In 1966, Corpsman Mark Dennis left Ohio for Vietnam. He thought it would be good for his future as a missionary. Dong Ha, Mark’s station, was a hotspot at the time. In July of that year, he was on a helicopter that was shot down with only three survivors. Mark was not one of them. The Navy suggested to Mark's family that they not view his remains due to the condition of his body.

On November 30, 1970, Newsweek published a photo of an unknown POW … one that looked just like Mark Dennis.

But the Navy determined it was someone else, a POW already documented. When the family requested his Navy death certificate, they found that Mark’s body was the only one not positively identified because it was burned beyond recognition. It was deemed Mark through the process of elimination.

That’s when Steve Wilcox, a Navy dental tech who was friends with Mark in boot camp, told the family of a friend from Mark’s unit. This friend told Wilcox that neither his corpsman material nor his dog tags were found in the crash and that 13 bodies were not recovered.

The Dennis family then exhumed the body. The remains were covered by his uniform, and then a blanket. Pinned to the blanket was his dog tags, as per regulation. When his brother (a fire expert) examined the dog tag, he found them to be brand new and the burn markings inconsistent with a crash burn.

A privately-funded forensic analysis of the remains show a man five inches shorter than Mark Dennis. Furthermore, the body in the coffin was not burned by JP-4 fuel, but with regular gasoline. Members of the Dennis family believe Mark never died that day.

In the years that followed, the military conducted multiple tests on the remains. Through DNA testing, they concluded that the remains indeed belonged to Mark Dennis. According to a 2017 Tampa Bay Times article, the Dennis family has come to terms with this conclusion, though doubts still linger.

7 Eerie Military Stories from Unsolved Mysteries That Still Haunt us

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