Infamous America - BERMUDA TRIANGLE Ep. 2 | “The Disappearance of Flight 19”

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

Five Navy Avenger airplanes vanished in the area of the Bermuda Triangle on December 5, 1945. The routine training flight began without problems but grew more alarming as time passed. Then it disappeared off radar and became the most enduring American mystery related to the Bermuda Triangle.  Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During World War II, the TBM Avenger was the U.S. Navy's top fighter plane and submarine killer. On December 5th, 1945, five Avengers took off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida. They were on a three-hour training mission that was dubbed Flight 19. The planes never returned. No wreckage has ever been found. To this day, no one knows for sure what happened to the Fort Worthed. men of Flight 19 or their aircraft. It remains one of the greatest mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle.

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In this season, we're telling some of the most infamous stories about one of the most mysterious places on Earth. The Bermuda Triangle. This is Chapter 2, The Disappearance of Flight 19. Think back to Stephen Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When you do, you'll probably think of Richard Dreyfus, endlessly sculpting Devil's Tower out of various materials. And you'll certainly remember the spaceship, and probably the catchy sonic notes that play throughout the film.

But do you remember the very beginning, the opening sequence? A bunch of researchers are running through a windstorm in the desert near Mexico. They suddenly stare at something in shock. When the camera reveals what it is, it's five fighter planes from World War II. They're lined up perfectly on the hard-packed ground, and they don't have a scratch on them. Those are the five Navy Avengers of Flight 19. The real-life mystery began as nothing more than a routine training flight, but it quickly became one of the strangest events to occur within the mysterious stretch of ocean off the southern coast of Florida.

On an afternoon, just a few months after World War II ended, the five torpedo bombers took off from a naval air station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The planes were scheduled to tackle a three-hour exercise known as Navigation Problem Number One. This problem number one was relatively easy for the flyers. The men were to take off from the base and then fly a course of 091 degrees for 56 miles. Then they were to practice low-level bombing at Hens and Chicken Shoals, a shallow coral reef located within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The pilots had all done the exercise before. None of them thought twice about it,

especially the flight's leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor. Lieutenant Taylor was an experienced pilot and veteran of six. several combat missions in World War II Pacific Theater. In 1945, he was 27 years old and a six-year Navy veteran with more than 2,500 hours in his logbook. He'd flown far more harrowing flights than this practice run over the Bahamas. Ironically, Taylor was not the ideal student at his Flight Academy at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. At one point, it didn't seem like he could pass muster. He was bored with the classroom work and maintained only a sea average.

But once he got into the cockpit, he was a different man. He was a natural pilot. After graduation, he quickly became an instructor. When he received his wings, he joined Air Group 7 aboard the USS Hancock. He was one of the gutsiest aviators in his unit. During the war, Taylor rescued his own commander not once but twice. Taylor's friends always said he was a hell of a flyer. Nothing could rattle him.

Nothing ordinary, that is. In January 1945, Taylor became a flight instructor in Miami. It was a relatively easy duty after serving 10 months flying combat missions in the South Pacific. When World War II ended in May of 1945, Taylor felt some measure of relief that his work days would be fairly uneventful. And they were. until that day a few weeks before Christmas of 1945. The weather report for that day was not perfect, but it wasn't bad. There were some mild surface winds with gusts and scattered clouds.

There were no anticipated wind changes. The conditions might have been a nuisance for small to medium-sized boats, but they were fine for TBM bombers. They ranked among the largest single-engine warplanes ever built. With a 46-foot fuselage, a 54-foot wingspan in a crew of three, the Avenger had a 1,600 horsepower engine and a top speed of 300 miles per hour. The planes had been deadly weapons in the Pacific Theater. They were built to fly in the harshest conditions, so the conditions off the coast of Florida in December 1945 shouldn't have been a problem. Shortly after 2 o'clock, Lieutenant Taylor's plane was airborne.

