Everyone has heard about this tragic day ‘the music died’, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson (aka the Big Bopper) all died in a plane crash while flying from Iowa to North Dakota. The plane crashed into a field in the town of Clear Lake, less than 4 minutes after it took off, on February 3rd 1959 and the theory has always been quite simple, it was a pilot error due to snowy conditions.
However, officials are considering reopening the case! I never knew there were some conspiracy theories associated to the incident, but the Guardian reports that a lot of speculation has been made around ‘the discovery of a gun supposedly owned by Holly in the same Iowa cornfield where the mangled wreck of the Beechcraft Bonanza was found’! There was also a rumor that the pilot’s seat had a bullet hole through it and that two chambers of the pistol were empty… talk about drawing conclusions 66 years later!
LJ Coon, a pilot who made his own investigation, approach the National Transportation Safety Board’s cold case unit, and asked them to re-examine the case. Coon doesn’t believe that it was an error of the pilot, the 21-year-old Roger Peterson:
‘Roger would have flown out and about this airport at night, under multiple different conditions. He had to be very familiar with all directions of this airport in and out,’ said Coon to the Pilot Tribune, but he also believe that a weight imbalance, newly installed flight instruments and a possible commotion among the passengers may have played a role.
It is such an intriguing mystery, but at the end does it matter if it was a pilot error or not? I think it does, imagine if the gun had really been used in flight, imagine if there had been foul play. However I wonder what kind of investigation can be made so long after the accident and when all witnesses have died. It’s highly probable they are going to go back to the same conclusion. Today, a giant pair of Holly’s signature black rimmed glasses marks the entrance to the cornfield where they all died,… so young.