Forum, Friday, May 11, 2001, 7:00 p.m., Pyle Adult Center

    According to Get Out magazine, nearly 600 military aircraft have crashed in Arizona since the early 1940s. During World War II, Arizona was home to more than 65 airfields as our nation geared up to fight Germany and Japan. A combination of new pilots and still-being-tested aircraft inevitably led to wrecked aircraft. And Arizona’s sometimes rugged and remote terrain didn’t help much either, sometimes making recovery, or even discovery, challenging.
    Some modern historians have taken up a hobby called “wreckchasing,” in which they use whatever information is available about a crash and seek to find, visit and document the details of the crash. Sources of information include official records (if you can interpret them), library archives, old newspaper stories and even Internet sites.
    Steve Hoza, a book and paper conservator at the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tempe, and his brother Mike are Phoenix natives who have been locating and documenting World War II aircraft wrecks in Arizona for the past 5 years. They will present a program of slides and artifacts from some of the more prominent wreck sites from 1941 to 1945.

    Please join us for a fascinating presentation at the Monthly Forum, Friday, May 11, 2001 at 7:00 p.m. at the Pyle Adult Recreation Center in Tempe. Come to the southwest corner of Rural and Southern, go about one block west on Southern, and turn south into the parking lot. Then joinus afterwards at the Uptown Brewery just a few blocks away for the Post-Forum Debriefing.