FOLEY, Ala. — The story of what Debbie Harris found on the beach on the Fort Morgan peninsula has been documented recently in newspapers and on television in places as faraway as California.

The story is recounted here because, quite frankly, the death of a Blue Angel pilot in 1958 continues to lead Harris and her family along paths they never imagined a few months ago.

They continue to experience a remarkable number of coincidences that tie 1958 to the present day, only don’t refer to them as coincidences. Harris and her family refuse to call these serendipities chance or happenstance.

Indeed, Harris and her family are on a spiritual quest of sorts. It’s on behalf of Cmdr. Robert Nicholls Glasgow, who was 36 when his F11F-1 Tiger jet went down over 50 years ago on the Gulf-side of the Fort Morgan peninsula in an isolated area. They’re doing it for Glasgow’s survivors and, in the process, trying to set the record straight concerning what happened to the husband and father that day.

That’s why Harris is searching for anyone who might have been an eyewitness to the 1958 crash or knows anything about it. As Harris talks about the tragedy a half century ago, one gets the impression from her that, for now at least, the story of Robert N. Glasgow has no end in sight.

“We’re trying to build enough evidence, not necessarily to do anything with it, but to see where it leads,” she said last week.

If anything is done with the eyewitness accounts Harris is gathering, it will be initiated by Glasgow’s 87-year-old widow and surviving children. What the pilot’s family is up against is something not easily changed, namely, the military’s account of the crash of a million dollar aircraft and the pilot in the cockpit that day.

While the military determined the cause of the crash was “undetermined,” pilot error is clearly written between the lines in official documentation.

“He is reaching out obviously, and now I’m not letting go of it until there’s a resolution,” Harris said.

“He” is Glasgow, and for Harris she is just following his lead.

Before winking at her persuasion of events that started in late 2008, listen to her story if you haven’t already heard it.

THE STORY

ALREADY TOLD

Like a lot of people raised on the Fort Morgan peninsula, Debbie Harris had heard about the death of the Blue Angel pilot most of her life. She was 5 when it happened.

A small house next-door to the property owned by her parents, Carol and Walter Wilkerson, was actually destroyed by the jet’s wreckage.

Over the years, what Harris calls “small pieces” of the F11F-1 Tiger would wash up on the beach. During the 1960s the jet’s engine appeared.

It was in more recent times —- October 2008 — while walking her dog along a path down to the water that Harris glanced down and saw an emblem.

“I felt like it had something to do with the crash — something military,” Harris said.

It was bronze or bronze-like; it had “Fighter Squadron 191” on it. Harris Googled the emblem and it came back that Fighter Squadron 191 was an old squadron of the Blue Angels, the flight demonstration team that was formed at the end of World War II. Harris even found the date of the Fort Morgan crash and a name: “Nick Glasgow.”

And there was a startling coincidence: The date of the crash was also the date Harris found the emblem. Oct. 14, 1958 and Oct. 14, 2008, 50 years to the day.

Maye Ann Lambert, Harris’ aunt, who lives in Pensacola, said military officials think the emblem her niece found might have been affixed to a cigarette lighter. Whatever, Harris put the emblem in a envelope and forgot about it.

February 2009: Harris was walking again, this time along a path within a hundred feet or so of her house.

“I looked down, and I knew exactly what it was. It was like it fell out of the sky.”

It was a military dog tag. Clearly legible on it was the name Robert N. Glasgow.

“I’m in this moment; it was very emotional,” Harris recalls. “I’m the first person holding this since it was around his neck.”

Harris calls her mother, daughter, aunt and uncle. “You’re not going to believe what I found,” she tells them.

The Lamberts — Maye Ann and husband Bob — say they will go to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola and see what they can find out about the man who wore the dog tag. Harris, on the other hand, tells her family that she has to find the survivors of Robert Glasgow and give them the dog tag, which was in remarkably good condition for being in salt water for 50 years.

The Lamberts go to the National Naval Aviation Museum, but find nothing under the name on the dog tag. Today, they feel one possible reason why was that Cmdr. Robert N. Glasgow had been at the Naval Air Station only a couple of days waiting to take command of the Blue Angels when the crash occurred.

The Lamberts were told they would need to talk to the museum director, who, they were also told, was not there that particular day. As it turned out, the director was just leaving the museum and somebody ran after him with word about the Fort Morgan dog tag.