10 minutes later, all five planes were in formation. They flew east over the Atlantic, toward the wreck of a target ship just south of the island of Bimini. After making their mock torpedo runs at the concrete hulk of a ship, Flight 19 regrouped. They then set out to do their navigation problem exercise. Flight 19 was due to return to the base at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. At Port Everglades National Communication Center, three radio men monitored transmissions from ships at sea to aircraft in the sky. They figured they would all be going home for the day when their shift ended at 4 o'clock

with the return of flight 19. But just before the top of the hour, a radio message came in. It was from Lieutenant Taylor in the lead plane, FT28. It should have been a request for landing instructions, but it wasn't. Instead, Taylor gave some bizarre news. He said they seemed to be off course and unable to figure out where they were. Several times the tower demanded that Taylor give his position. But Taylor kept repeating the same thing.

He had no idea where they were. Taylor's voice became increasingly panicked. He said both his compasses were malfunctioning. He also reported he was over some land. He thought it was the Florida Keys. He and the other bombers had been on the same. the Atlantic Ocean side of Florida. But now Taylor thought he'd somehow circled all the way back, passed over the Florida Keys, and was in the Gulf of Mexico. Thinking he was in the Gulf, he directed

the other pilots to head northeast. That should put them on a course for Florida. Instead, it took them farther out over the Atlantic Ocean. As Taylor's planes headed farther out over open water, the radio transmission started to become more faint. At 4.45 p.m., the base ordered Taylor to turn over the flight lead to one of his trainees. For reasons unknown, he didn't. Then Taylor was heard prepping his men for a potential crash landing in the ocean. He knew, as did base control, the planes were running out of fuel. He ordered the pilots to tighten their formation.

He said that unless they saw land soon, they'd have to ditch their planes. A few minutes later, the Avengers radio communications stopped. They were replaced by an eerie buzz of static. The last contact from Flight 19 was at 6.20 p.m. The Navy immediately assembled search planes to hunt for the missing bombers. Around 7.30 p.m., a pair of PBM mariners took off from an air station north of Fort Lauderdale. With its 124-foot wingspan, the mariner was sometimes called a flying boat.

The rescue planes headed for the last estimated position of Flight 19. But just 20 minutes later, one of them seemed to follow Flight 19's lead by suddenly vanishing off radar. It's commonly believed that the mariner exploded shortly after takeoff, but the remains of the plane and its 13 crewmen were never recovered. The mariners were notoriously accident-prone and were nicknamed flying gas tanks for their propensity to catch on fire. A passing merchant ship spotted a fireball and found an oil slick in the ocean.

It seemed to support the Navy's suspicion that the plane exploded. At first light the next day, the Navy dispatched more than 300 boats and aircraft to look for Flight 19 and the missing mariner. The search party spent five days combing through more than 300,000 square miles of territory. They searched over land and water, but they found nothing.

There was no debris from any of the five planes of Flight 19 or the missing mariner. No bodies were ever recovered. One Navy lieutenant later said, they just vanished. There was no other way to put it. A Navy Board of Investigation could not come to any conclusion about Flight 19. It argued that Taylor might have confused the Bahamas for the Florida Keys after his compasses malfunction. But it found no clear explanation for why Flight 19 had become so disoriented. The board members eventually attributed the loss to, quote,

causes or reasons unknown. The disappearance of Flight 19 was accompanied by several oddities and unanswered questions. Perhaps the strangest of all concerns Lieutenant Taylor. Witnesses later claimed that Taylor arrived to Flight 19's pre-exercise briefing several minutes late. He then requested to be excused from leading the mission. He supposedly said, I just don't want to take this one out. Some Navy personnel suggested that he might not have been fit for duty, that he may have been drinking or just fatigue. Others have suggested he just had a bad feeling about flying that particular day.

But like everything with Flight 19, the cause of Taylor's reticence remains a mystery. The Navy continued to investigate the disappearance of Flight 19. The result was a 500-page report published a few months later. The report made several observations. First, it said that Lieutenant Taylor had mistakenly believed the small islands he passed over were the Florida Keys. Thus, he believed that his flight was over the Gulf of Mexico.

