"Word has been received here that the body of James Bray has been recovered from the wreckage of an Air Force transport plane which crashed into a mountain peak near Las Vegas, Nevada, Thursday, November 17, 1955, killing all 14 men aboard. Mr. Bray was in the employ of the government secret service in connection with the atomic bomb. He was a former resident of St. Paul, being the son of the late James Edward Bray of St. Paul. Burial will be in St. Francis Cemetery on Thursday."

St. Paul Journal, November 24, 1955.

James Francis Bray was born in 1907 and died November 17, 1955, age 48 years. He is buried in Block N, Lot 12.

St. Francis Parish Cemetery, Viola Gouvion, p. 207.

The location of the crash was Mt. Charleston, Nevada, and the group was apparently working on the U-2 spy plane project, not the atomic bomb as reported at the time in the St. Paul Journal. The crash of the USAF C-54 represented the single greatest loss of life in the entire U-2 program. Mr. Bray was either employed as a civilian with Lockheed Martin, which was under contract with the CIA on the U-2 project, or was an employee of the CIA.

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