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."

DAY TWO: Air Force Report Undermines Secrecy Rationale
June 23, 2003

She wanted to know what her father was thinking the moment he died.

So she returned to the spot, to the field on a farm in Georgia where his airplane had crashed. She sat on a stump in the field, now overgrown with pine trees. And she looked at the sky.

Judith Loether says she was looking for inspiration. "What are you supposed to glean from a moment like this?" she remembers thinking.

It was February 2002. For nearly two years, Loether had been wading through a long-secret Air Force report about the 1948 B-29 airplane crash that killed her father, an RCA engineer from Haddon Heights. And she was beginning to believe her government had committed an injustice against her family.

"I'm thinking of my father falling through the air and I think I had the sense that his last thoughts were about his family," she says. "And did they take care of his family? They didn't. And from that day on I decided I was going to do something. I think I had the sense that my father would say, 'Give it a try.'"

In 1949, Loether's mother, Elizabeth, and the widows of two other civilians killed in the crash sued the government for negligence in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The widows won two rounds in court, and the decision was upheld by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But in 1953 they were forced to take a reduced settlement when the U.S. Supreme Court said that the government could keep as a state secret the accident report detailing the cause of the crash.

Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter, a Philadelphia native, wrote: "The airplane . . carried confidential equipment on board and any disclosure of its mission or information concerning its operation or performance would be prejudicial to this Department and would not be in the public interest."

After finally reading the accident report 50 years later, Loether wondered: Who was Finletter trying to protect?

Many causes for crash
Loether found the report through Michael Stowe, a South Jersey aviation buff who collected declassified reports. In it, she found the answers to questions that had long haunted her. Why did the B-29 crash? Why did some men on the plane live and others die?

Failure to follow procedure. Failure to carry out special safety orders. Pilot error. These were the causes identified by the Air Force -- all evidence that could have been used 50 years ago to support the claims of negligence.

The accident report contains grainy pictures of the wreckage and play-by-play details of the plane's final, swirling descent to earth.

The aircraft was at 18,500 feet, about 40 minutes into its flight, when the pressure on the first of four engines dropped and it caught fire. Two mistakes were made: The propellers on the fourth engine, instead of the first, were slowed; and fuel for the second engine, not the first, was shut off.

The report concluded that "confusion did exist among the pilot, copilot and engineer." By the time the bomb bay doors were opened for evacuation, the plane was spinning. At 15,000 feet, the plane began disintegrating: The fourth engine fell off from the plane, the left wing exploded, and then the first and third engine fell away.

Only four of the 13-man crew made it out alive.

The investigation found that the eight Air Force personnel had never flown together before, and the five civilians were not instructed on emergency procedures, including how to operate a parachute.

Loether's father, Albert Palya, was found "free of wreckage with parachute on but unopened, indicating he failed to pull the rip cord or that he jumped at too low an altitude for successful use."

The report also found:

• Two Air Force orders calling for changes in the exhaust system -- "for the purpose of eliminating a definite fire hazard" -- were not complied with. The fire began in the exhaust system.
• An Air Force order requiring the inspection of rivets was ignored. Loose rivets may have been a factor in the crash.
• The plane needed "more than the normal amount of maintenance." It had been out of commission because of technical problems 97 of the 189 days before the crash.

Beyond these details, there was little information about a secret mission. The flight's secret mission, Project Banshee, is mentioned in the report in passing -- as a classified testing program requiring the B-29 to fly at 20,000 feet and drop bombs. In supporting documentation, it is described as a "pilotless aircraft guidance system."

The SHORAN project -- which Eugene Mechler, a survivor, had told Loether was involved in the operation -- is not mentioned at all.

Loether and other family members believe the Air Force sought to keep the report secret to avoid embarrassment. Legal experts say the government wanted to establish a precedent for keeping state secrets.

In either case, the time period was likely a factor. The Air Force was established in 1947, and it was seeking credibility among the more established military branches. Also, the military's reputation, high after World War II, had declined as a result of the Korean War.

And it was the start of the Cold War, too: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as spies the same month as the 1953 Supreme Court decision.

Families feel a bond
The civilians who died left behind families who fought a court case for five years, and then spent the rest of their lives in the dark about what had happened.

Once Loether knew the truth, she tracked down the widow and two daughters of William Brauner, and the widow of Robert Reynolds.

She started with postcards sent around the country. "I thought, 'What the heck? It only costs me 19 cents,'" Loether says.

