Saturday marks the 70th anniversary of the day the United Air Lines Flight 629 exploded over Weld County, killing 44 before crashing and spreading debris east of Longmont, an event that will be memorialized at an event on Saturday in Denver.

Now, 70 years later, Philip Bearly remembers the explosion “like it was yesterday.” Bearly, who was 5-and-a-half years old at the time, remembers driving to his grandmother’s birthday celebration at 17th Street and Main Street in Longmont when he saw a flash.

“… it was as bright as daylight,” Bearly said in an interview.

The DC-6B aircraft leaving Denver exploded on Nov. 1, 1955, when a dynamite bomb went off 11 minutes into the flight. The plane’s wreckage landed below on more than 6 square miles of beet fields in the Longmont area. The explosion

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