On Saturday, Sept. 23, 1939, a small biplane sustained engine-related problems in the sky over eastern Connecticut. Unable to reach an airport, the pilot decided to set down in a cow pasture on Hanover-Versailles Road in Sprague, just above the Little River.

The pilot, Otto E. van Schaik, did a pretty good job of coming in for a landing. The land wasn’t flat, and there were probably a few cows hanging around.

The plane came in slow, bouncing enough to damage the landing gear. As it lurched to a stop in the pasture grass, it tipped forward and bent its propeller. Quite a bit of smoke arose form the scene, but there was no major fire.

It was an open cockpit plane, the kind in which you can fly along with your elbow in the wind. It had two cockpits, fore and aft, and they were occupied by the pilot and two young women.

History has no record of exactly how the three were seated in the two available seats. Not that it mattered. They all survived in good order.

There was no possibility of the plane taking off without major repairs. Sprague, a town of wool and cotton mills, could offer nothing in the way of landing gear or propellers, so pilot and passengers had to abandon the little airship and hitch a ride in search of a mechanic and parts.

They left a neighbor, Anthony Zinavage, Jr., in charge of the plane. (This was the uncle of Wilfred Zinavage, a writer and retired Navy veteran who still lives just up the road from the ad hoc landing strip.)

Besides wool and cotton mills, Sprague also had one of Connecticut’s most productive rumor mills. News of the crash spread quickly, swelling with details as it raced into the town’s three villages: Baltic, Hanover and Versailles. A crowd of thousands gathered.

Upon inspection, it was noted that “Made in Germany” was engraved on the hub of the bent propeller. A plaque on the engine said, “Siemens & Halske bei Berlin.”

This was just three weeks after Germany had launched its blitzkrieg into Poland. German and French armies were on the verge of a battle.

By the time someone thought to call the state police, scuttlebutt had transmogrified the plane into a German bomber that had been abandoned by 15 Nazi soldiers.

Nothing rouses the state police like a report of invading Nazis. Two troopers sped north from the barracks in Groton.

When they arrived, they found Zinavage sitting on a water can nearby. With a neatly trimmed mustache and khaki clothing, he looked suspiciously military, arguably even Teutonic.

The troopers were on guard for trouble until they realized that if the little plane was a bomber, it was carrying very little ordnance, and that if 15 Nazis had emerged from it, they must have been very small ones.

It wasn’t hard for Zinavage to convince the troopers that he wasn’t German.

An inspector with the State Aeronautics Commission was called in. He confirmed that the magneto system that helps charge the airplane’s sparkplugs had been the technical problem. He identified the plane as a Siemens-Halske, made in Czechoslovakia and antiquated beyond military use.

There is no record of how the plane left the scene. Presumably it was dismantled and taken away on a trailer. To date it is the first and only plane to land in Sprague, not including a hot air balloon that landed just up the road in Wilfred Zinavage’s back yard.

Glenn Alan Cheney lives in Sprague.