Disappearance of Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle

At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers roared off the runway of the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station. Flight instructor Lieutenant Charles G. Taylor was leading thirteen crewmen of Flight 19 on a routine navigational training exercise. But the course lay over an area bounded approximately by Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico, in what is now known as the Bermuda Triangle, where so many ships and aircraft have met mysterious fates.

Flight 19 began smoothly but at 3:40 p.m., an unsettling message from Taylor to another plane in his sqaudron was intercepted by Lieutant Robert Cox, who was airborne over Fort Lauderdale on another exercise. "What is your trouble?" Cox asked Taylor. "Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale," Taylor replied. For the next fourty-five minutes, Cox tried to ascertain Taylor's position and direct him to land by orienting him toward the sun, but although it was a clear day, Taylor seemed unable to find it. Finally, Taylor's trasmission faded until it stopped. Then, inexplicably, Cox's radio went dead too. He returned to the field at Fort Lauderdale.

The ground station at Port Everglades had meanwhile established intermittent contact with the troubled Flight 19, confirming Cox's observations. Finally, at about a quarter past five, the ground station heard a forlorn message from Flight 19: "We'll fly west until we hit the beach or run out of gas."

The authorities at Fort Lauderdale ordered a search, and before long a Mariner flying boat was in the air with another thirteen crewmen. But the Mariner was not heard from again.

For the next five days, other search planes flew more than 930 sorties over the area but not a scrap of wreckage was recovered, from either the Avengers or the Mariner. Most analysts blame this and other disappearances that have occurred in the area on the normal hazards of the sea and air but students of the occult blame the disaster on the malevolent powers said to flourish in the Bermuda Triangle.