Aidan Mc Govern of Kildough in March 2004 had this to say about the events of the night of 17^th March 1943, he was a young adolescent confined to home because he wasn't well. Home is within a short distance of St. Mogue's Island and very close to where the council boat, or (Erne type) cot as it was then, was kept to carry the funeral corteges out to burials on St. Mogue's Island.

On St Patrick's night 1943 there was a Parochial dance in the hall of the workhouse in Bawnboy and an aeroplane was heard circling progressively lower, making circles of about five miles diameter between Corlough, Newtowngore and Templeport. After the noise of the circling plane ceased abruptly many of the revelers realizing that it had crashed went searching and some were nearly lost on Gowlagh bog where they thought the aircraft had come down.

Aidan's father Michael was visiting Rector Armstrong at the Rectory and was about to leave for home at 11 o'clock when the plane flew very low over Corboy Hill. It crashed in the water with a very loud explosion and flash slightly to the North of St. Mogue's Island but just short of the adjacent island. Aidan's father and the rector took the Rector's boat out in the dark to the crash location and attempted to look for survivors but as calling didn't elicit any response and the search in the dark was abandoned due to the smell of petrol and the danger of fire.

The next morning the Garda (police) arrived and shortly after security was taken over by the Irish Army who brought in a raft to remove all they could. Security was very tight and no local people were allowed near the crash site. The operation took up to three weeks during which time he remembers having some of the soldiers billeted in the family home. They slept beside the fire in the kitchen/living room in their own sleeping bags. At one stage Aidan was shown the belts of 20mm machine gun ammunition, every second shell of which was a tracer. He particularly remembers one of the propellers with yellow tipped blades, which weighted about six stone was around his house for many years, but, regrettably it may have been put into the foundations of their new house, built in the late fifties?.

Of the crew of two,* the navigator had baled out over Northern Ireland.* The pilot apparently baled out over Corlough where he was fed and looked after by the local Parish Priest Fr. McGovern, who subsequently arranged for him to be smuggled back across the border in to Northern Ireland so he would avoid internment in the neutral Republic of Ireland.
  * We now know better about both these events as recent research has shown!

Another local resident David Breiden of Ballyconnell remembers watching from the window in his school classroom the boats and raft going to and back from the Island when the army were recovering whatever they could. When asked about the dance in Bawnboy he told that he thought there was another dance in Templeport Hall on the same night. Since St Patrick's day would have been a public holiday and as dance halls were small and most people had to walk or cycle it would have been very probable that dances were held in both locations. He was only eleven and would have been too young at the time to attend dances!