So Supernatural - DISAPPEARED: Flight 19

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

On December 5th, 1945, Flight 19 flew out over the Atlantic Ocean on a routine training mission. It was a simple exercise—hundreds of pilots had navigated it before. But the flight crew never made it back to base. Instead, they fell victim to one of the deadliest paranormal phenomena on earth: The Bermuda Triangle.  

On December 5th, 1945, Flight 19 flew out over the Atlantic Ocean on a routine training mission. Their flight plan was simple. Hundreds of pilots had navigated it before. They should have been back to base in three hours. Instead, they drifted farther and farther away until they ran out of gas and plunged into the waves. Search and rescue was deployed immediately. The Navy combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic for days, but they found no trace of Flight 19. No wreckage, no parachutes, no bodies. One officer reported, they vanished as completely as if they'd flown to Mars. The crew of Flight 19 had fallen victim to one of the most

dangerous paranormal hotspots in the world, the Bermuda Triangle. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're looking at the Bermuda Triangle and the disappearance of Flight 19. This is the landmark case of the Bermuda Triangle lore, the story that started all the rumors. What is it about this piece of the Atlantic that makes so many ships and planes just disappear? In the case of Flight 19, we'll never know because no one in the entire 14-man crew was ever seen or heard from again. We'll dive into this story right after this. Stay with us. The phrase Bermuda Triangle is most often attributed to Vincent Gaddis, a paranormal writer from the 1960s. In an article for Argosy magazine, Gaddis defined the points of the triangle as Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico.

According to his research, hundreds of ships and crew had disappeared in this particular section of the Atlantic, never to be seen or heard from again. But Gaddis didn't invent the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. He just gave it a name. The stories extend all the way back to the 15th century. One of the first surviving accounts comes from Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he sailed through the triangle on his way to the Americas. One night, he saw a strange light rising up out of the ocean. He described in his journal that it was like a flame from a wax candle that went up and down three or four times. In the pitch black, Columbus and his crew were glad to see the

light. They thought it meant that they were finally close to land. But they sailed toward the flame and found nothing, just more ocean. Then the light disappeared and they couldn't ever explain where it had come from. But it stuck with the entire crew. Not only did Columbus document it, so did two other sailors. And this becomes the first seed of the mystery. It only grows in 1610. A ship wrecks off the coast of Bermuda so horribly, word travels all the way back to England. It allegedly inspired William Shakespeare to write The Tempest. Another boat called the Carol A. Deering ran into trouble in the early 20th century while sailing through the Triangle. When they found the wreckage off the shore of North Carolina, it was completely deserted. The entire crew was just

gone without a trace. Now you could say, oh, well, these ships are old. These are small ships. They probably weren't that seaworthy. There isn't anything strange here. But how about this one? The USS Cyclops was a 550-foot-long freighter carrying 11,000 tons of manganese ore. In 1918, it sailed from Rio de Janeiro to Baltimore, Maryland, passing through the Bermuda Triangle. The last message anyone received from the Cyclops was, weather fair, all well. Then it vanished, along with its 300-person crew. They didn't even send a distress signal. It just fell off the face of the earth. Santa Fe Magazine covered the disappearance, writing, usually a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver identified as belonging

to a lost ship is picked up after a wreck, but not so with the Cyclops. She just disappeared as though some gigantic monster of the sea had grabbed her, men and all, and sent her into the depths of the ocean. But the story of the Cyclops gets swept under the rug in the chaos of World War I. Ships were sinking all the time from torpedoes. What was one more freighter lost in the Atlantic? The world didn't really start paying attention to the power of the Bermuda Triangle until the disappearance of Flight 19. Flight 19 left Fort Lauderdale's Naval Air Station just after 2 p.m. on December 5th, 1945. Calling it a flight is a little misleading. This wasn't just one plane. It was five. Five TBM Avengers crewed by 14 men on what was otherwise a banal training mission. They're called Flight 19

because it was the 19th group of trainee pilots that day. 18 other flights had taken off, run their mission, and successfully returned. So this was supposed to be a totally routine exercise that dozens of pilots had done before them without incident. And not just that day, but hundreds of times in the history of flight school. In fact, this was the final mission the students had to complete before graduating from the advanced training. The final mission was supposed to test their dead reckoning skills. Basically, naval pilots fly most of their missions over open ocean, so it's really easy to get lost without any landmarks, like mountains or metropolitan areas. And this is before the days of advanced radar or GPS, so they had to use just like straight up math. And it's a pretty simple formula. If you

fly in a known direction at a known speed for a known period of time, you'll generally get where you're supposed to go. This means that three tools become absolutely essential in the cockpit. A compass, an airspeed indicator, and a clock. These tools were so important for staying on course that the TBM Avengers came equipped with two different kinds of compasses, a gyro compass and a magnetic one. Most pilots also wore a wristwatch as backup to the clock mounted in their dash as well. For their training mission, Flight 19 would fly a simple triangle path over the Atlantic, 123 miles east, 73 miles north, then 120 miles back west until they reached the Florida coast. Along the

