CASSOPOLIS — Cassopolis resident Taras Lyssenko has written a new book that contains everything from mystery and adventure to government dealings and World War II history. The book documents his company’s three decades-long effort to recover World War II-era Navy planes from Lake Michigan.

Entitled “The Great Navy Birds of Lake Michigan,” the book introduces people to the long-lost history of how U.S. Navy pilots trained and sometimes lost their lives and their planes over Lake Michigan. It also gives people an inside look at his company’s recovery and salvage efforts as well as their sometimes-contentious relationship with federal agencies.

Lyssenko will speak at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Southwest Michigan Regional Airport, 1123 Territorial Road, Benton Harbor, in a presentation sponsored by the Morton House Museum. That talk will be preceded by a book signing at 6 p.m.

The book chronicles the three decades his company, A and T Recovery, has spent finding and recovering World War II era planes primarily from Lake Michigan. Several of the recovered planes can be found in museums around the country including at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo, Midway and O’Hare International Airports in Chicago.

A and T Recovery is made up of Lyssenko, his friend, Allan Olson, and others who all grew up in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn.

“The aircraft of Lake Michigan are just a part of our lifelong quest to explore everything,” he said. “Since [the planes] were right in our backyard, they and the lake were logical items for us to seek out and explore.”

He said his goal in writing the book was to record what happened in his company’s quest to find once lost World War II aircrafts in the waters of Lake Michigan and bring them back to the public which they have been able to do with some notable success.

“The book explains the entrepreneurship, the technological advancements, the federal and government relations, the public relations and the human interactions required to achieve great success,” he said. “It is the story of the triumph of many people working together as a unified force in order to overcome any and every obstacle presented along the way.”

As he relates in the introduction to the book, there are times when people tell stories that are truly unbelievable but that are nevertheless also true. He describes his book as an anthology of such stories, complete with “protagonists, villains and outright antagonists” including a number of government bureaucrats who have sought to thwart their efforts at times.

The book ends with the “rest of the story” of their recovery of the SBD-1 Dauntless. Lyssenko was able to find and contact surviving family members of the pilot who died when his plane crashed in Lake Michigan in November 1942. He writes of being able to bring closure to them and to show “that the life of one person who died cold and alone had meaning.”

In addition to the planes they have recovered from Lake Michigan, their work has also led to what Lyssenko calls their “most surprising discovery” of the location of an 8,000-year-old “Early Holocene Forest” in Lake Michigan about 15 miles off the Chicago shoreline. That discovery came about as they searched for the wreckage of a SBD-5 Dauntless plane.

The 160-page book published by Arcadia Publishing and The History Press contains many photographs of historic planes and documents as well as their company’s salvage, recovery and restoration efforts. It is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.