Couple's Plane Found 21 Years After They Vanished

The discovery of the wreckage of a small aircraft in the remote woods of Michigan has likely solved a mystery two decades in the making. Per the Detroit News, NTSB officials were dispatched to an area outside St. Ignace on Michigan's Upper Peninsula last week after employees in a national forest found a crashed Piper Cherokee 235. The plane is believed to be the one that Mark and Janet Davies were in when they took off from Drummond Island in Lake Huron in 1997 and were never seen or heard from again. The husband and wife were headed to the town of Howell 300 miles south when radar showed Mark, the pilot, made a sudden turn north then disappeared in foggy weather.

A search party fanned out in search of the plane but no sign of it was seen until Wednesday, when a surveyor came upon the crash site. The plane was officially ruled lost and its occupants presumed dead. Janet's brother, Michael Smith, said he didn't think that this revelation would ever come. "Pretty much everyone had given up hope," he told WPBN. Now, he says, the family can have closure. Smith will reportedly be giving authorities a sample of his DNA in order to verify the identity of his sister's remains. Smith said a small ceremony is being planned to commemorate the long-awaited ending to his sister's story. (More plane crash stories.)