpower.

But he was also the primary breadwinner for his wife, Elizabeth, and three children, including Judith. His death left Elizabeth caring for the family on her salary as a home economics teacher at Haddonfield High School. One son, Bob Palya, still lives in Camden, where he owns an auto repair shop.

Elizabeth remarried a few years later. But for Judith, life remained difficult; her stepfather didn't give her the same kind of attention as his own daughter.

"I just accepted it how it was," she says.

But after marrying John Loether of Cherry Hill, and starting a family in the suburbs of Massachusetts, she began asking questions. 

Seeking answers
Loether's curiosity about her father, tinged with anger, led her to strike up correspondence with Eugene A. Mechler.

Mechler was a retired engineer from Cherry Hill who had worked for the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He was also the only civilian survivor of the plane crash.

"I didn't see anything of him (Palya) after the plane began to have trouble," Mechler wrote to Loether from his home in DeLand, Fla., in 1977.

Mechler gave Loether some details from the crash, explaining that he was sitting close to the bomb bay door of the plane and parachuted to safety. He even drew a diagram showing where he and Palya had been sitting.

At the time, Loether was not looking to unlock a decades-old mystery. She was just hoping to find out more about her father by asking questions.

Mechler gave her a general sense of their mission that day and even noted the "B-29 wasn't the greatest." But the meaning of these details would only be realized 20 years later. Until then, the official accident report would be sealed.

"So much of this takes on so much more significance now," Loether says.

State secrets privilege
The widows of the three civilian victims of the crash sued the government for compensation in 1949.

They believed the government had been negligent.

But the Air Force refused to permit even a federal judge to review the accident report, citing national security.

Three times the courts sided with the families. Then United States v. Reynolds, named after one of the other families bringing suit, reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court ruled that the Air Force could conceal the report, given the government's concern about national security being compromised.

The widows had lost.

Fifty years ago today, the three widows reluctantly accepted a $170,000 settlement, $55,000 less than the judgments the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia had originally ordered.

But beyond the money, the decision effectively established a new law, granting the military unprecedented power to conceal documents that it says can compromise national security. It is considered the most important case on the "state secrets privilege," and essentially allows the military to keep documents secret from anyone, even from federal judges.

"How important was Reynolds?" says Stephen Dycus, a Vermont Law School professor and the author of "National Security Law." "The answer is very important. The principal of the state secrets privilege is by itself not so controversial. But how it's applied is very controversial."

Dycus points to the post-Sept. 11 cases against so-called "enemy combatants," where the evidence against individuals is not disclosed under the state secrets shield. He calls this the government's "trust us" argument, and said it can be invoked in any court case. "Can you believe that?"

If not for a New England homemaker's curiosity about her father and a South Jersey man's fascination with military aviation accidents, the 1948 crash of a B-29 over Georgia may have remained a government secret lost in a mountain of government files.

Three years ago, Loether was surfing the Internet for information about B-29s when she came across a Web site selling declassified Air Force accident reports.

Accident-Report.com said it had 34 years of reports on Air Force accidents.

After e-mailing Stowe, Loether ordered the 220-page report on the crash that killed her father. For $63, she would find out why her father died -- and open a new chapter in United States v. Reynolds.

"I really didn't understand the significance of what I was involved in," says Stowe, a manager at a fiberglass distribution center who operates the accident report business as a sideline. "It's exciting, but a little bit intimidating. Here's little me, even having a hand, a little part, in this thing."

As Loether waded through the report, and repeated passages to her husband, she kept repeating: "Can you believe that?"

"It was just wrong. It's not the American way," Loether says today, barely concealing her anger.

"This story is all about America," she says. "It isn't about a plane crash, it isn't about my neighbor not keeping a secret and me wanting to do something about it. It's about my country doing the wrong thing."