National spotlight find's Goffstown sonar search expert Garry Kozak
Jun. 21—The images captured from the lake bottom were surprisingly clear: a piece of aircraft fuselage, painted with black and red stripes, the plane's instrument panel and engines.
A mystery that had haunted five families and confounded searchers for more than a half-century has been solved. And a Goffstown man played a key role.
Garry Kozak is a pioneer in the use of side-scan sonar technology and a world-renowned, much-sought-after expert at finding long-lost things. You could call him a treasure hunter.
Last month, he was part of the team that found the wreckage of a twin-engine business jet that disappeared over Lake Champlain on a snowy January night in 1971.
Kozak has had an unusual life. His home office is decorated with treasures from some of his successful searches — a ship's bell recovered from the wreckage of a mid-19th-century schooner that sank in Lake Erie, and an iron safe from another shipwreck in the same lake.
"I swear to this day it was empty," he deadpanned.
Mementos of his travels adorn the walls of his family's home, plaques from NASA and the U.S. Navy thanking him for his consulting work, ceremonial masks from Papua New Guinea, wall hangings from Russia and India. Every picture tells a story.
"I've been to 54 countries and over 570 cities in my career," he said.
But he doesn't brag about his accomplishments — and disapproves of those who do.
Kozak grew up in Canada. After a brief stint in college, he went to work as a commercial diver for a company in Newfoundland that was doing oil exploration on the Grand Banks. The company needed someone to monitor a new kind of technology called side-scan sonar, which uses ultrasonic sound waves to create images of items on an ocean or lake bottom.
"I volunteered," he said.
The job was short-lived, but it ignited a life-long passion.
"When I saw this instrument that made pictures of the bottom, my mind went to treasure and shipwrecks immediately," he said.
And not just any shipwrecks, he said. "It was shipwrecks that hadn't been found by anybody before," he said. "It was sort of the Indiana Jones thing most of us have a degree of in us."
"I've got to get one of these," he remembers thinking. "I'm going to find shipwrecks and I'm going to get rich."
He was 22 years old.
The obsession
Kozak points to an oil painting on his office wall of a freighter tossed by an angry sea. Painted by a friend of his who has since died, it depicts the loss of the Dean Richmond, which went down in a storm in Lake Erie in 1893.
Despite numerous searches, the shipwreck had never been found. Kozak became obsessed with it.
He bought a boat with his brother-in-law and started searching the lake bottom with side-scan sonar. "What I thought was going to take one summer to find it turned into nine," he said. "I found a lot of wrecks, but not the one I wanted right off the bat."
Deciding he needed "a real job," he went to work as a field engineer in 1978 for Klein Associates, a Salem company that was building side-scan sonar equipment. But he kept looking for the Dean Richmond, living on his boat from May to October.
It was his girlfriend and future wife, Kathleen, who actually spotted the wreck on the sonar scan one summer day in 1983. "I was taking a snooze on the back deck, and she was driving the boat when we went by it," he said.
She woke him up.
From years of intensive research about the shipwreck, he knew that what he saw on the sonar images looked like the real deal. "It was thrilling," he said.
Other discoveries
In 1980, Kozak joined a team from National Geographic to search for HMS Breadalbane, which became trapped in ice and sank in 1853 during a search for the missing Franklin expedition, which had been seeking the Northwest passage.
While still outside the target search area above the Arctic Circle, Kozak suggested that they test the sonar equipment to make sure everything was working. He watched in amazement as the gear revealed what he recognized as hints of a ship.
After a few well-placed drinks, they convinced a Canadian Air Force crew that had brought in supplies to give them a lift to Calgary so they could get the film from their underwater cameras developed. As the first images appeared, the Breadalbane emerged from the watery darkness of history.
The July 1983 cover of National Geographic magazine celebrated their discovery.
More recently, Kozak joined a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that in 2014 found the San Jose, a Spanish galleon that sank in the Caribbean in 1708 with $18 billion in gold and jewels on board. "It's really a phenomenal wreck," he said. "You can see gold coins, gold bars, lying around."
'Really lucky'
Kozak, 76, runs his own consulting business from his Goffstown home, and works for Edge Tech, a Massachusetts company that specializes in underwater technology. His constant companion is Ross, the sweet-natured pit bull the family adopted as a puppy 13 years ago.
He says he'll retire "when I get old."
"My career has kept life interesting," he said. "I've been really lucky."
A lot has changed since his first years doing this work, Kozak said. "Back then, shipwrecks were really just junkyards on the bottom," he said. "Divers who grew up in my era, we always dove with a crowbar, a hammer and a wrench, and we picked out goodies."
There were only a few rules, he said. "If you salvaged it, you legally could go to court and charge the owner the recovery cost to get the cargo, up to and equal to the full value of the cargo."
The field has changed dramatically, Kozak said, with tension between archaeologists and "explorers."
"Anything that is older than 50 years, at least in the U.S., is classified as historical," he said. The only way you can salvage such sites, he said, is to get an agreement from the ship's owner or insurance company. Otherwise, he said, "If you take anything, it's stealing."
The elusive one
One shipwreck remains elusive, despite Kozak's research and efforts. The SS Arctic, a transatlantic steamship carrying 300 immigrants to the Midwest, went down off the coast of Newfoundland after a collision with another ship in 1854. The disaster is infamous for the actions of its crew, recounted in a book Kozak has on his shelves, titled "Women and Children Last."
"The crew bailed in the lifeboats and left everybody on board to sink with the ship," Kozak said.
"That's the one I really want to find."
These days, it's solving such mysteries that compels him, not his youthful lust for riches.
"The one thing about anything — driving a car, flying a plane — the longer you do it, the better skilled you get at it," he said. "Because I've been doing it for so long, I have a very large mental library."
That's how he found the jet that crashed in Lake Champlain. Others had used sonar to search for the wreckage but it was never found.
A longtime colleague, Joe Zarzinsky, had first told Kozak about the missing plane back in the 1980s. In 2014, a family member of one of the five men on board called him "out of the blue" to ask if he would be part of a new underwater search. Busy with other projects, he couldn't join the effort, which turned up nothing.
But the file stayed on his desk, and the mystery never left his mind.
Different kind of find
When he learned that teams from Middlebury College and the Champlain Maritime Museum had once scanned the lake bed for shipwrecks, Kozak asked to review their data, which revealed four "anomalies" that looked promising.
Kozak and a colleague, Hans Hug of Exeter, took several trips to the lake in 2022 and 2023 to check out those anomalies. They even found a plane, but it appeared to be a military aircraft — even though no record of such a crash could be located.
This past winter, Kozak went through all the sonar mapping data one more time and found one other possible location. Last month, they searched that site, and sonar images revealed a debris field.
Joined by Tim McDonald, a marine contractor in Meredith who has a remotely operated underwater vehicle, they went back on May 25. Video revealed the wreckage of the missing jet, an Aero Jet Commander. "It's the only plane that has a custom black/red/black paint scheme," Kozak said.
The circular pattern of the wreckage was evidence that the plane went straight down into the water, Kozak said. "Whatever happened to those guys on the flight, it was catastrophic," he said.
Kozak shared his findings in a conference call with family members. They were stunned, and grateful, he said.
The families plan to hold a memorial service at the lake in the future. Only they — and those who found it — know the true location. Kozak plans to keep it that way.
When old shipwrecks are found, no trace of human remains are found, Kozak said. The airplane crash site is different.
It's now a sacred place, marking the final resting place of five souls. "We're not touching it," he said. "Nobody should touch it."
