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On April 2, 1997, an A-10 Thunderbolt II—a heavily armored ground-attack aircraft designed for close air support—took off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona on what was supposed to be a routine training mission. On board was Captain Craig Button, a 32-year-old Air Force pilot with a promising career. But what happened next would become one of the strangest aviation mysteries in modern military history.
Instead of following the planned training route, Captain Button inexplicably broke formation and flew eastward, away from his designated airspace. His radio went silent. No distress signals were sent. No explanation was given. He simply kept flying—straight into the unknown.
For hours, his A-10 Warthog, carrying four live 500-pound bombs, flew in a seemingly deliberate course across multiple states. Military and civilian radar tracked his aircraft as it traveled over New Mexico, then into Colorado. Fighter jets were scrambled to intercept, but they never reached him in time. Finally, somewhere over the rugged mountains of central Colorado, the aircraft vanished.
For three weeks, search teams scoured the wilderness, looking for any sign of the missing plane and its pilot. Speculation ran wild. Some believed Button had staged a desertion, intending to land the aircraft somewhere and disappear. Others feared he had gone rogue, planning to drop the bombs in a deliberate attack. There were even theories of suicide, but if that was the case, why did he fly for so long before crashing?
Then, on April 25, 1997, wreckage was discovered in a remote area of the Holy Cross Wilderness in Colorado. The aircraft had slammed into the mountains at high speed, disintegrating on impact. There were no signs of the four bombs. They had either detonated on impact or were still lost somewhere in the wilderness.
To this day, no one knows exactly why Captain Button deviated from his mission. The official explanation suggests that he may have been dealing with personal stress or mental health struggles, leading to an intentional crash. Reports later revealed that Button had appeared withdrawn and troubled in the days before his flight, but he had given no clear signs of distress.
Without a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder, the truth may never be known. The A-10 Warthog’s rugged build and ability to fly long distances only deepened the mystery. What was going through Captain Button’s mind in those final hours? Why did he fly hundreds of miles off course in complete radio silence? And what really happened to those missing bombs?
More than two decades later, the disappearance of Captain Craig Button and his A-10 Warthog remains one of the strangest and most haunting unsolved cases in U.S. military aviation history.