On this day in 1945, a group of five US Navy Planes known as Flight 19 vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Such accidents unfortunately do happen. So why is Flight 19 so famous? Because after the disappearance, people made up a bunch of stuff about space aliens. No, really.
Flight 19 was led by US Navy Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor. The other aviators were his student pilots for the exercise, and their crews. They took off around 2 pm from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
In 1945, there was no GPS, so pilots found their way by various means, including dead reckoning using elapsed time, compasses, and simply looking out the window. Unfortunately for aviators in the Florida area, there are a lot of little islands down there that look alike.
Lt. Taylor was having a very confusing flight. The training exercise involved flying east to the Bahamas, then north for a while, then southwest to complete the triangle and return to Florida. But when Taylor reached the Bahamas by flying east, he somehow thought he was 200 miles to the southwest, over the Florida Keys. So then he tried to take the flight further east to where he expected the mainland to be. But of course, east from the Bahamas will lead you out to open ocean, and that’s where Flight 19 ended up.
No one knows how Taylor made the bizarre error and why he stuck to his strange belief of being over the Keys in the face of mounting contrary evidence. It’s possible his compass may have been broken, and he may not have had a watch to help with dead reckoning. But when the mainland of Florida did not appear below, he should have believed what his eyes were telling him. In fact, it’s such an inconceivable mistake that writers made up aliens to explain it.
The radio tower, who in 1945 also could not tell exactly where Flight 19 was, tried to guide him, but it didn’t help. Some of the student pilots were heard on the radio urging Taylor to fly west, showing they were not confused about where they were and presumably had working compasses. But no one deserted the group and saved themselves, possibly because that would be going against military discipline.
Check out the blog post for the whole story and writing prompts, such as:
“The ocean doesn’t look as it should.” This fake quote has a lot of possibilities. One way to go would be to have something Very Seriously Wrong with the ocean: for example, it’s red, it’s boiling, or it’s not the ocean anymore but some strange landscape. Or you could have things gradually get creepy, slowly building dread. For example, what if every once in a while, the waves run backwards, like you’re watching a video rewind? Or if the water looks normal, but it seems thicker, moving more like honey?
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