BOWDOIN COLLEGE GRANT WEST — Bruce Reed will get to solve a 49-year-old puzzle on Thursday when he leads a team of Maine Forest Service rangers up Elephant Mountain.

While deer hunting with friends last fall on the mountain, the forest service district ranger found one of three ejection seats from the infamous B-52 Stratofortress-C crash that killed seven airmen north of Greenville in 1963.

He returned on Saturday to photograph and mark the GPS location and to record identification numbers.

On Thursday, Reed will lead three other rangers to the steep site to retrieve the estimated 85-pound seat using a cargo net.

“It will be nice to get this seat down out of there,” he said Tuesday afternoon in western Maine.

“It’s an opportunity to put some final touches to some of the puzzles that were left unanswered.”

At 12:11 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 24, 1963, nine members of the U.S. Air Force left Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts for a five-hour flight in the plane, which had eight jet engines, according to mewreckchasers.com.

The crew of the unarmed, $8 million aircraft was practicing routine low-level flight navigation at an altitude of 500 feet in Maine. The training was to avoid the newest Soviet radar technology.

When the jet encountered turbulence just beyond Brownville Junction, pilot Lt. Col. Dante E. Bulli tried to climb out of it, but the vertical stabilizer came off the plane. That sent the jet into a 40-degree right turn, its nose pointing down.

Bulli tried to level out, but when he couldn’t, he ordered the crew to eject into the bitter cold.

Only Bulli, copilot Maj. Robert J. Morrison, and navigator Capt. Gerald J. Adle ejected. The other six crewmen, who either had no time or the altitude was too low to eject, all died, along with Morrison, whose parachute hit a tree.

Reed, who was 2 years old when the crash happened, said he doesn’t know whose seat he found, but the Moosehead Riders Snowmobile Club believes they have Adler’s ejection seat. Adler’s chute never opened, so he hit the snow-covered ground in his ejection seat, before separating from it, suffering a fractured skull and broken ribs.

Reed said that as he hiked down the mountain last fall, he came onto an old woods road and saw metal up ahead through the trees. As he got closer, he saw that it was laying on the edge of the road.

“At first, I didn’t know what it was, and then I got up close to it and you could tell by the different markings and the handles that, to me, it looked like an ejection seat,” he said.

“I could have probably picked it up and strapped it on my back and lugged it out, but it’s been there for 49 years and I don’t want it to get crumpled up. I want it to come out intact.”

Reed said the seat location can’t be accessed by all-terrain vehicle.

“It’s too steep,” he said.

“Years ago, they built old logging roads perpendicular to the slope, and then they would go 100 yards and build another one, and they’re all grown in now all around it.

“But there’s still those pathways and that’s where this individual landed,” Reed said.

“It was interesting. Of all the places, there’s thick woods around here, but some things happen for a reason.”

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For more information about the 1963 B-52C crash, visit www.moosehead.net/history/B-52.html, www.mewreckchasers.com/B52C.html and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Elephant_Mountain_B-52_crash.