Two weeks later, she was in touch with Susan and Cathy Brauner -- William's daughters. Both live in Massachusetts.

"To have this come out of nowhere was just incredible," says Cathy of Wellsley, Mass., who had previously gotten a copy of an accident report that was almost completely blacked out.

"The verbal descriptions of what had happened were pretty uncomfortable. I didn't even want to look at it again," she says.

The families immediately felt a bond.

"I knew what my experiences were without a dad, and it's not an easy thing," Loether says. "The government did everything it could to make it worse."

Shortly after visiting Waycross in 2002, Loether set out to find Patricia Herring, who had been married to Robert Reynolds. She sent out a mass mailing to the Indianapolis area, where she believed Herring lived.

"I am looking for Patricia Herring . . . I have some interesting information for her," Loether wrote.

On April 18, 2002, Loether got a letter back from Herring.

Now, she would look for justice. "How do we fix this problem?"

Loether was impressed with the compassion the late Charles Biddle of Philadelphia, a World War I flying ace, had shown her mother when he represented the widows before the Supreme Court. So she contacted his old firm in Center City Philadelphia to see if the case could be reopened.

Wilson Brown III, an attorney at Drinker, Biddle & Reath, was immediately interested.

"The story, when you hear it, is so grabbing," he says. "The question we faced was how do we fix this problem? What can we do for these people who suffered this injustice?"

Last November, Brown took the case to the Supreme Court with a highly unusual petition charging that fraud was committed upon the court five decades earlier. In the petition, the three families sought $1.14 million, the $55,000 difference, adjusted for inflation, between the original court award and the money the families received in the final settlement.

The petition argued the Air Force intentionally suppressed the crash secrets.

"When it found it could not protect them based on truth, it determined to resort to the lie that they contained, and might compromise, military secrets," the petition says.

United States v. Reynolds was a landmark case. It has been cited more than 500 times in court cases, including 19 times in the Supreme Court; one of the more famous was the 1974 Watergate case involving President Nixon. Despite the significance of the case, Brown's petition did not seek to alter national security law.

"The lesson to the government is if you're going to ask the court to give you that much discretion, then you better be making decisions that are appropriate," Brown says. "If we give discretion to the government, we need to have a system in place to make sure it's never abused."

The U.S. government filed a response in May, saying the petition had no place in the Supreme Court. Government attorneys said the Air Force secretary in 1953 was "legitimately concerned' that the details of a confidential mission could be revealed.

"It is easy for parties to make hindsight judgments about whether the disclosure of internally restricted military documents such as accident investigation reports could compromise the national interest,' government attorneys wrote.

On Monday, the Supreme Court effectively agreed with the government attorneys, and decided not to docket the case. But family members and Brown have said that even if they failed to rectify the wrong in the highest court, they would continue their fight, possibly in lower courts.

"We all have to be careful"
During today's unconventional war on terrorism, civil libertarians and government officials are clashing over the use of government power in the name of national security. United States v. Reynolds, therefore, is particularly instructive today.

Last year, the case was cited by the Justice Department when it sought to block a New Hampshire widow -- who lost her husband Sept. 11, 2001 -- from getting the safety plans to Boston's Logan Airport.

"What's really important about United States v. Reynolds is that the Ashcroft Justice Department is doing the same thing in a variety of cases throughout the country," says Professor Stephen Dycus, a security law expert at Vermont Law School.

"(Officials) are going into the courts, saying we need for the courts to rely on us to make judgments about what's necessary to defend the nation, and do not look behind our claims."

In discussing the case, Loether draws lessons from her own family. When her boys were growing up, she says lies were always met with harsher punishments than the crimes.

"I want that lesson to be learned by everybody," she says.

"I don't say I don't love my government, because I do. But we all have to be careful."

The newlyweds looked as if they'd walked off the silver screen and onto the hills of Macon, Ga.

Patricia and Robert Reynolds woke up early on Oct. 6, 1948, and went for their daily sunrise stroll through the warm hills, taking their first steps together in their own version of the post-war American dream.

"Our whole life revolved around the present and the future," Patricia says. "We didn't even have a past history at that point."

Patricia was a picture-perfect 20-year-old brunette, with an hourglass figure, prominent cheekbones and fashionably wavy, shoulder-length hair. Robert was tall and blond and at age 24 -- smart. He had worked as an engineer for RCA for only a few months, and yet he was assigned to a secret project with men nearly twice his age, including Albert Palya of Haddon Heights.