The report concluded that Taylor must have thought that heading northeast, would eventually take them to Florida. Second, the report determined that Taylor had actually passed over the Bahamas. So when he then headed northeast, he took the flight farther out over the Atlantic and to its demise. According to witnesses who testified for the report, Lieutenant Taylor was an excellent combat pilot and an officer with no problems in the Navy. But, they said, he had a tendency to fly by the seat of his pants, getting lost several times in the process. He'd had to ditch his plane in the Pacific Ocean twice during such incidents,

and then had to be rescued. The Navy placed the blame squarely on Taylor for the loss of Flight 19. But others came to much different conclusions. The first to do so was Taylor's family. The lieutenant's mother contended that the Navy was unfairly blaming her son for the loss of five aircraft and 14 men, and indirectly, the loss of the 13 men on the rescue plane. She said the military had neither the bodies nor the airplanes as evidence. Because of this, the report was amended to read, Cause Unknown. The first person to publicly note that something was amiss with Flight 19 was a writer

for the Associated Press in 1950. Then two years later, Fate Magazine published a piece that referenced flight 19 and other occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle. In 1962, author Alan W. Eckert questioned the findings of the Navy's report in his popular magazine article about Flight 19. That article was what really brought the mystery to a wide readership. Eckert asked how six airplanes and 27 men could vanish and there could be nothing found. No oil slicks, no wreckage, no clothing, and no body. bodies. He acknowledged that the Avenger planes were apt to sink quickly if they were forced to

ditch in the sea, but if that was the case, it was still likely that at least a few of the men would have survived the crashes. All the crewmen were well-versed in escape procedures if they were going down over water. In the case of the missing rescue aircraft, the mariner, was just as puzzling. It was nicknamed a flying boat for a reason. It was huge, number one, and it was designed to land on water, number two. Eckert said there was no reason why it couldn't have landed on the surface of the ocean during the rescue if it had been running out of fuel. The seas were unusually mild during the search,

and yet the massive plane with its 13 crewmen, life rafts, and other rescue equipment simply disappeared like the Avengers. Eckert couldn't explain the strange inconsistencies any better than anyone else, but he was the first to voice a theory that it might have been the area of the ocean itself that caused the problem. There was something about the Bermuda Triangle that was off. Eckert started writing about more disappearances after the big one of Flight 19, and it just added to the enigma of the Avenger planes and the rescue craft that tried to save them.

Two years after the disappearance of Flight 19 in the Mariner Rescue plane, another giant aircraft vanished. It was a four-engine Star Tiger. The Star Tiger was an airliner that belonged to the British South American Airways Company. It carried 34 passengers and six crew members. It was in the same general area as Flight 19 when it was en route to Kingston, Jamaica. At 10.30 p.m., it radioed the tower in Bermuda. The plane reported excellent weather and said it would arrive in Jamaica on schedule.

According to Alan Eckert's article, that was the last message ever received from the plane. The Star Tiger was never seen again, nor was any trace of it found that would indicate a crash. Just like Flight 19, there was no wreckage, no oil slick, no debris. The big plane in its 40 occupants had vanished. Then, another plane vanished just one year after the Star Tiger. In an eerie coincidence, it was the plane. Star Tiger's sister aircraft. On January 17th, 1949, the aerial was carefully checked and fueled in Bermuda. It was prepped for a short flight to Jamaica. As an extra precaution,

mechanics added fuel for another 10 hours of flying. At 7.30 a.m., seven crew members and 13 passengers boarded the aerial. Fifteen minutes later, the plane lifted off from the runway and flew into a clear morning sky. The pilot and ground crew had carefully checked the weather reports. There was no indication of bad weather. Eckert said it couldn't have been a better day for Ariel's trip. At 8.25 a.m., Bermuda Tower received its routine flight report from the airliner. The captain reported that he had reached cruising altitude. The weather was fair, and he confirmed they would land at their scheduled time. The Ariel was not. neither seen nor heard from again.

