Jun. 14—MENOKEN, N.D. — June 12, 1954, started like any other Saturday for the Pfeiffer family of Menoken, North Dakota.
Eudora Pfeiffer was washing the lunch dishes while daughters Jackie, 7, and Janine, 3, played with paper dolls. Jack Pfeiffer was stretched out on the kitchen floor for his usual post-meal nap before returning to farm work.
But his rest was cut short by a thunderous interruption from the sky.
In an instant, their quiet afternoon turned into a front-row seat to the Cold War, leaving a scar in the earth — and fragments of twisted metal that would surface from the soil for decades to come.
“I remember seeing something go in front of the sun — then it was dark,” Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor, recalled in a 2022 interview with The Forum, where she and her sister, Janine Pfeiffer Knop spoke about
a book they had written about growing up in North Dakota.
“I remember the sound of the plane — it was different, louder, and lower,” added Janine, who now lives in Ames, Iowa. “But we never expected a crash. A boom.”
An F-86D jet fighter from Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City had plummeted into their flax field, exploding on impact.
Jack and Eudora raced outside, telling the girls to stay put. They didn’t.
“Looking back, the most vivid thing I remember was running into the field and seeing a parade of cars coming up our driveway, stirring up dust,” Janine said.
Neighbors had seen the jet go down and rushed over, hoping to help — or at least witness the aftermath.
Earlier that day, 300 miles southwest, 2nd Lt. Arnold Weber climbed into the cockpit of his F-86D for a routine training mission. He and another pilot from Ellsworth’s 54th Fighter Interceptor Squadron flew toward North Dakota, a key region for Cold War surveillance and interception drills.
The squadron maintained round-the-clock readiness to intercept any unidentified aircraft in U.S. airspace within two minutes.
At the time, pilots were not allowed to discuss their missions in detail, but most took place over North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana — regions laced with strategic missile sites.
According to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, the state housed more than 300 ICBMs and 30 ABMs, making it both well-armed and a prime target.
Weber’s mission changed abruptly when, at high altitude, he heard an explosion behind him.
“I didn’t know what it was,” he told a reporter later that day. “My wingman radioed, ‘Son, you’ve got something. I don’t know what. You’d better get out.'”
Weber tried to throttle back — nothing. He hit the eject button and was launched into the atmosphere at 35,000 feet.
“I knew if I tried to breathe, I’d black out,” he said. “So I held my breath as long as I could.”
He tumbled uncontrollably — head over heels, limbs flailing — until his parachute deployed at 15,000 feet. The freefall seemed to last forever.
“It felt like half an hour,” he laughed later.
But the trouble wasn’t over. As he neared the ground, Weber couldn’t collapse his chute. The wind dragged him 100 yards across a field.
“If that other fellow hadn’t come when he did, I think I’d still be in it,” he said later.
That “other fellow” was Joseph Swartz, driving with his teenage daughter. She spotted the parachute, and they turned around to help.
“There was a high wind blowing,” Swartz said. “The chute was dragging him while he fought to collapse it.”
Together, they wrestled the parachute under control. Weber had landed just 50 feet from phone lines near McKenzie, about six miles east of Menoken.
Miraculously, he was uninjured. After folding up his chute, he caught a ride to the Bismarck airport, then flew back to Ellsworth.
Back at the Pfeiffer farm, Jack, Eudora and their neighbors discovered Weber’s jet buried in a smoking 12-foot crater. Wreckage was scattered across the flax and adjoining cornfields.
“The fire and smoke kept coming out of the ground,” Janine said. “And the depression is still there. For years, whenever Dad worked the soil, he’d dig up plane parts and bring them into the house to show us.”
Given the classified nature of Weber’s mission, security quickly descended on the site. Military personnel cordoned off the farm, posting sentries at both ends of the property.
“We could come and go, but no one else could,” Janine said. “They even posted a guard a mile away, on the far edge of our land.”
Neither sister remembers exactly when the plane was removed. But both vividly recall one particular visitor.
“There was a good-looking captain who came to talk to us,” Janine said, laughing. “We were so little, but we must’ve been impressed by his Air Force dress blues.”
Little else was reported about the crash in the following days. News coverage was minimal, and later searches of local papers yielded no new details.
Weber returned to duty and was briefly hailed as a celebrity — believed at the time to be the highest-altitude survivor of an ejection.
Over his 23-year career, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross 10 times and set several endurance records. He retired as a major and died in 2023 in his home state of Kansas.
Janine said she was disappointed to learn of his death so recently.
“I would’ve loved to meet him,” she said.
But his brief descent over their family farm left a lasting impression.
“I was pretty little, but something that impactful sticks with you,” Janine said. “Jackie and I remember the details. It was amazing.”