Crowdsourcing, Phone Cameras Aid in Returning Fallen Soldiers

Jun Sunseri remembers his grandfather, Stanley, sharing stories about his service in World War II. A mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Forces, Stanley was deployed to North Africa and Italy, where he repaired bombers and fighter planes that flew across Europe.

Sunseri also recalls his grandfather's sadness about the friends who never made it home.

Those stories, and ones from other relatives who served in the U.S. military, have stayed with Sunseri. After earning an engineering degree, he worked in automobile accident reconstruction, studying how cars crumpled and some parts could survive catastrophic crashes. He then pivoted to a special kind of archaeology that uses cutting-edge geophysical instruments to quickly and efficiently survey dig sites.

Now a UC Berkeley associate professor of anthropology, Sunseri is drawing on his array of specialties to develop a first-of-its-kind resource library to help archaeologists around the world recover the remains of fallen service members and finally bring them home.

"Even though I have a mechanical engineering degree, worked in automotive crash reconstruction and failure analysis and had a grandpa who gave me a basic orientation to aircraft anatomy, many folks volunteering on these projects don't have that background," Sunseri said. "They might benefit from some helpful digital resources like those we're trying to build."

Approximately 80,000 U.S. servicemembers - primarily from World War II - remain missing around the world, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). The organization believes approximately 38,000 of those remains are still recoverable.

Comprised of a mix of private archaeology consultants and university researchers, DPAA-backed teams each year excavate sites where planes are believed to have crashed. Sometimes they cut through thick brambles or knock down trees in order to access sites.

The missions can be brief, only about a month or so, Sunseri said. Occasionally the excavation has to pause while a munitions expert disposes of unexploded ordnance.

"If you've got a six-week window, you damn well better make the best out of it," Sunseri said.

But making the most of it can be challenging at a crash site. Scraps of metal can look the same, and highly trained and experienced aircraft experts who could tell the difference between an aluminum shard from a wing and a steel shard from a cockpit are thousands of miles away.

That's where Sunseri comes in.

As a zooarchaeologist - an archaeologist who uses museum collections of complete animal skeletons to identify animal bone fragments from a dig - Sunseri realized he needed a similar kind of comparative collection for airplanes. To help his colleague, Nicholas Tripcevich of Berkeley's Archaeological Research Facility, on a recovery project, he visited multiple air museums and the National World War II Museum in 2022 to glean a better sense of what might survive a catastrophic crash and 80 years of exposure.

Those trips sparked the idea for his Missing American Aircrews Project.

"We need to build something," Sunseri remembered thinking. "We need to build a toolkit."

Sunseri's lab has begun developing a three-pronged approach to build a library of 2D and 3D images and video resources that can be used by teams deployed to work at crash sites to help expedite digs and increase the chances of a successful recovery.

The first phase involves crowdsourcing hundreds - or perhaps thousands - of high-quality photos and videos of airplanes, military uniforms and aviator life support equipment. People who visit military aircraft museums could take photos or videos on their phones. Collectors with equipment or other personal effects from wars throughout the 20th century could also share their images. Even antique shaving kits could become part of the research archive, Sunseri said.

The details are especially valuable when paired with military records chronicling details about the mission the crew was flying and any details about those onboard. Merging all of that information would, for example, allow archaeology teams to better decipher a buckle for a throat microphone in a plane's communications system from an oxygen mask buckle or seatbelt found in the cockpit.

On the ground, that could help the team orient itself within a large debris site.

"You can imagine that there are just too many parts to too many aircraft and too many zippers and too many buttons and too many buckles for any one group of people to know all of them," Sunseri said. "We're hoping that we get a lot of participants from all places pitching in what they know and can send references for."

Phase two draws on the expertise of military history buffs and veterans around the world.

While they may not all be able to travel to museums or have collections in their attics, Sunseri envisions they will be able to help sort and validate the crowdsourced images and scans into useful frameworks for the digital comparative collection. Their work also involves fine-tuning details about specific aircraft, a crew's personal effects and the dates and locations where those missions flew, and preparing the mission-specific packets teams will use in the field.

The final stage is compiling the materials into extensive files, sorted by airframe, period, theater and duty stations, that can be downloaded and accessed on a phone or tablet while offline and in the field. If a diver was investigating a suspected plane that went down in the Pacific Ocean, they could quickly access the packets and have comprehensive 3D models of both the plane and all of its components. That would help navigate the surviving parts of a crash site and better orient themself in the wreckage.

Students in Sunseri's lab group, including Rory Hinkle, Mario Castillo, Juliette Lovell, Jessica Gallup, Evan Agbayani, Milka Grenier, Andy Matessa and Nathalia Harris, started working on the project with him when they took his seminar last fall that linked low-impact and non-invasive archaeological technologies to real-world deliverables for community partners. Since then, the team has visited local air museums, started working with citizen scientists and participated in field recovery operations.

They continue to build out workflows and tutorials to train new volunteers to contribute to the mission in all three aspects: intake, validation and deployment.

"We're just getting started," Sunseri said, adding that the project is in addition to his teaching load and grant-writing work. "It's a scrappy little lab group of archaeologists here with zero funding, so we're doing our best."

He has completed the weeklong DPAA partner training and is submitting the project for review with the team that handles long-term collaborations. The hope is that the comparative collection becomes useful enough that the DPAA will take over and deploy it for their partnered teams around the globe.

Sunseri has already seen for himself how the information could be helpful. Last summer, he and several other Berkeley students joined a recovery project in Germany led by Portland State University. While there, he considered how a more comprehensive digital comparative collection in the hands of all the recovery team members could increase the odds of mission success.

Sunseri said he's hopeful the project will one day increase the likelihood of recovery missions being successful. In a way, he said he also sees this project as being about something else.

"I see this as a touch point for how we affect a broader group of Americans and get them excited about something that many people are especially passionate about," Sunseri said. "I've seen some pretty stark political and social rifts in our society bridged by different kinds of Americans working together with a shared sense of purpose in the mission."

Sunseri feels that the nationwide contributions of citizen scientists to recovery efforts could be a regenerative process of community-engaged scholarship that has an immediate, anti-polarizing effect on participants.

"But in the end," he said, "it's about giving these families closure and finally bringing these service members home."