Warehouse 13, Paul Tibbets Binoculars Artifact

original movie prop

In third season episode Shadows, people who clash with a young woman named Megan are suddenly vanishing in a flash of light and hard radiation. The Warehouse agents initially believe that Megan is using an artifact to destroy her enemies, but she's found to be a victim as well when a guy who's been stalking her is caught with these binoculars. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, used this pair to observe the results of the first atom bomb drop at Hiroshima in 1945, giving them the power to disintegrate objects and people when the user becomes sufficiently angry.

Pair of authentic WWII US M3 military binoculars (Nash-Kelvinator Corp. 1942), with 'ENOLA GAY' painted on the side of one lens, and 'GOD FORGIVE US' scrawled on the other. With matching original leather case (apparently these are somewhat hard to find, although not seen onscreen in this episode). Scratches and scuffs in the 'ENOLA GAY' lettering are easily screen-matched to the closeup of the prop in the scene; the closeup of 'GOD FORGIVE US' does not perfectly screen-match and is likely of a different prop.

Tibbets, who was a supremely competent and experienced US Army Air Force bomber pilot directly involved with advance preparations for the atomic bomb drop on Japan, and who personally selected the B-29 Superfortress bomber used for the mission and named it after his mother, likely never said or even thought 'God forgive us' with respect to this action. In fact even as late as 1995, Brigadier General Tibbets (Ret.) denounced a Smithsonian Institute 50th-anniversary revision of the Enola Gay exhibit as a 'damn big insult' for focusing on Japanese casualties rather than on the brutality of the Japanese government that led to the decision to use the bomb in the first place.

From VIP Fan Auctions & NBCUniversal.