Somewhere Under the Trees: John and Jean Block

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 19, 2026

John Block was 57 years old on the morning of July 4, 1977, an experienced pilot with more than two decades of flying behind him, when he and his wife Jean, 58, climbed into their green and white Cessna 150J at Macomb Airport in New Haven, Michigan and took off at 11:10 a.m. Their destination was Lost Creek Sky Ranch Airport in Luzerne, in the northern Lower Peninsula, where their son was waiting to celebrate the holiday with them. The flight should have taken roughly two hours. John and Jean Block never arrived, and neither of them has ever been heard from since.

A Pilot Who Flew by the Highways

John's aircraft, tail number N50935, was a small two seater with white wings tipped in international orange, a white lower fuselage, and a green upper body, a plane that, according to family accounts, was in the process of being converted for use in search and rescue work at the time it disappeared, an irony that would not become clear until decades of searching for the plane itself had already passed. John was not instrument rated, meaning he flew visually, navigating by tracking major highways and landmarks below him rather than relying on cockpit instrumentation to hold a course through poor visibility. He did not file a formal flight plan before departing that morning, a common enough choice for a private pilot on a short, familiar route in 1977, though one that would make the eventual search considerably harder to organize with precision.

A Radio Call, Then Nothing

The Blocks were not flying in total silence. At around one o'clock that afternoon, John radioed ahead to Lost Creek, requesting that a car be arranged to meet them once they landed, an entirely routine, unremarkable transmission that gave no indication anything was wrong. Separately, the Civil Air Patrol station in Bay City reported overhearing a routine radio call from the aircraft around the same general timeframe, a detail investigators later used to help narrow their search, reasoning that if the plane was still transmitting and being picked up near Bay City, whatever happened to it likely occurred somewhere north of that point, along the remainder of the route toward Luzerne. A pilot separately reported seeing a plane matching the Blocks' description at an airstrip in Charlotte, Michigan, around noon that day, heading north, another data point suggesting the flight had proceeded largely as planned for at least the first stretch of the journey.

Investigators eventually developed a theory that John may have made a navigational error near Flint, Michigan, potentially mistaking Interstate 69 for Interstate 75, a mix up that could have pulled the flight off its intended path and toward the Lansing area instead of continuing cleanly north, introducing exactly the kind of small early deviation that, compounded over a two hour visual flight through unfamiliar terrain, could plausibly end with a pilot considerably off course by the time weather or fuel or simple disorientation caught up with him.

Weather, Wilderness, and a Search That Found Nothing

Conditions on July 4, 1977, were reportedly poor, adding another variable to an already visual only flight through terrain the Blocks were not deeply familiar with. When the couple failed to arrive at Lost Creek and no word came from them afterward, an extensive search effort was launched, covering ground and air across the region investigators believed the flight had most likely passed through. That search turned up nothing. The area in question, spanning parts of what is now understood to include the Huron-Manistee National Forest and the broader northern Lower Peninsula, is heavily wooded, dense enough that investigators concluded at the time, and have continued to believe in the decades since, that a small aircraft going down among the tree canopy could plausibly remain concealed from aerial searches indefinitely, hidden simply by the density of the forest closing back in above a crash site.

A Son Who Never Stopped Looking

Decades after his parents disappeared, John Block's son, also named John, has continued actively searching for the crash site himself, working from the theory that the plane came down somewhere within roughly thirty miles of its intended destination, likely along a route running north on Interstate 75 before shifting toward M-33 in the final approach to Luzerne. He has specifically appealed to hunters, hikers, and other outdoor enthusiasts who spend time in Michigan's Huron National Forest and Atlanta State Forest, areas that see relatively light regular foot traffic outside of hunting seasons, asking them to keep an eye out for anything resembling aircraft wreckage while they are out in the woods. His reasoning for believing the plane might still be recoverable, even after so many decades, rests on a straightforward point of materials science: the aluminum fuselage of a Cessna like the one his parents were flying resists rust far better than steel would, meaning a wreck sitting undisturbed under decades of fallen leaves and new growth could still be recognizably intact and identifiable as an aircraft if someone simply happened to walk close enough to see it.

His appeal has remained simple and direct across the years he has spent making it. Please help me find my parents and bring them home, he has said, a plea addressed not to any single investigator or agency but to the general public, anyone who might, by chance rather than deliberate search, stumble across the answer his family has been waiting on since 1977. Anyone who believes they may have found a potential crash site has been asked to avoid disturbing the area and instead contact the Grand Traverse County Sheriff's Office directly, or reach the family through a dedicated email address, searchfortheblocks@gmail.com, set up specifically to field tips connected to the case.

A Familiar Pattern in Small Plane Disappearances

The Blocks' case fits a pattern familiar to anyone who has followed Michigan's history of small aircraft disappearances, one shaped by the same combination of factors again and again: a private, visually navigated flight, a pilot experienced enough to trust his own judgment over instrumentation he did not have installed, and a destination reachable only by crossing long, sparsely populated stretches of forest where a downed plane can settle into the landscape almost as if it were never there at all. Unlike a crash on open farmland or near a populated corridor, where wreckage tends to surface within days through the sheer volume of people passing nearby, a plane that goes down deep in the Huron-Manistee region can go undiscovered for decades, its aluminum skin gradually disappearing under leaf litter and new growth until only a chance encounter, a hunter cutting through unfamiliar brush, a hiker following an old logging trail, brings it back into view. That is precisely the mechanism the Block family has spent decades counting on, not a renewed forensic investigation or updated aerial survey, but the accumulated odds of enough ordinary people passing through enough of that forest that someone, eventually, walks close enough to notice.

Still Somewhere in the Woods

Nearly fifty years after John and Jean Block took off from Macomb Airport for what should have been an ordinary two hour holiday flight, their case remains open, anchored not by any confirmed wreckage or recovered remains but by a reasoned, geographically narrowed theory about where a small green and white Cessna most likely went down sometime after passing Bay City on July 4, 1977. Michigan's northern forests have kept the answer hidden for decades, dense enough to swallow a small plane whole and give nothing back despite repeated searches, leaving the Blocks' son still asking, every hunting season, every hiking trip, for the one person who might finally walk close enough to the right patch of trees to finally end a search that has now outlasted the lifespan of the aircraft itself several times over.

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