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My great-grandmother Wilma, who worked in the animal-training business, pointed out some signs that Poppy belonged to someone else: She looked like a purebred, was well behaved, responded to her name, and had a tarnished collar around her neck. Wilma urged my grandmother to put an ad in the paper, and though Tony was hesitant at first (because she loved the dog and wanted to keep him), she eventually conceded.
A few weeks passed with no response to the ad, and the family was relieved, but Wilma insisted Poppy was someone else's pet. She examined the scratched-up collar dangling from the dog's neck. Less than half the letters were recognizable, but she was able to make out a county in Washington state that she recognized. She contacted authorities and found the dog was registered. That's when the family learned of its tale.
"I wouldn't have believed it until we got a phone call from the airline telling us that they had lost the dog," my father told me. "They said that a dog had literally fallen, and they knew where the owner was, and that the dog had a mate who wasn't eating."
The family believed, based on its phone call with the airline, that Poppy had fallen out of an airplane while it was in flight. It's impossible to know what the airline said in that phone call 46 years ago, but the message received was the dog had fallen from the sky.
"United Airlines contacted the family and said on a particular day they would come and pick up the dog — which was a sad day for the Saincomes," said my great aunt Jacinta Martinez.
The dog belonged to an elderly woman in Washington state. Her husband had died a year before Poppy went missing, so the widow was grieving both the loss of her husband and her toy poodle. The airline dispatched a team to my family's home to retrieve the lost animal, ending its extended layover in Pacifica.
The airline officials who showed up on the porch with a crate in hand left an impression on my father. "I can picture them, because they were in uniforms and had wings," my father says, pointing to his chest where airline pilots wear insignia. "They were big. I think it was two guys. They got the dog and offered us a reward for taking care of it for that time — $100 I think."
According to my great aunt, my grandfather refused the reward, but United insisted on giving the family something, so the two parties settled on a coupon for a free family meal. Feeling its hand was forced, the family agreed to give the dog back.
"I mean, if it's theirs it's theirs, but that part was hard, because we liked the little dog," my father recalled.
Investigation
Nice legend, but if I was to truly believe in Poppy's leap of faith, I would need some hard evidence. It's true that animals and humans do, on occasion, fall from great heights and survive: Last year a California dog survived a 15-story fall from a high-rise building after splash landing in a hot tub. Skydivers who survive extraordinary falls after their parachutes fail to open appear in the news with regularity, and according to Jim Hamilton, who created the Free Fall Research Page, free-fallers surrounded by a semi-protective cocoons of debris — like plane wreckage (or in Poppy's case a kennel) — have an even higher chance of survival, especially when landing in wooded areas with lots of flora or bodies of water (like Pacifica).
But despite my searching, I failed to find any documents proving Poppy's legendary fall; I couldn't even find a picture of Poppy. And although many of the people involved in the tale, and the dog itself, have passed away, I was struck by the drama and power of the story. Was it true that the house I now live in was once occupied by a dog who fell from the sky?
I've looked in microfilm archives, digital databases, and other incident records searching for Poppy's paper trail. I called every aviation organization that might have a record and enlisted its help in my search. I even called the Bay Area-based MythBusters, but like United Airlines, they never got back to me.
Doug Yakel, SFO's public information officer, couldn't find any documents or records of the Poppy dropping. Ian Gregor at the FAA couldn't find an accident or incident report resembling Poppy's. Terry Williams of the National Transportation Safety Board said, "We checked our database regarding incidents involving cargo doors opening during takeoff during 1968-1971 and there's nothing that references a dog being ejected or dropped from an airplane."
John Hill, curator and assistant director of aviation at the SFO museum, dug even deeper, leading an investigation that checked every handwritten operations report from 1969 looking for evidence of Poppy. He turned up empty-handed.
"If a dog gets loose and then gets put back in the airplane or recovered later in 1969, does that get reported?" Hill said. "Maybe, maybe not."
Since there was no federal mandate to report animal-related incidents on commercial airlines before 2005, it is plausible that such an event could occur without an official record. It's also plausible that a 46-year-old record could have been lost. Hill noted some of the pages from the handwritten 1969 operations reports had gone missing.
Based on more common animal incidents on airplanes it seems most likely Poppy only fell two or three feet after her kennel was mishandled on the tarmac, causing it to crack open. Perhaps that's what the airline meant when they said Poppy had "fallen."
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