The British Ministry of Aviation conducted an exhaustive investigation, similar to the one done by the United States for Flight 19. Its conclusions were almost exactly the same. The planes, it said, were presumed lost at sea. No trace of oil, belongings, debris, or bodies were ever found. The conclusion led Eckert to wonder why the Bermuda Triangle swallowed so many aircraft and left no trace of them. He was one of the first to start thinking

outside the box, so to speak. But he wasn't alone. Another voice joined him in putting forth new theories about the Bermuda Triangle. Eckert wondered if perhaps they were atmospheric anomalies in the world that simply cannot be explained by earthly science. He said these anomalies should be taken into consideration when trying to understand the Bermuda Triangle. While Eckert was one of the first to write about Flight 19 and otherworldly forces. He was soon overshadowed by a much more ambitious proponent of Bermuda Triangle theories. In 1964, journalist Vincent Gaddis published his own theories about Flight 19.

He said that if the patrol had flown west from where they were at one point, they would have reached Florida. If they had flown east, they would have seen the Bahamas. Grand Bahama Island is almost 25 miles long. Southeast were two more chains of islands. On the day flight 19 disappeared, the planes had decent visibility in the afternoon. The pilots should have been able to see the islands or the mainland, at least part of the time. Gattis concluded that the planes had flown in a circle between Florida and the Bahamas.

That meant that all five compasses were thrown off to the same degree. And if all five were thrown off to the same degree, they should have eventually flown straight and seen land somewhere. Gaddis said something affected the compasses, and the same thing might have silenced the patrol's radios. And Gaddis thought the rescue plane provided more fuel for mystery. The twin-engine mariner had the usual radio facilities, but it also had a hand-cranked generator for emergencies.

Even if its primary radios failed because of some unexplained anomaly, it should still have been able to call for help. And if it exploded, because of the flaws of its design or some other reason, surely someone would have seen evidence of the wreckage. Gaddis also noted that some of the last radio communications from Flight 19 said the ocean looked strange to them. And at one point, the pilots said they couldn't see the sun, yet visibility shouldn't have been so bad that the sun was blocked completely.

Gaddis wondered if the pilots of Flight 19 had experienced, an unknown type of atmospheric aberration that only exists in the Bermuda Triangle. He described the aberration as a hole in the sky. The author was particularly interested in the failure of the compasses. He noted that the Navy was studying the phenomenon. Though the alleged project was classified, Gattis managed to get some information about it. He said the military spread sensors around the globe. Those sensors were equipped with highly.

sensitive magnetometers. They were searching for magnetic anomalies or unusual variations. Although the project was classified, Gaddis reported that the variations had been detected in the Key West Caribbean area, right in the center of the Bermuda Triangle. Gattis also discussed a Canadian project that had been commissioned in 1950. The leader of the project thought there were regions on Earth that had unusual combinations of magnetism and gravity, and those locations had been the sights of unexplained plane crashes. The regions were described as roughly circular. They could be up to a thousand feet in diameter, and were thought to extend upward quite a distance. They appeared to be more common in southern latitudes, such as the area of the Bermuda Triangle.

Unfortunately, they also appeared to fade away after a period of. of time, according to the Canadian expert. That made it extremely difficult to collect data on them. Bermuda Triangle author Gian Kwasar has written extensively about his belief in electromagnetic anomalies. His rationale for the strange disappearance of Flight 19 rests on something he calls the Hutchison Effect, a series of experiments by a Canadian man. The experiments purportedly show how the combination of the right environment and the right elements can cause disappearances in wrecks. According to Quasar, the Hutchison effect can also generate something he calls electronic fog. He writes that the electronic fog is responsible for making

compasses and other instruments go haywire in the Bermuda Triangle, like those of Flight 19. So in theory, electronic fog messed up the compasses of the planes of Flight 19. Lieutenant Taylor became disoriented and led the flight farther out over the Atlantic Ocean instead of back toward Florida. The planes ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean. The pilots who survived the crashes would have been at the mercy of rough seas and deep water. Forty years later, an army captain thought he found one of the planes.

