President Biden made several claims about his family history during recent speeches that have been called into question or exaggerated.
In Pittsburgh, he said his uncle Ambrose Finnegan went missing in New Guinea after his plane was shot down over an area populated by cannibals, but records show the plane crashed into the ocean and three men died while one survived.
“He was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid,” Biden said. “He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea. They never found the body because there used to be, there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
“When D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military,” Biden said. “Ambrose Finnegan, we called him Uncle Bozey, he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force.
“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,” he added.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” the report stated. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”
Biden also exaggerated stories about his academic record and being the first in his family to attend college.
Mainstream fact-checkers have frequently pointed out exaggerated elements in Biden’s stories about his past.
“I, like an awful lot of people in this audience, was the first in my family to go to college,” Biden said.
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden told a reporter. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.”
“In the first year of law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class,” he said. “And then I decided to stay, went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class.”
“I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school, and my recollection of this was inaccurate,” Biden said.
“I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science,” he said. “My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors. I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.'”
“I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it was like to lose a home,” Biden said. “Years ago, now, 15 years, I was in Washington doing ‘Meet the Press’… Lightning struck at home on a little lake outside the home, not a lake, a big pond. It hit the wire and came up underneath our home, into the … air condition ducts.
“To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat,” he added.
