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PORTAGE CANAL - Justin Hicks was out watching the waves at the Houghton Breakers last Sunday afternoon with some friends when he noticed something that looked out of place on the rocks.

"I saw a large piece of metal, so I went out there and picked it up," said the Michigan Technological University student. "I had no idea what it was."

What Hicks had found on the stormy afternoon appeared to be part of an airplane - and that reminded him of a story he had read in The Daily Mining Gazette just a week before about the 40th anniversary of a missing National Center for Atmospheric Research plane believed to have gone down in Lake Superior.

Since the piece was the same color as that of the missing aircraft, there was immediate speculation in some quarters that part of the missing plane had washed up.

Over the past 40 years, plane parts have been periodically found on both sides of the Portage Canal.

The last discovery had been in the summer of 1999 when divers on the Hancock side found what appeared to be plane parts. The National Transportation Safety Board was informed of the discovery, but declined to take any action.

Houghton County Sheriff Brian McLean said the disappearance of the NCAR craft is still on the books.

"It's still an open case and we still take information on it," McLean commented. "It's a very intriguing case."

Hicks, a first-year graduate student at Tech from Oconomowoc, Wis., turned the part over to McLean Friday.

"I really wasn't sure what I should do with it," he said. "This way, it's in the hands of people who know what the next step should be."

McLean said he will contact aviation officials - and possibly NOAA - in an attempt to identify the part.

"We'll call in someone who knows more about planes .... that way we'll have a better idea on how to proceed," he said.

The color of the most recent plane part is a perfect match to previous ones found.

The largest plane part discovered came in 1976 when a rear horizontal stabilizer was found near Rockhouse Point by Dana Nakkuka.

Four years earlier, the late Frank Morin of Freda had found a section of plane fuselage while walking the beach in the same area.

The mystery of what happened to the NCAR Queen Air 80 Beachcraft began on a sunny afternoon on Oct. 23, 1968.

On a routine flight to collect water radiation temperatures from Lake Superior, the three-man crew made contact with the Houghton County Memorial Airport around 12:30 p.m. A flash was seen by some residents in Freda and Redridge about that time. But the plane and its three occupants were never seen again.

The three men on board - research pilots Gordon Jones and Robert Carew and University of Wisconsin graduate student Velayudh Krishna - all had conducted the mission many times.

Lester Zinser, a pilot for the NCAR in 1968, was involved in searches for the missing flight in 1968 and 1969. He believes the parts found over the years came from the plane.

"All of the parts have been the same color, a light blue," Zinser said in an interview in 2005. "I think that's more than a coincidence."

There have been many theories on what happened that day 40 years ago. They range from the plane being accidentally shot down by U.S. Air Force planes because it wandered into a no-flight zone - to it hitting an old mine smokestack in Redridge.

And there are rumors the plane ran afoul of an Unidentified Flying Object that day.

The late John Wiitanen was the county sheriff at the time of the incident. He always believed the plane crashed into the lake and became lodged in the the deep valleys that are found in that area.

The searches in 1968 and 1969 turned up just a few small items, but Zinser said he always believed the fate of the plane and its crew would be known someday.