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When the three failed to show up in Meridian, COFO workers called the FBI, which at that time had no evidence on which to enter the case, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, which declined to do more than issue a routine missing-persons bulletin. Then, Tuesday afternoon, a telephone tip on the station wagon's whereabouts came to the FBI office in Meridian. Agents rushed to the northeast corner of Neshoba County, found the gutted car in a blackberry thicket 40 feet off State Highway 21 near the dank Bogue Chitto Swamp. The site, twelve miles northeast of Philadelphia, was in the opposite direction from which Deputy Price said he saw the civil rights workers going when they left Sunday night. By the time the law got there, Choctaw Indians from a nearby reservation had stripped three hubcaps from the station wagon.
Side by Side. After the discovery of the car, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered a full-scale search by an army of FBI agents he had ordered into the state. The Mississippi Highway Patrol came alive, worked with the federals in beating the swamps of Neshoba County and questioning rural residents. President Johnson sent one time CIA Director Allen Dulles to Jack son to confer with Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson on the state's law-enforcement capabilities—and its willingness to cooperate. After a one-day trip, Dulles reported back that "a very real and very difficult problem which will take many months to solve" exists in Mississippi. But, he insisted, he saw "no likely explosion" soon.
President Johnson ordered 200 sailors from the Meridian Naval Auxiliary Air Station into Neshoba County to join in the search (the White House, through a mistake, at first announced that the sailors were marines, bringing screams of anguish from segregationists about another federal invasion of the South). Armed only with sticks to protect themselves against the water moccasins and rattlers that abound in the area, the sailors tucked and taped up their pants legs to ward off mosquitoes and chiggers, began poking under every bush and peering down every abandoned well.
At week's end, there was still no sign of the missing men. Some people shared the suspicion voiced by Neshoba County Sheriff L. A. Rainey: "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state." But with each passing day, the possibility of a hoax seemed less and less likely. Whatever their fate, whether dead or alive, the case of the three young civil rights workers would reverberate around the U.S. for the rest of this summer and beyond.