After their morning walk, Robert went to work at nearby Robins Air Force base, a facility established in central Georgia in 1941 to house America's growing and increasingly potent air service.

Patricia stayed home, preparing for their move to an apartment in Haddonfield a few days later when Robert would start working at RCA in Camden.

Crowds flock to site
Like a blast of thunder is how many described the sound. At 2:08 p.m., the people of Waycross, Ga., 170 miles from Robins Air Force base, heard a roar they could only compare to an act of God.

Looking skyward, townspeople "stood frozen as bodies and plane parts hurtled downward," the Waycross Journal-Herald reported the next day.

The B-29 bomber carrying Reynolds, Palya and 11 others had broken up in the sky, scattering wreckage over 2 miles, the largest pieces falling on the 350-acre farm of the Zachry family. Three crew members and one of the five civilians aboard were able to parachute to safety. The other nine men aboard were killed.

"Thousands of people milled through Gilchrist Park to view in awesome horror the wreckage that gave the Zachry farm the sudden aspect of a battle field," the Journal-Herald reported. 

"Fields that once grew sweet grasses were splattered with blood, and the nearby fields bright with purple and yellow of autumn flowers were dotted with the bodies of brave men intent on a special mission."

Four of the bodies were found wedged in the tail section, the largest intact piece of the plane. Another was found in a forward section of the fuselage. Four other corpses were pulled from nearby marshlands.

Newspaper accounts of the day blamed the crash on fires in two engines, a problem known to have plagued B-29s.

The death of the nine men on a secret Air Force mission was news across the country, and nowhere was it felt more than in Camden, where more than 15,000 people worked for RCA.

The accident sent shock waves through RCA's engineering staff.

One month after the tragedy, a top RCA executive in Camden, Frank M. Folsom, wrote a letter to the Air Force that the accident had forced employees to confront the "danger of flying in military aircraft."

The accident report from the crash was concealed by the Air Force. If it had been made public, the engineers may have been even more reluctant to fly. 

Horrific scene
The Zachrys still have a plot on the farm where the plane fell and remember the day vividly, as much for the secrecy surrounding the investigation as the horror of the crash scene.

Robert Zachry, a World War II veteran, thought he was under attack and jumped for cover in his barn.

His son Bernard was down the block at the schoolhouse carrying a little girl up a tree during a game of cowboys and Indians. Hearing the blast, he ran home to the mayhem that was his family's farm.

"People were on fire before they keeled over, and you could see blood where they were stepping," Bernard recalled in a recent interview. "There were body parts in the wreckage. It was terrible. It was horribly gory to look inside."

The horses and cows were spooked, Robert, now 83, remembers. "I thought two planes ran together," he says.

His wife served coffee to a crewman whose parachute put him in a nearby gator pond. Outside, onlookers sat on the farm's fences and trampled the property.

"By then people were coming from all over the county," Robert remembers. "You couldn't turn away people. One of the officers helped out. He drew his pistol and told them to get away from everything."

Newsmen were also flooding the area, he says, looking to describe the scene and interview survivors.

"I can say the government was protecting itself," Robert says, "because (survivors) weren't allowed to meet with the press."

Information scarce
The victims' relatives also found themselves struggling to get information.

"I was treated at that point like someone who had wandered in and gotten in the way," says Patricia Herring, the former Patricia Reynolds, now 75, from her home in Carmel, Ind. "We couldn't get any information on the crash site or who the survivors were. I was treated very badly, I was ignored. And no one ever said to me, face-to-face, 'Your husband was killed.'"

Failing to secure any information from the highway patrol office in which she was sequestered, she called RCA offices in Camden.

"They told us," she says.

Because she could not see the body, it made it harder.

"Here is this young vibrant man walking out the door in the morning and giving me a kiss and saying, 'I'll see you tonight.' And he disappears."

Investigators stopped by the Zachrys for some time after the accident for follow-up interviews.

"You would find pieces of aluminum occasionally (after that) in the field," Bernard says. "Daddy put them on the top of a shed."

Looking back, Patricia has memories that stick out, too. She remembers her young husband's concerns.

"He complained about the plane," she says. "There would be many days where he'd be scheduled to fly and they'd call in the early morning and say, 'There's such and such a problem, so we're going to postpone until tomorrow.' It should have been a clue."

These articles appeared in the Courier-Post and Gannett newspapers throughout New Jersey. Photos provided and by Carlos Ortiz, Courier-Post.