Situated on the North Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of North America, the Bermuda Triangle has long been shrouded in mystery.
The story goes that those who venture there disappear off the face of the earth, with ships, aeroplanes, and people disappearing forever. One such tale is that of Flight 19, a fleet of planes that set off 77 years ago to this day and never returned.
Flight 19, made up of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, a plane that was instrumental in bringing down Japanese warships in the Atlantic Ocean, set off for a routine training flight on December 5, 1945.
Each plane was crewed by three men except for one which only carried two, the trainees involved each having completed around 300 hours in the sky.
The training got off to a smooth start. But half an hour in, the flight’s leader 28-year-old Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor – who was heavily experienced having carried out more than 2,000 flight hours, over 600 of them in Avengers – reported a problem.
Lieutenant Taylor thought his Avenger’s compass was malfunctioning, convincing himself that Flight 19 had been travelling in entirely the wrong direction.
Five Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared during a training flight (Image: Getty)
Turbulent weather compounded problems further with one of the pilots stating: “I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.”
Instead of flying West towards the mainland, Lieutenant Taylor became disoriented and ordered Flight 19 to travel further out to sea, in a northeasterly direction.
Flight 19 had now been out for four hours and with fuel running dangerously low, Lieutenant Taylor could be heard stating: “All planes close up tight, We’ll have to ditch unless landfall…when the first plane drops below ten gallons, we all go down together.”
As they travelled further out to sea, radio transmissions slowly disappeared, falling completely silent, never to be heard again.
Flight 19 set off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida and was never seen again (Image: Getty)
A rescue mission was quickly launched and two PBM Mariner flying boats were sent out. Mysteriously, however, these too disappeared.
The Mariner and its 13 crewmen were never found, and it is strongly suspected that the flying boats exploded shortly after leaving as they were known to be prone to accidents and nose-diving.
Despite the Navy dispatching hundreds of boats and aircrafts, searching more than 300,000 square miles of water, not a single sign of Flight 19 was ever found, with the causes or reasons for its disappearance being recorded as “unknown”.
Navy Lieutenant David White, a retired rear admiral in the United States Navy who helped with the search for Flight 19, said: “They just vanished. We had hundreds of planes out looking, and we searched over land and water for days, and nobody ever found the bodies or any debris.”
A commemorative plaque dedicated to Naval aviators including those of Flight 19 (Image: Getty)
Speculation ensued, and the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle was born, with Fate magazine publishing an article by George Sand in 1952 called “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door” which first laid out the triangular area.
Sand, as well as others since, have suggested that there was a supernatural element to Flight 19’s vanishing.
This idea was expanded upon in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind which depicted Flight 19 being taken by aliens and returned to Mexico.
It is largely thought that the planes ran out of petrol, and the airmen were at the mercy of the treacherous conditions. The wreckage of Flight 19 remains to be found.
