Biden suggests uncle eaten by ‘cannibals’ in New Guinea — but military says his WWII plane lost at sea

President Biden suggested twice Wednesday that his uncle Ambrose Finnegan was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea after his plane went down during World War II — even though military records show the plane disappeared in the above the Pacific.

“He was shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden initially told reporters before boarding Air Force One as he left Scranton, Pennsylvania.

“They never found his body, but the government came back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”

After arriving in Pittsburgh, the 81-year-old president told the same story to members of the United Steelworkers union.

“He was shot in New Guinea and they never found the body because there were – there were definitely a lot of cannibals in that part of New Guinea,” Biden said.

The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA accounting agency says Finnegan’s plane was in fact lost over the ocean.

“For unknown reasons, this aircraft was forced to ditch in the ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude and the nose of the aircraft hit the water hard,” the military account states.

“Three men failed to escape the sinking wreck and were lost in the accident. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. The next day, an aerial search found no trace of the missing plane or the lost crew members.

Biden told this story while attacking former President Donald Trump for allegedly skipping a visit to a military cemetery outside Paris during his term after calling fallen American soldiers buried there “suckers” and of “losers”.

“Suckers and losers? This man doesn’t deserve to have been my son’s commander in chief,” Biden said in Pittsburgh, after declaring in Scranton that Trump “refused to go up to the veterans memorial in Paris.”

The controversial version of Trump’s words was mentioned in an article by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, which said that Trump “blamed the rain for the last-minute decision (not to visit the cemetery), saying that ‘the helicopter could not fly” and that the secrecy The service would not take him there. Neither statement was true.

Documentation appeared in 2020 debunking Goldberg’s account by showing that the Navy made a bad weather call that prevented the trip to the cemetery from being made by helicopter. Before returning to the United States after that trip, Trump spoke in the rain, without an umbrella, at another military cemetery near Paris.

Biden frequently tells personal anecdotes that turn out to be false – often in an apparent attempt to connect with his audience.

While president, Biden shared at least 13 times a debunked story involving an Amtrak conductor, claimed in 2022 that his uncle Frank Biden won the Purple Heart – even though the details of his account make it factually impossible, and twice stated that he was selected to attend the Naval Academy, although there is no supporting documentation.

Biden told Jewish leaders in 2021 that he remembered “hanging out” and “going” to Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 after the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. United, during which 11 people were murdered.

The synagogue said Biden never came, and the White House later claimed he was considering a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.