On a blustery night 65 years ago, Frank Sutliffe and Richard Heimann heard the roar of airplane engines over their Mill Valley homes followed by a flash of light on the side of Mount Tamalpais. The two 12-year-olds talked about it the next day with their buddies at Park School and decided they would check it out after the bell rang.

Little did they know that they would be the first to stumble upon a haunting scene of mangled metal, charred supplies and burned flesh.

Sutliffe and Heimann, now 77, are two of the boys who found the wreckage of a Navy seaplane that crashed and killed all eight aboard Nov. 30, 1944. Last week they were intrigued to hear that a group of pilots from Gnoss Field in Novato and a park ranger who is an expert in Marin plane crashes recently trekked to the remote site to mark the crash's 65th anniversary.

"I wonder what's still up there," Heimann said. "I bet there are a lot of bits and pieces left."  There are.

Chuck Jessen, of Mill Valley, recently gathered the pilots at the Mountain Home Inn and listened to a historical summary by Matt Cerkel, a Marin Municipal Water District ranger who has spent countless hours researching the wreck. The debris is widespread among the manzanita bushes, but all the big chunks are gone — confiscated by the Navy or poached by souvenir hunters. Cerkel is hoping visitors will show respect and leave the site as it is.

Small pieces of the plane are in surprisingly good shape, Jessen said, because the metal was treated with corrosion-proof compounds. "They look current. It's very strange," he said.

Heimann now lives in Carmel Valley. He lived on a ridge that faced the mountain right where the plane crashed.

"From my house you could see the scar on the mountain near the old railroad tracks," Heimann said.

"We went up there and crawled through the brush and came out on a little ridge. There it was. It was something."

Jessen obtained the aircraft accident report from the U.S. Department of the Navy by filling out a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this year.

According the report: It was raining in the Bay Area the night of Nov. 30, 1944, with 18 mph winds.

Visibility was less than two miles at the Alameda seadrome, where seaplanes took off and landed next to the Alameda Naval Air Station.

The plane was a two-engine Martin PBM-5 Mariner, a slow seaplane designed in 1937 that was used primarily in the Pacific theater during World War II. It lifted off the San Francisco Bay waters and turned west toward the Golden Gate Bridge as it climbed and headed toward Hawaii. Two other planes carried on radio communications with the pilot, who was flying by instruments through clouds and rain.

At 11:25 p.m., radio traffic stopped from the one PBM-5. Later it was learned that the plane crashed into the side of Mount Tam at about 1,425 feet.

The dead were identified as pilot Lt. J.L. Rensley, Thomas Oliver, Chapin Miller, Harry Holland, Rodney Jeffers, Thomas Joyce, John Kelly and Wayne Paxson.

According to Navy information obtained from the wreckage, Rensley had trouble with one engine and was trying to return to the seadrome area by turning north near the Golden Gate Bridge in an attempt to loop back toward Alameda.

The Navy believed Rensley didn't keep a close eye out of the windshield because of the confusion over the engine problems. His view would have been limited by darkness and rain.

The plane had clipped a telephone pole and electrical wires about a half mile before crashing. The crash was described as a heavy impact followed by a bounce uphill of about 50 yards, followed by an explosion. Eyewitnesses at the crash site told reporters that the nose and part of the wing remained intact. Sheet metal was found a half mile away.

"It's clear what happened from a pilot's perspective," Jessen said. "When you're fully loaded, you have all that fuel and it takes every bit of those engines to get airborne. Once they got out to the Golden Gate, they lost an engine.

When you're heavily loaded like that, you have to make a very gradual turn. And since he's down to one engine, he's losing altitude at the same time. It's probably taking everything he's got to hold onto the controls. I think he lost track of where he was relative to the mountain."

Sutliffe, Heimann and the other boys figured that they weren't the first to the crash site, but they still high-tailed it down to the Mountain Home Inn and told Max and Katie Todd, the proprietors, about what they'd seen. Katie Todd heard Sutliffe's story and called the sheriff's office.

"The sheriff told her something like, 'Come on, they're a bunch of kids. What do they know?'" Sutliffe recalled.

"But Katie said, 'I've known Frank Sutliffe since he was a little boy and I know he's telling the truth.' Finally, he decided to come up and look."

There is some mystery surrounding the crash, too.

The Army dentist who identified the bodies later said there was one other man aboard the plane not listed among the casualties. Rumors that it was somebody of considerable rank, possibly involved in the Manhattan Project, or that one of the names listed as killed was a pseudonym for a high-profile mystery man have not been proven.

The boys who found the wreckage said there was scattered debris of orange Japanese bicycles at the site. The Navy denied that report.

"They're lying," Sutliffe said. "We found parts of Japanese bicycles. They were orange or maybe yellow, I can't remember. There was something going on that they're not telling you. I never felt we got the straight story. We only know what we saw."

"There were a few bikes," Heimann said, "but it never occurred to me that they might have been Japanese."

There were a few other strange facts: The National Transportation Safety Board said all reports of stateside plane crashes that occurred in 1944 were destroyed, and there were no records kept by the telephone or power companies of downed wires despite the plane having severed lines before it crashed.

Nancy Skinner, former historian and current archivist for the Mt. Tam Interpretive Association, said the mystery about this crash continues to spark intrigue.

"Nobody can say yes or no to a lot of these so-called facts, so there's a lot of speculation, and that makes it even more fun," said Skinner, a 78-year-old San Anselmo resident.

She remembers interviewing Sutliffe many years ago. When she called him back a second time, he told her that the first call had jogged his memory and he remembered being told by a Navy official to never tell anybody what they'd seen, "not even your mother."

"Of course they were intimidated by that man with all those scrambled eggs on his hat," Skinner said, using a slang term to describe the twisted gold insignia on the visor of white Navy caps.

Skinner said she spent parts of a year researching the crash in the 1980s and was repeatedly blocked by federal agencies when she asked for official documents. She said she's glad the MMWD's Cerkel has made progress and that it's "his turn to do the legwork."