Joe Biden saw his latest bizarre family anecdote challenged by the Department of Defence as their records show a very different story.
During a campaign pit stop in Pennsylvania, the US President implied to members of the United Steelworkers Union that his uncle was likely eaten by cannibals during World War 2.
Biden told the steelworkers that his mother’s four brothers volunteered to join the army shortly after D-Day, including pilot Ambrose Finnegan.
He said: “He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea.
“They never found the body because there used to be, there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
The US President had only hours before shared the same story with reporters after boarding Air Force One to fly over to Pennsylvania.
He said: “When D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military.
“Ambrose Finnegan, we called him Uncle Bozey, he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force.
“They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”
However, the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s records appear to contradict Biden’s account of his uncle’s story.
According to the site, a plane carrying three crew and one passenger, identified as Finnegan, left Los Negros Island for a courier flight on May 14, 1944.
Rather, than being shot down, the official account notes that “this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea.”
They added: “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”
The report said three of the passengers failed to emerge from the wreck. One crew member was later rescued by a barge.
Finnegan’s remains were never recovered and he is still officially listed as unaccounted for.
Biden has been known to share questionable anecdotes about his family in the past.
Earlier this week, the US President claimed to have been the “first” member of his family to attend university but only two years ago he said his grandfather had played college football.
During his second presidential primaries run in 1987, he bragged about graduating “in the top half” of his class. He later admitted graduating 76th in a class of 85.
