In February 1958, a routine Air Force training mission over Georgia became the origin of one of the region's greatest mysteries. After colliding mid-air with a fighter jet, a B-47 bomber dropped its 7,600-pound nuclear bomb into the waters off Tybee Island to ensure a safe landing. The "Tybee Bomb" was never recovered.
This Mark 15 hydrogen bomb, with an explosive capability far greater than that dropped on Nagasaki, may still rest in the waters of the Wassaw Sound to this very day. While the Air Force claimed the bomb did not carry a nuclear core at the time, declassified documentation has since disproven this claim, leaving the possibility that it could have been fully armed. Even after extensive searches from Navy crews and sonar equipment, the weapon was never found.
Its fate has been the subject of speculation by locals and experts for decades. Derek Duke, a retired Air Force pilot who spent years investigating the bomb's whereabouts, thinks it's still out there. "If it were near Chesapeake Bay or Washington, D.C., it would have been found long ago," Duke said. His surveys in the early 2000s detected radiation near Tybee, though follow-up searches by the government were inconclusive.
Everything from Soviet retrieval to hurricanes that could dig it up has been tossed out as a theory. While the government has assured residents that the bomb is unlikely to pose any danger, the story remains a fascinating piece of Tybee lore—a lost relic of history waiting to be dug up or forgotten altogether.
