On Wednesday, President Joe Biden regaled the nation with another family tale, this time insisting that his uncle Ambrose Finnegan — whom he called “Uncle Bosie” — may have been eaten by cannibals.
It is a fact that Finnegan disappeared in New Guinea after his plane went down during World War II. Military records state that Finnegan’s plane went down in the Pacific Ocean and his body was never recovered, the New York Post reported.
During a campaign trip to Pennsylvania, Biden told reporters that his uncle’s Air Force plane was “shot down” during a “reconnaissance flight over New Guinea.”
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” the president said after visiting a Scranton war memorial.
“They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane,” he continued.
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Biden reiterated the Finnegan story after arriving in Pittsburgh to give a speech on steel tariffs.
“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” he told members of the United Steelworkers union.
But the Pentagon’s records do not seem to jive with Biden’s claims that his uncle could have become a victim of cannibals.
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The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency maintains that Finnegan was lost out over the open ocean on May 14, 1944.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the government website says.
Finnegan also was not alone on the plane, and some of those with him were rescued.
“Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members,” the POW/MIA site says.
Biden frequently tells dubious stories about his life or that of his family.
He repeatedly tells the debunked tale of an encounter with an Amtrak conductor named Angelo regarding his train travel compared with the 1.2 million miles he had flown on Air Force planes as vice president.
The president also has repeatedly doled out the false claim that he was arrested in apartheid South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.
He has also indulged numerous other stories that were easily proved untrue.
During his State of the Union address last year, for instance, only five minutes into his speech, Biden claimed the economy was “reeling” when he took office.
In another case, he claimed that his grandfather died in the same hospital in which he was born. But the records show that his grandfather, Joseph H. Biden, died in Baltimore, while the president was born in Scranton.
