Expedition Unknown | Josh Gates Joins the Search for America’s MIA Heroines

Standing on the windswept shores of West Africa, I felt the weight of history pressing as heavily as the humid air around us. Traveling with Josh Gates on this mission — unlike our usual quests for ancient ruins or mythic cities — carried a solemn gravity. This time, our search was not for relics of forgotten civilizations, but for the missing daughters of America: 18 servicewomen who vanished in the final days of World War II.

Armed with decades-old crash reports, newly digitized records, and cutting-edge scanning technology, Josh joined forces with Project Recover, a team dedicated to locating missing American personnel. Our target was a C-47 transport plane believed to have gone down off the Ivory Coast — lost beneath waves that conceal both time and truth.

As we launched our boats into the Atlantic swells, the mission felt eerily similar to archaeological work: piecing together fragments, reading landscapes, interpreting clues left behind. But here, every data point carried human weight. Every sonar ping could mean a family’s long-awaited closure.

Diving below the surface, we navigated through shifting currents and layers of silt, searching for the unmistakable outline of wartime wreckage. The sea offered no easy answers. Yet each scan, each descent, each painstaking grid search brought us closer to a moment that might rewrite an overlooked chapter of WWII history.

Throughout the expedition, Josh’s determination never faltered. He approached each lost clue with the same respect he brings to ancient mysteries — understanding that these women, though not etched in stone or enshrined in temples, deserve to be remembered with equal honor.

Whether the plane is ultimately found, our mission revealed something profound: archaeology is not merely the study of the distant past, but a commitment to recovering stories that should never have been forgotten.