Back in June, a dozen service members, veterans, and police and fire personnel stood at solemn salute in the small island community of Sitka, Alaska while two U.S. Coast Guardsmen carried an American flag-adorned case from a cemetery to a hearse.
They weren't there to honor a recently deceased soldier. Rather, to formally mark the disinterment and transport of an unidentified soldier known simply as "X-3," who's been dead for over eighty years.
X-3 is one of more than 81,000 U.S. service members whose remains have either never been found or never been identified. The majority are missing from World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War.
An agency within the Department of Defense is tasked with locating and identifying these service members. Their remains are rarely found on U.S. soil because it wasn't a primary theater of war, according to DOD. But in Hawaii and Alaska, where military action took place during WWII, there are more missing soldiers. DOD says there are currently around 120 unidentified soldiers in Alaska and over 1,900 in Hawaii.
A plane crash in the Aleutians
The story of X-3 goes back to June 3, 1942, when Japan bombed Unalaska — also known as Dutch Harbor — a community about 800 air miles from Anchorage in the Aleutian Islands. The U.S. military responded, sending resources to help defend against the attack.
"One of the planes crashed outside of Cold Bay, on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula. All the service members on that plane perished," said Michael Livingston, a local history buff who's spent a lot of time studying WWII events in the Aleutians.
Sixteen soldiers were on the twin-motor C-53B when it went down during a routine flight between two Alaska bases. The wreckage of the plane and 10 of the servicemen were never found. Livingston said a local fur trapper found the bodies of the other six soldiers after they washed up on shore and buried them temporarily. The U.S. military then re-buried them in a local cemetery. And then, after the war, moved most of them to their respective communities. Only one of the recovered men remained unidentified: X-3.
"He was moved to Sitka," Livingston said. "We've been trying to get X-3 identified for a long time."
For years, Livingston advocated for DOD to disinter X-3 and try to identify him, but was unsuccessful.
"Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes."
Meanwhile, in Texas, 71-year-old Chris Pfeiffer had also spent years trying to figure out what had happened to his grandmother's brother, who was one of the men who went down on that flight.
"We've always known that we lost a great uncle in the Aleutian Islands," Pfeiffer said. "And here we are, 83 years later."
Pfeiffer believes his great uncle – 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen of Nebraska — is X-3. According to Pfieffer, Christensen went to college for just one year before he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces (the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force) at age 21. He spent less than a year in the Army before his plane went down.
Pfeiffer, a military vet himself, has collected hundreds of pages of records about the crash and his great uncle over the years, and, like Livingston, petitioned DOD to disinter the remains.
He said he's hopeful, but also realistic.
"Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes. We have to manage our expectations on this," he said.
Pfeiffer said his great-grandparents, parents, and other relatives passed away without ever knowing what happened to Christensen, and he wishes the disinterment had been approved sooner.
"It could have been shared," he said. "There's some closure, because now we know this is the one opportunity, it's the best one we have, to see what happened."
Aaron Cummings is a senior planner with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the DOD agency in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members. Cummings said the DPAA has been looking into this case since 2017, but progress stalled until Pfeiffer got involved.
"We are an agency with finite resources," he said. "It's hard to prioritize, it's hard to rack and stack your missions, and family interest is one of the elements that we utilize to determine how we prioritize and which missions move up the ladder."
Unique and challenging disinterment
Over several days in late June, a recovery team from DPAA, including an archeologist, odontologist (dental expert), a medic, and Cummings, hand dug the grave of X-3, which was perched on a narrow step of the main hill at the national cemetery.
Cummings said the dig was unique in many ways. They were concerned that the casket, which has lain in Sitka's rain-drenched soil since 1948, might have shifted due to subsurface movement. The team tried excavating another unknown soldier from an unrelated case just a day before, but were unsuccessful. Cummings said they dug 10 feet below the surface, but found the grave empty. He said they were fortunate to find X-3's remains just three feet under.
"It was a very successful, respectful, and honorable extraction. We had challenges with X-3, but ultimate success," he said.
Fortunately, he said, the remains were intact, preserved in a wooden casket lined with metal.
Now that X-3's remains have been disinterred, Cummings said their job is to combine the historical information with modern scientific techniques like dental identification and DNA testing, to identify X-3's remains and bury the soldier in his final resting place.
If X-3 turns out to be Christensen, Pfeiffer said he hopes to bury his great uncle's remains in a Lutheran cemetery in Nebraska where the rest of his family lies.
Whoever X-3 turns out to be, investigating cases like this one, Cummings said, is important to the nation's promise to never leave anyone behind.
"It's important for the closure of the families to know that we will always try to bring our folks home and honor our nation's fallen," he said.
Copyright 2026 NPR