FORMER Sarawak deputy chief minister Dr George Chan has finally spoken about the “weird dream” he had following a 2004 helicopter crash that killed seven people, including an assistant state minister.

For 18 years, he had not told anyone about the dream for fear of being ridiculed.

“I had this rather strange dream. Three religious men, one a Muslim, one a Buddhist and one a Christian, told me in the dream where I could find the wreckage of the helicopter,” he said at his 86th birthday party at his Petra Jaya home in Kuching recently.

“They even had a map drawn and pointed me to the spot where the helicopter went down.”

That dream, he said, came on the second day after he was ordered by then chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud to be the point man in the search for the crash site.

“However, they said I will only find the wreckage on the 16th day of the crash,” Chan said.

“I am a doctor and I do things based on scientific facts. How did you think my colleagues in the cabinet, my friends, and the general public would react if I were to talk about this mumbo jumbo?

“To say they would all be laughing at me would be an understatement.”

Chan said the spot where the three men said the helicopter crash was not even on the reported flight path.

“The spot was way to the left of the flight path. It’s not a path pilots would normally take to get from Bario to Ba Kelalan.

“So that made me wary too. That’s why I told nobody about it…until now.”

The pilot of the ill-fated Hornbill Skyways Bell Jet Ranger that crashed into the side of a mountain on July 12, 2004, had reported to air traffic control he would be flying from the Baram highland settlement of Bario to another highland settlement, Ba Kelalan, on the Sarawak-Kalimantan border.

Assistant state minister Dr Judson Tagal and his entourage were killed in the crash.

Despite his misgivings, Chan said he ordered aerial and ground searches into the area described to him in his dream.

“I sent so many flights over the area. Ground parties scoured the area.

“No one found anything.

“We threw every high tech equipment that was available at that time in the search,” Chan said in reference to the aerial scanning equipment that was mounted onto the search helicopter.

The camera, which could detect changes in temperature on the ground and also record visual movements, was operated by two Australian specialists.

The United States, Australia, Indonesia and Brunei also contributed equipment or personnel to help locate the missing helicopter.

The US deployed its Lockheed P-3 Orion, a four-engined, turboprop anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft. The plane is able to detect metal pieces the size of a coin.

The Royal Brunei Air Force deployed a S-70A Black Hawk helicopter that had a forward looking infrared radar.

The Malaysian air force and Sabah air operators, Layang Layang and Sabah Air had also contributed  aircraft and equipment for the search, while Indonesian authorities searched their side of the border for the wreckage.

“We found a lot of helicopters. But not what we were looking for.

“Some of the helicopter wreckage found were British army helicopters that crashed during the confrontation,” he said, referring to the 1963-66 armed conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Chan said that on the 16th day of the search, he had flown back to Kuching from Bario, where he was stationed during the search, to ask for further instructions from the state cabinet.

“It was costing the state government a million (ringgit) a day,” he said.

“While waiting for the meeting to start, I received a call to say they had found the wreckage. And it was at the spot where the three men said I would find it.”

The pilot of a helicopter sent to scour the area again saw pieces of the wreckage in a break of the forest canopy.

The cause of the crash is still unknown as the result of the investigation was never made public.

“You can say I am a sceptic but then again I suppose strange things can happen in the jungle,” said Chan.

The three men did not appear in Chan’s dreams again. – September 25, 2022.