Former Air Force Times contributor Robert F. Dorr, who died in June at age 76, wasn’t your run-of-the-mill aircraft enthusiast.
He was so enamored by airplanes as a teenager that his enthusiasm caught the attention of the FBI, the website Gizmodo reported last week.
The 14-year-old Dorr wrote several letters to defense companies, military bases and airports throughout the country asking for photos of their airplanes to add to his collection.
“I would like to obtain an 8 x 10 inch glossy photo print of the KB-47,” wrote Dorr in one of his letters to Boeing.
“I would like to have two 8 x 10 inch glossy photographic prints showing the F7U-3 being refueled by an AJ tanker plane,” Dorr wrote to the public relations office at Friendship International Airport in Baltimore, Maryland.
At least three times, he wrote, he didn’t receive his requested photos. Instead, he received a visit from the FBI, to whom the letters’ recipients reported him.
When the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the early 1950s looked into who was sending the letters, what they found wasn’t a spy, but just a young teenager with a hobby. Dorr was an “average” and “loyal American boy,” the FBI concluded.
Gizmodo obtained the file on Dorr’s investigations through a Freedom of information Act and uploaded it to Scribd.
To read more about Dorr, who also had been an airman and a diplomat, take a look at Air Force Times’ obituary:
FBI investigated former diplomat, Air Force Times writer as a young boy for being a possible spy