Retired Navy Captain Robert L. Rasmussen, director of the museum, came back to speak with the Lamberts. They remember vividly his first words: “Robert Glasgow.”

“That just floored us,” Maye Ann Lambert said of that encounter with Rasmussen, who, you see, was flying with Glasgow on the day of the crash over 50 years ago.

“He has not ever told this story — nobody knew about it,” Maye Ann Lambert said of Rasmussen.

Rasmussen told the Lamberts Robert Glasgow was married and had four children at the time of his death. He also told them his superior was scheduled to fly with Glasgow that fateful day in 1958, but something had come up and the superior asked Rasmussen to fly with Glasgow instead.

Rasmussen went up to 25,000 feet over Mobile to test his radio, leaving Glasgow in the Gulf Shores/Fort Morgan area at a lower altitude. When Rasmussen started back to join up with Glasgow, he tried to raise Glasgow on the radio but couldn’t. He eventually saw smoke from the crash rising from the beach.

“I couldn’t process that,” Harris said of the Lamberts “stumbling on” Rasmussen, the pilot flying with Robert Glasgow that day.

Bob Lambert points out yet another happenstance. The National Naval Aviation Museum has two curators, neither of which was at the museum that day. Had they been, Lambert said he and his wife would have been directed to one of them instead of to Rasmussen, and who knows how that might have changed the chain of events.

Debbie Harris started Googling again and discovered that Robert Glasgow was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She also discovered yet another of those coincidences relating to time.

“He was born on the day I found his dog tag,” Harris said, meaning Feb. 17, 1922, and Feb. 17, 2009.

Harris would eventually learn that Mickey Sue Glasgow, Robert Glasgow’s widow, lived in Corona del Mar, Calif. One of the Glasgows’ sons, Patrick, lived in nearby Newport Beach.

With plenty of media fanfare, Harris eventually talked by telephone to Glasgow’s widow about the objects she found in the sand at Fort Morgan. Mickey Sue Glasgow said she couldn’t come to Alabama to get her husband’s dog tag due to her age. On the spot and unplanned, Harris told the widow she would bring the items to her.

At the end of March, Harris and a half dozen or so of her family members made the trip and met with Mickey Sue Glasgow and her three surviving children. Harris gave the widow her husband’s items from 50 years ago in a box with Fort Morgan sand and a few sea oats. Harris said when Mickey Sue Glasgow opened the box it was like the dead pilot’s soul was inside. Again, plenty of media attention was focused on the emotional meeting between the two families.

Debbie Harris says today that she thought in March that returning the dead pilot’s items to his family was the reason she had found them; that it was a father reaching out to his family from beyond this world. Now, however, she sees the story has taken another direction.

At no time during the emotional California meeting between the two families did one subject come up. It’s one that Robert Rasmussen addressed to the Lamberts, namely, how Robert Glasgow’s death was the result of pilot error; that Glasgow tried to make a loop with the F11F-1 Tiger jet and didn’t pull out in time.

THE STORY That Hasn’t Been TOLD

In February 2008, Bob Lambert called a man about clearing some brush off his property. He got an estimate for the job, but as his wife, Maye Ann, said, Bob doesn’t act on anything in a hurry. Last month — May — Bob called the man and his son to come and do the brush-clearing.

It was while Maye Ann was writing out the man’s check at the end of the day that she asked him if he had time to hear a remarkable story — a story about the crash of a Blue Angel in 1958 near Fort Morgan, Alabama.

“I know all about it — I was there and saw it,” said the man, Randy Powell, 58.

Randy Powell was 8 at the time and was mullet fishing with his father, a friend of his father’s and Randy’s two brothers on the day Robert Glasgow’s jet crashed.

“Randy said the plane had made a couple of passes, the engine was in trouble it sounded like to them, and it exploded about treetop level,” Maye Ann Lambert said in recalling her conversation with Powell that day.

Upon learning of yet another fortuitous connection to the Robert Glasgow story from her aunt, Debbie Harris placed a call to Marvin Swindle of Silver Creek, Miss., the other adult who was fishing with the Powells that morning. Swindle was under a canopy of trees on the beach. He recalled the jet sounding as if it was in trouble. He also recalled “black smoke coming out” and an explosion in a “fireball,” Harris said.

