On the bottom of Lake Champlain, the answer to a 50-year-old mystery likely solved. This wreckage, believed to be the remnants of a private jet that vanished in January of 1971, discovered by underwater investigator, Gary Kozak, who says he succeeded where 17 searches had failed. The NTSB has yet to confirm the findings.

We brought in a remote operated vehicle, and we captured the underwater images, confirming that it's 99% the right plane.

The 10-seat private plane carrying passengers Frank Wilder, George Nikita, Donald Myers, Randy Williams, and Kirby Windsor, vanished on a snowy Vermont night shortly after takeoff with no distress signal sent.

I started getting more interested in the problem and the challenge of why has nobody found this plane?

Kozak, a seasoned underwater rescuer, joined the effort in 2014. His first attempt to find the jet in 2022 turned out to be a false We got all excited.

We found it. Closer inspection, it had a stemseling that looked more military in nature, not something you would see on a commercial private jet.

Last month, Kozak and his partners say they finally cracked the case with decades-old sonar data.

It was in the location that the radar lost tracking of it when it crashed. It has painted the same custom paint scheme, black, red, black, that was on the side of this jet. So there's very little doubt in my mind this is the right plane.

Finally, appearing to put one of Lake Champlain's biggest mysteries to rest and giving five families a sense of bitter sweet closure. Frank Wilder's father was on the plane that night.

I'm feeling a lot of sense of a relief because spending 53 years not knowing if the plane was in the lake or maybe on a mountainside around there or somewhere was distressing. Unfortunately, it's open to other questions, and we have to work on those now.

Tom, why the plane went down remains a mystery. Tonight, we heard from the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB, put out a statement saying they're going to evaluate the condition of the wreckage, and based on that, as well as a number of other factors, they'll figure out next steps.

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