No evidence to support Biden’s suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals

During a recent trip to his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden visited a local veterans’ memorial honoring his uncle and other service members. 

While speaking to reporters after the visit, Biden said his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, Jr., was shot down over New Guinea during World War II and suggested he could have been eaten by cannibals in the region since his remains were never recovered. 

“He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Biden said.

“They never recovered his body. But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like,” he continued. 

These comments led multiple people online to accuse the president of lying or question his state of mind. 

Multiple VERIFY readers also asked the team to look into whether Biden’s uncle was eaten by cannibals during World War II, as his statements suggest. 

THE QUESTION

Is there evidence that President Biden’s uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea, as he suggested?

THE SOURCES

• Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency 
• White House spokesperson Andrew Bates’ statement to the AP
• Article on Papua New Guinea and instances of kuru, a disease caused by an infectious protein found in contaminated human brain tissue
• Alex Golub, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii-Mānoa
• Frederick Damon, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at the University of Virginia

THE ANSWER

There is no evidence that President Biden’s uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea, as he suggested.

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WHAT WE FOUND

Department of Defense (DOD) records and other historical evidence do not support Biden’s suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.

The DOD has a record of 2nd Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan’s death on its POW/MIA Accounting Agency website. It does not say cannibalism was to blame for his missing body. 

Finnegan is presumed to have died on May 14, 1944, while he was a passenger on a U.S. Army Air Forces plane that was “forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea” for “unknown reasons,” according to the DOD record. 

Three men, including Finnegan, “failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash,” while one crew member was “rescued by a passing barge,” the DOD says. 

Finnegan “has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area” and he is still unaccounted for today, according to the DOD. 

As for claims of cannibalism in the region, there are documented instances during the 20th century. But experts say cannibalism is unlikely to have played a part in Finnegan’s death.

“The chance of Biden’s uncle being cannibalized is vanishingly small,” Alex Golub, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii-Mānoa, told VERIFY. 

Golub explained that, though there were regions of New Guinea where people practiced cannibalism in the past, “the vast majority of the population never practiced it.” The practice had also “largely been suppressed by colonial authorities, often with some brutality,” by World War II, Golub added. 

People also practiced cannibalism under certain conditions and were unlikely to cannibalize a stranger like Finnegan, according to Frederick Damon, an anthropology professor at the University of Virginia.

“So far as I know, in most places where there is something we call cannibalism, the categories of people – and their parts – that were eaten had to do with formalized social relationships, not strangers, or monsters from the air,” Damon said. 

Michael Kabuni, a lecturer in political science at the University of Papua New Guinea, also told The Guardian that people who practiced cannibalism “wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”

In a statement provided to the Associated Press, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates did not address the discrepancy between the DOD record and Biden’s account of what happened to his uncle. Bates did confirm that Biden’s uncle died when the plane he was on crashed into the ocean. 

“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform,“ Bates said, adding Finnegan ”lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”

Biden “highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment ... to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’” Bates said.