In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. After the disaster, a submarine that was searching for parts of the shuttle, discovered a plane on the ocean floor. The sub thought the plane was a DC3. A retired army captain who was obsessed with Flight 19 was convinced it was an Avenger. He got an investor, and in 1990, he pulled up the plane. And he was right.

It was an Avenger, not a DC3. But any identifying numbers had dissolved in seawater, so it was impossible to tell if it was one of the five planes of Flight 19. In May of 1991, a group of treasure hunters seemed to finally solve the puzzle. They discovered five Grumman Avenger fighter bombers lying in a group on the ocean floor. The discovery caused a media frenzy. Then, as quickly as it started, the sensation evaporated. The leader of the treasure hunters announced further investigations revealed

the plane's tail numbers did not match those of the long-lost flight. In fact, experts believe that all five of the newly discovered planes crashed in separate incidents. It was just a crazy coincidence they were all found within about a mile of each other. The explorers of the 1991 site dubbed their find the Phantom Five. After some analysis, the Phantom Five were determined to be older than Flight 19 planes, and they all showed signs that their pilots had been able to evacuate. The inventor who led the undersea expedition said he would keep looking for flight 19. But he also said that if he ever found a cluster of five planes again, he wouldn't tell anyone.

He said, if we find five more, it will just confirm our theory, there's a lot of aliens playing with us. In 2014, two independent researchers separately re-examined the 500-page report issued by the Navy in 1945. They focused on a detail from an aircraft carrier that was off the coast of Daytona Beach on the day of the disappearance. The carrier had picked up radar signals from four to six unidentified planes over North Florida. The two researchers concluded that Flight 19 probably did not realize it had wandered over land. It was dark because it was about 7 p.m. and the weather was getting worse. The theory might help explain the wreckage of an Avenger bomber found.

found in 1989 in the Everglades by a sheriff's helicopter. Since there was no other Avenger of that type reported missing in or around Florida between 1944 and 1952, the two researchers believed it was a plane from Flight 19. And there was a rubber boot heel found at the wreckage site that was thought to belong to Lieutenant Taylor because of its size. The two investigators believed the other planes scattered in different directions while over Florida in the hopes of picking up a homing signal from an aircraft carrier or an airport. The investigators also noted an important detail that was not discussed very much in the decades immediately following the crash.

The detail was that two of the planes were flown by Navy crews and three by Marine crews. Because of that, the investigators believed the planes went in different directions based on their allegiances to their branches of the military. The three marine planes went toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the two Navy planes went south. Then they all ran out of fuel and crashed on land or in the water. A 2015 newspaper report claimed a wrecked plane with two bodies inside was retrieved by the Navy in the mid-1960s near Sebastian, Florida. The Navy initially said it was from Flight 19, but later recanted the statement. Many believe the wrecks of Flight 19 and its doomed rescue plane may still lurk somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.

But while the search continues to this day, no definitive signs of the Five Navy Avengers or the Mariner Rescue Aircraft or their 27 crewmen have ever been found. And while many theories have been put forward to try to explain what happened at the very end that the planes crashed somewhere, the theories don't explain why it happened. Why did experienced crewmen have so much trouble on a routine training mission? And if they crashed, why hasn't a single piece of evidence surfaced in the last 75 years? Next time on Infamous America, we'll explore the phenomenon of electronic fog and see if it caused strange experiences of pilots in recent times. And will reveal the existence of a second place like the Bermuda Triangle. one that we rarely hear about on this side of the world.

That's next week on Infamous America. And if you're a member of our Black Barrel Plus program, you already have access to the full season. If you're not a member, you can sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Members receive access to each new season in its entirety one week before the season begins for the general public.

And members receive exclusive bonus episodes. sign up today for just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Julia Brickland, original music by Rob Villeer, audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels.

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