The text that ended a months long search arrived on the Fourth of July. Jason Allard says a friend messaged him that day, and he recounts the exchange in three short lines: “I found it. I see the wing. Let’s do it.” The same day, he says, “we packed all our gear, drove out there” and started walking.
Allard, who posts as @jason__allard, tells the story in a 56 second reel, seated at an outdoor table in a black hoodie with footage of the trip cut in above and around him. The caption opens, “We found an abandoned plane crash.” His hashtags include #rhodeisland, #localhistory and #forgottenplaces.
The first captions burned into the video read, “walked through the brush, and there it was, just a plane flipped upside down in the woods.” The footage matches the line: a white fuselage with a blue stripe lies on its back among thin trees, with brush grown up around it.
“This is something that we had been searching for for months,” he says, and they “couldn’t find it” until the Fourth of July “one year.” While he says it, the screen shows three people at the wreck, one of them crouched beside a tangle of dark machinery.
The walk in was not a sure thing. The video shows a small group crossing an open field of long grass and boulders, then a man with a black backpack stepping over fallen logs in open forest. “We were 90% sure we had the right coordinates,” Allard says of that stretch.
Then the wreck came into view. “Once I saw the plane crash in the woods, it was unreal,” he says, “cause I didn’t think anything like this existed, or if it did exist, a bunch of other people would have already been there. But we were the first explorers to go out there and document it.”
What followed, by his account, was quiet. “I don’t think for the first 15 minutes we said a word to each other,” he says. “It was three of us out there and we just kind of marched through the swamp and just stared at it because we couldn’t believe what we were looking at.”
The closing shots move in close. A pair of boots stands on a detached white panel beside a piece trimmed in blue. A later shot frames a window opening in the hull, a blue stripe running beneath it and dead leaves banked against the side. The reel cuts off partway through a sentence, on the words “It looked like.” It does not say what the aircraft was or when it came down.
In the caption, Allard thanks three other accounts “for helping to track, visit, and document this spot.” Those three verbs are a workable outline for anyone planning a hike to a hard to find place of their own.
Track first. Allard’s group searched for months and did not drive out until someone had a visual on the target, in this case a wing. Hold the trip until you have that kind of confirmation, and save the coordinates to your phone for offline use before you leave the car, because even with a sighting he puts their confidence at 90%. Agree in advance how far past the marked spot you will search before turning around.
Visit with the terrain in mind. His footage shows field, forest and brush in a single walk, he describes swamp at the end of it, and the hikers in frame wear long pants and carry backpacks. He went as one of three, which leaves a second person to help if the third turns an ankle on a log.
Document, and stop there. The caption’s last verb is about making a record, and the reel is that record. Photograph a site like this from the ground, leave every piece where it lies, and give a place where an aircraft went down the kind of silence Allard describes from those first 15 minutes.
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