Piece of World War II-Era Drone Plane Washes Up on Massachusetts Beach

The device had been used to assist with target practice in the 1940s and 50s

NPS/Hohman piece of drone

A piece of World War II history has washed ashore in Massachusetts.

According to a statement shared by the Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS) on Wednesday, April 10, a piece of a World War II-era drone plane was found last week.

John Woike/Tribune News Service via Getty Marconi Beach

The National Park’s staff published a photo of “a man-made object” that had “washed up on Marconi Beach” in a Facebook post.

Exhibiting clear signs of wear and tear, the device was pictured lying in the sand.

Staff members with the CCNS, a protected environment overseen by the National Park Service, came together to remove the object from the beach before it was carried away by the waves due to an incoming storm,” the post said.

Once it was moved to a safe location, “park historian Bill Burke examined the object and determined that it was in fact the fuselage of a RCAT (Remote Control Aerial Target).”

NPS Archives airplane and men

It has been decades since the part was last used to assist with target practice in the 1940s and 1950s — most notably for anti-aircraft training off Marconi at Camp Wellfleet, a former U.S. military training camp.

The former camp was used from 1943 to 1961 and sat on nearly 1,738 acres of land located along the Atlantic Ocean on the Cape Cod peninsula.

Though it is now a recreational area currently used for sunbathing, surfing, fishing, hiking, hunting, and picnicking, the Army warns that “munitions and explosives of concern (MEC) may remain within the project area.”

“Aircraft equipped with an RCAT would take off from a now defunct runway located in the woods of Wellfleet,” the CCNS staff continued of the drone discovery. “The RCAT would then be rocket-launched off the aircraft at 0 to 60 mph within the first 30 feet, and then controlled remotely from the bluff.”

The fuselage isn’t the only remnant of World War II to be discovered recently.

Just last month almost a dozen shipwrecks off the coast of the small island of Kasos, Greece in the Aegean Sea turned up artifacts dating back to 3,000 B.C., La Brújula Verde magazine reported.

Hellenic Ministry of Culture shipwreck discovery

The most recent finds were from World War II.

In total, 10 shipwrecks were found as part of a four-year survey conducted from 2019 to 2023.

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“It is the first systematic research on the seabed of Kasos with the main objective of locating, recording and studying the antiquities of an area at the crossroads of cultures and once a center of navigation,” the survey’s website says, translated from Greek by CBS News.

A film called Diving into the History of the Aegean will take a deeper look into their findings, according to La Brújula Verde.

Read the original article on People.