Great Lakes History Hunters

03/03/2026

03/03/2026

To date, three persons involved in past Michigan area searches for Northwest airlines flight 2501 have come forward to share their experiences. The tragedy was the greatest loss of life in an airline accident at the time and remains one of the greatest mysteries of the Great lakes. Many many people have been involved in the search over the years and one would expect that they would want their efforts to amount to something today. It's quite understandable that several have shared and hopes are high that more will in the future.

Wreck hunters tend to be a secretive bunch but we will be more transparent than most. We will be using the same technique that Robert Ballard used to find the Titanic. Hopes are high that we will be able to locate the final resting place of these lost 58 souls. Be sure to follow us for updates.

02/16/2026

02/11/2026

Same as so many of you, we struggle with cabin fever. Making plans for warmer days has always been a popular pastime to get through the winter.

Brutal Winters take their toll on ships as well as people. The Burlington in 1936 learned that lesson the hard way near the Holland, Michigan pier.

Several years ago we located buried wreckage in the sand using a magnetometer. One of our projects this summer will be mapping a subterranean debris field with a towable metal. Some of the ship was scrapped but much of it still remains. Everything that is there today lies under the sand. Our pulse 12 towable metal detector will be the ideal tool to ReDiscover this shipwreck and we will share the process with you.

Since this is an unknown wreck site, we will also be filling out the beach wreckage reporting forms with the state of Michigan.

01/22/2026

Not aliens, not the Michigan triangle, just a simple microburst is what took down flight 2501 in 1950. The loss of 58 lives near South Haven Michigan, was the greatest aviation disaster in American history at that time.

A great deal has been written of the loss and we are not here to add to those volumes. We are here to find it. We will do so with different technology than has been employed in the past.

Depending upon the configuration, a dc4/dc54 weighs approximately 40,000 pounds and that's mostly aluminum. The entire debris field will be nearly 72,000 lb because the plane was only 58 lb from being overloaded. That 40,000 lb of aluminum leaves a rather unique signature on the bottom of lake Michigan. We're going to find that using a special metal detector designed to search for aluminum and a glorified fish finder.

Between the aluminum sniffer, hot rotted fish finder, and some new research, we believe our chances of success are quite high. This is all part of a plan we had for 2025. Cancer and a broken ankle put us on a road to recovery last year instead. That's all in the rear view now and we see only blue skies in our future

Stay tuned,
Kevin and Amy Ailes
Great lakes History hunters

11/24/2025

Now that Amy's ankle has healed enough to explore, we made the most of a fine day in the woods to see a Native American mound. This is one that I came across while searching for Native American trail marker trees which were indicated on an old map near Allegan Michigan. The eastern half of the United States held thousands of these mounds when settlers arrived. Most of them were removed by agriculture but many do still exist in the wild and can be recognized today if one knows what to look for.

I believe this mound was built by people due to its regular shape, a size consistent with others, the location near water, and an unnaturally flat area nearby where building materials were likely taken from. I also have archaeological records from Western Michigan University indicating that numerous archaeological digs were performed in this area from the 1960s into the 1990s.

There is an area on the slope indicating where someone has violated the site in the past. Due to the fact that these mounds are still victims of the unscrupulous, I will not be disclosing the exact location and metadata has been removed from the images.

In my amateur opinion, I believe this mound to be a Midden. These are mounds composed of excess materials derived from hunting and fishing. Generally, they are not human burials. This is very close to where a large natural spring joins a creek creating exceptional fishing and hunting grounds.

Generally, we avoid walking on native American mounds. We will only tread on them for documentation purposes or if there is already a well-established trail. In this case I did walk on the mound to obtain measurements and better examine what turned out to be a pin oak growing near the center. Amy and I came up with measurements of 200 ft. East and west and 160 ft. North and south. We estimate the height of the mound to be 15 to 20 ft . The fast growing pin oak with a circumference of 12 ft indicates that it has been there for potentially 137 years, which would predate any modern activity.

The next steps here will be to compare the location and description to the archaeological records I have from WMU. Based upon what I find in those comparisons, I will send a letter to the Michigan State Archaeologist for the Southwest section informing them of the current condition of the site. The state of Michigan has a beach wreckage recording form which works well for documenting these sites.

11/10/2025

Never forgotten....

https://youtube.com/shorts/M2UqQ6Rx-yA?si=dR-pBXb2yeog6Q5s

11/07/2025

Map of the Silent Sentinels - Part 1

Over the past several weeks we have been deciphering the information found on a 3/4 century old map. It speaks of ancient Native American trail marker trees and other unique historical features on public land in Michigan. This is an area that is known as a sacred place to the Native Americans who live amongst us today.

Although we are not going to divulge sensitive areas, by following along you will learn of places that we should all know about and can appreciate. This won't be just a simple walk in the woods. We will walk you through how we used Lidar, GPS, and archived survey maps to locate and examine these places.

This particular History Hunt is one that didn't reveal everything we were looking for but we did find much more than we had hoped.

Feel free to follow us to learn more

Kevin and Amy

Great Lakes History Hunters

11/03/2025

We are very much looking forward to meeting many of you at the Shipwrecks and Scuba show in Sandusky Ohio on November 8th. Tickets are still available if you'd like to catch any of the impressive programs.

Our booth will be easy to find and we are bringing some of the tools of the trade of History hunting. No doubt many of you have questions about the operation of side scan sonar, magnetometers, GPS, Lidar and would appreciate a breakdown of just how much easier historical research is today.

Be sure to stop by and say hello.

09/26/2025

Only a remnant of these sentinels of the past watch over us yet today. Native American trail marker trees were a relatively common sight to the earliest surveyors of the Great Lakes area. Time, age, urban expansion, and just plain ignorance have all taken a toll upon their numbers.

They appear in the early surveys, today's websites, and numerous books have been written about them yet a few of the foolish claim them to be false history. The facts and traditions of today's natives speak otherwise.

If you should come across one of these rare survivors of days gone past, treasure the moment. They will likely be gone within our lifetime. We are fortunate to still have a few, if you know where to look.

06/23/2025

Is today, June 23rd 2025, the 75th anniversary of the loss of flight 2501 or is the 24th? We won't know until the site of the tragedy found.

The greatest disaster in American aviation history, at the time, happened somewhere between South Haven Michigan and Milwaukee Wisconsin on the night of June 23rd, 1950. 58 souls were lost too quickly to send out a mayday.

Whether the plane went down on the 23rd or 24th is a question of time zones. It was last heard from at 12:15 a.m. on the 24th in Michigan but was due and never arrived in Milwaukee on the 23rd just before midnight. During flight the DC4 would have crossed the border between Eastern and central time zone effectively setting it's arrival time back by an hour.

It comes down to a question as to whether the plane is in Michigan or Wisconsin Waters. If the plane went down in Michigan then the time had already advanced to the 24th. If the plane went down in Wisconsin Waters, then it was still the 23rd.

We really won't know until the plane is found.

Our research has yielded an alternate search area which we are investigating.