Joe Biden doubles down on claims his uncle was eaten by cannibals

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Speaking at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh this week, U.S. President Joe Biden claimed that his uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., had never been found due to cannibals after his aircraft was shot down during the Second World War.

“He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones,” Biden said of his “uncle Boise.”

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“And he got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be, there are a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden continued.

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On Thursday, though, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre skipped over Biden’s remarks, instead stating that Finnegan “lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”

Official military records also align with that version of events and make no mention of cannibals.

The official record of Finnegan’s death on the Department of Defense (DOD) website for the Defense PoW/MIA Accounting Agency states that he and two other men failed to emerge after the crash.

“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members,” it states.

The record also clarifies that Finnegan “has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area after the war and is still unaccounted-for.”

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Biden doubled down on his cannibal theory during the campaign stop, bringing it up while visiting a Scranton, Pa., war memorial that bears his uncle’s name.

“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time. 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,” Biden told reporters, per the New York Post.

Jean-Pierre said that Biden was “incredibly proud of his uncle’s service in uniform.”

“You saw him at the war memorial. It was incredibly emotional and important to him,” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force 1.

It’s not the first time Biden has shared a questionable family story about an uncle.

In 2022, Biden claimed his uncle Frank Biden was awarded the Purple Heart for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge in Second World War, despite no records supporting the claim.

Speaking in Delaware, Biden said he had personally given his uncle the military decoration after the 2008 election at the urging of his father.

“My dad, when I got elected vice-president, he said, ‘Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge.’ He was not feeling very well now — not because of the Battle of the Bulge. But he said, ‘And he won the Purple Heart. And he never received it. He never — he never got it. Do you think you could help him get it? We’ll surprise him,”’ Biden reportedly said.

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“So, we got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house, and I came out, and he said, ‘Present it to him, OK?’ We had the family there.

“I said, ‘Uncle Frank, you won this. And I want to … ’ He said, ‘I don’t want the damn thing.’ No, I’m serious. He said, ‘I don’t want it.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter, Uncle Frank? You earned it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but the others died. The others died. I lived. I don’t want it.’”

However, fact checkers questioned the story, citing the fact that Biden’s uncle died in 1999, while his father died in 2002, years before Biden became vice-president.

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