"I Know My Brother's Alive"

Despite persuasive evidence that U.S. Air Force pilot Charles Scharf died when his plane slammed into a Vietnamese mountainside, Barbara Scharf Lowerison remains convinced that her brother survived and is being held against his will in Asia. She has only fragmentary evidence to support her belief, like a fleeting glimpse of someone who might have been her brother in an old East German film about POWs, and a CIA report that lists him as a prisoner. "I know my brother's alive," she maintains.

Over the years, Lowerison, 57, has come to believe that her brother was captured and shipped to China. She reasons that he would have been valuable to Beijing because, she says, he told her that during the Vietnam War he undertook secret reconnaissance flights over China. Lowerison says when Air Force officials told her and her mother that Scharf's plane had gone down, they added a strange command. "We were told not to talk about him or give out his name to anyone," she recalls, "not even our neighbors."

Members of Scharf's family believe they spotted him in an East German film of American POWs made during the war. A figure who appears onscreen for perhaps one second has what they say is Scharf's characteristic waddling walk. Lowerison also has a paper, found in her brother's service records, that she has been told is a "CIA report." It lists her brother as one of 12 POWs identified by the agency in the same film.

Another more bizarre brand of evidence has also spurred Lowerison to pursue her brother's case. In 1980 she began receiving mysterious phone calls. "I'd hear airplane engines and machinery sounds in the background," she recalls. "This would last one or two minutes. Then two clicks, and the line would go dead." On one occasion a caller with a woman's voice twice repeated the words "China, Cambodia" -- and then hung up.

The most upsetting call came three years ago. Lowerison returned from work to find a message on her telephone answering machine. After almost a minute of noise that might have been traffic or from an airport, a man was heard to mutter what sounds like the words "Help, Barbara" in the tone of someone perhaps drugged or in pain. To an outsider, the tape could easily seem like a cruel hoax. To Lowerison, it is a tormenting sign that her brother might be alive.

Lowerison complains that her attempts to resolve her brother's case have been obstructed by Pentagon incompetence and dishonesty. When she sent her brother's purported phone message to Air Force analysts, they reported back that it contained no discernible human sounds. Only after she appeared on Donahue in June 1990 did the Air Force agree to re-examine the recording. This time it concluded that the message did in fact contain a human voice -- but there is no way of determining whose voice.

Lowerison vows to keep pressing the government for news of her brother. "I think they've known all along where he is," she says. "They've made grave, serious mistakes leaving so many men behind. Now they want to cover it up." But like some other MIA family members, she has become so distrustful of the Pentagon that she may never be satisfied by any official sifting of the evidence that does not lead to her own conclusions.