Randy Powell’s father, A.L., lives in Molino, Fla. According to Harris, he is in his eighties but when they visited him he was “very adamant” about the crash details he remembers. Indeed, what he told them was very different from what they had always heard about the crash while growing up in Fort Morgan.

True, some of the jet’s wreckage ended up in front of the Wilkerson home, where it destroyed that nearby house. But, as Harris points out today, approximately three miles away the Powells and Swindle were seeing and hearing something different.

In a May 29, 2009, notarized affidavit for Harris, A.L. Powell said the following: The Blue Angel came over before noon; the fishermen commented to each other that the pilot “sounded like he was in trouble;” he and his sons saw black smoke coming from behind the aircraft; they saw the jet explode in a “large fireball.”

“Everybody down there (Fort Morgan) just assumed he hit the house going so low and it exploded,” Carol Wilkerson, Harris’ mother, said. “We never knew about the other crash site,” the one to which the Powells and Swindle attest.

A.L. Powell went to the crash site he identified as being approximately three-quarters to a mile west of “The Pines” where they launched their boat on Oct. 13, 1958, for a night of fishing. Powell also said it was three hours before military investigators arrived at the site following the crash.

The military put the time of the crash at approximately 3:30 p.m. The eyewitnesses Harris has talked to say the crash occurred in the morning. Rasmussen, the man who was flying with Robert Glasgow that day, said the crash occurred in the morning, according to the Lamberts.

The Onlooker , in a Oct. 16, 1958, article on the crash, noted the jet crashed at 4 p.m. on that Tuesday afternoon, “just off the beach” about six miles east of Fort Morgan.

Harris and her family wonder if the time discrepancy could arise from the fact that it might have been 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. before the military got to the crash site.

Of Robert Glasgow’s surviving family members, Bob Lambert said, “They thought the crash was on Pensacola Beach until we went out there and showed them on a map.”

Betty Ewing is mentioned in The Onlooker article from 1958 as a witness to the plane crash. Harris has contacted Betty Ewing Byrd, who was 18 at the time and planning her wedding that particular morning. Byrd says this today:

She and her father, upon hearing the Blue Angels practicing, went down to their dock to crab and watch the jets.

“I never saw them do any loops or maneuvers other than fly straight. As he flew in front of us there was black smoke coming out from behind the aircraft, and the further he flew the larger the amount of smoke billowed out.”

Byrd said it was evident the jet and pilot were going down.

“We kept looking for a parachute but never saw one,” she said.

Harris said Byrd told her to this day she won’t go see a Blue Angels’ show because of what happened when she was 18.

Among the military papers that Debbie Harris has today is a simple, hand-drawn picture of an airplane making a steep bank straight up, making a big loop, coming down and striking the ground and exploding before it can pull out of the loop. Yet another document states that a civilian pilot observed an F11F doing loops the afternoon of Oct. 14, 1958. After the plane struck the ground the document said the aircraft appeared to “crack open like an egg.”

Two recommendations are made in those military documents pertinent to the accident that took Cmdr. Robert N. Glasgow’s life. One, publish in a “forceful manner” the need for pilots to adhere to restrictions. Two, have pilots continually survey their qualifications and “limits of their skill and ability.”

Regarding the tone of the recommendations and the alleged pilot error, Maye Ann Lambert points out that Robert Glasgow was no kid in 1958; he was 36 years old with four children, not exactly the profile for a “hotdogging pilot.”

Debbie Harris said they met Glasgow’s wingman, David Tingler, who lives in Newport Beach. Tingler served with Glasgow on the USS Yorktown. He doesn’t recall Robert Glasgow being the type to take chances, Harris said.

In telling Patrick Glasgow, the son and a former military pilot himself, about what they had learned from eyewitnesses such as Randy and A.L. Powell and Betty Ewing Byrd about his father’s crash, Harris said it is evident the specter of pilot error has been hanging over the Glasgow family for years.

“He said, this means everything to me to clear my father’s name,” Harris said of Patrick Glasgow.

For that reason, Harris wants any and all who know anything about the Blue Angel crash of 1958 to contact her.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m just following,” Harris said of a story that seems to her to be moving ever forward and is somehow orchestrated from beyond this life.