t 6:52 p.m. on November 1, 1955 United Air Lines Flight 629, a DC-6B with 44 persons aboard, took off from Stapleton Airport in Denver, Colorado bound for Portland, Oregon. Eleven minutes later, the 39 passengers, including an infant and five crew members, were dead—killed instantly when the luxurious airliner crashed on a sugar beet farm near Longmont, Colorado.
Upon learning of the disaster, an official of the FBI immediately offered the services of the Bureau's Identification Division in identifying the victims of the tragedy. Fingerprint experts were dispatched from Washington, D.C., by plane, arriving at the scene of the crash on November 2.
As the bodies were recovered, they were taken to Greeley, Colorado and placed in a temporary morgue set up in the National Guard Armory. Upon the arrival of the FBI fingerprint experts, they learned that nine of the bodies had been identified by relatives and friends or by personal effects and had been removed from the armory. The remaining 35 bodies were fingerprinted and 21, or 60% of those fingerprinted, were positively identified with fingerprints contained in the vast files of the FBI.
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