U.S. pilot accounted for after vanishing during Vietnam War [Video]

WASHINGTON — An American pilot who disappeared during a Vietnam War-era spy mission has been accounted for almost 60 years later, officials said Monday. 

John C.G. Kerr, originally from Florida, was 35 when he was reported missing in 1967. Kerr had been piloting an attack aircraft on a “solo nighttime armed reconnaissance mission” over Laos on August 22, 1967, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said in a news release. He did not return from the mission, and failed to check in via radio, spurring U.S. forces to undertake an “extensive electronic and visual search” of the area where he had flown. 

Neither Kerr nor the aircraft was found, but a broadcast that same day from the New China News Agency said that an American aircraft had …