way, they practiced dropping some torpedo bombs. All told, it should take three hours to complete this mission. Now, four of the Avengers were piloted by the students. They would each take a turn flying lead and basically guiding the group through one of the legs of the journey. The fifth plane was helmed by an experienced flight leader to make sure that they stayed on the correct course. If any of the trainee pilots strayed too far from the planned route, the instructor would assume the lead position and pilot them back on course. The weather report that day was pretty unremarkable. 67 degrees and visibility of 10 to 12 miles, which is good. It's actually slightly above average. The weather did indicate a chance of rain that evening, but this is Florida.

There's basically always that possibility. So all in all, it should have made for easy flying conditions. Flight 19 was scheduled for takeoff at 1.45 p.m. But less than an hour before wheels up, their flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, still hadn't arrived at the airfield. The students were all sitting in the ready room, waiting for their instructor, wondering what was going on. You know this is a big day for them. This is the test that they have to pass to graduate. Where is their guy? When Taylor finally does arrive around 1 10 p.m he doesn't go to the ready room. Instead he heads for flight operations and he finds his friend, Lieutenant Howard Williams, and he pulls him aside. And he quietly asks Williams to do him a favor. Taylor wants him to lead Flight 19 today. And Williams kind of taking it back, like you can't just change up a flight crew at the last second,

like definitely not in the military. They're scheduled to take off in a half hour. So Williams says, no, I can't lead your flight for you. When he asked Taylor what's going on, Taylor doesn't really give him an answer. He just has this bad feeling about flying today. And just so we don't take this too lightly, Taylor was an experienced World War II pilot with literally hundreds of hours of flying time under his belt. He'd faced open combat in the Pacific and survived, but something about flying today spooked him. Williams said later that it was like Taylor had some kind of premonition.

Still, Taylor makes his way to the ready room to greet his trainee pilots and go over the mission briefing. He reviews the flight plan, the headings, the timings, everything they need to determine their dead reckoning. Overseeing this briefing is aviation training officer Arthur Curtis. And at some point during the mission review, Taylor stops and pulls Curtis aside. Again, he expresses his reservations about flying today. He even formally requests to be relieved from leading flight 19.

Now, naval regulations actually do allow for this kind of thing. If a pilot doesn't feel up to the task of flying for whatever reason, they're required to ground themselves. But again, Taylor doesn't really have a reason to quit the mission. He just has a bad feeling and bad feelings don't really fall within the regulations.

Plus, this is the last mission of his students required curriculum. It's supposed to rain the next few days. So if they don't fly this afternoon, the test will be delayed almost a week. Curtis wants to just get these trainees through the program so they can earn their wings and then go home to their families for Christmas. So he tells Taylor, request denied. He's flying today, period. After the briefing, the 14 men head to their planes and prepare for takeoff. They do their routine checks on the engine, the radio, the controls. Everything is good to go. At 2.10 p.m., Flight 19 lines up

their five planes on the tarmac. It's 25 minutes past their original departure time, so a light drizzle has started, a taste of the predicted evening shower. But visibility is still average, and they have almost three and a half hours until sunset, plenty of time to run the mission and get back to base. Taylor radios the tower. They are cleared for takeoff. The five planes race down the runway and set off into the sky. At 2.11 p.m. that same day, a couple sitting on the beach in Fort Lauderdale saw five TBM Avenger bombers fly overhead out to sea. Without knowing it, they were the final witnesses to Flight 19. The 14 men were never seen again. The only details we have about their final moments come from their radio transmissions. And we'll dive into their last known communications

right after this. Now let's get back to the story. After the couple sees the five planes at 2.11 p.m., the 14 men are never seen again. The only details we have about their final mission comes from their radio communications with the tower at the naval base and with each other. Based on radio chatter, we know that the group successfully completed the first leg of their journey. They flew 56 miles east to a small group of islands called Hen and Chicken Shoals for their torpedo exercise. Sometime between 2.30 p.m. and 3 p.m., the tower in Fort Lauderdale picked up two pilots on the radio. One said, I've got one more bomb. And the other replied, go ahead and drop it. It probably would have taken 20 minutes to fly to Hen and Chickens and then another 20 to 30

minutes to complete the bombing exercise. So this reported timeline definitely matches up. And after this point, they would have to move on to the next leg. Keep flying east for 67 miles until they reach Great Stirrup Key. This is a small island, only 268 acres. It should be visible from the air, but there's always a chance you could miss it if visibility is low. So this is where the dead reckoning equation comes into play. Flight 19 sets their clock for 27 minutes. Well, 27 minutes came and went. And according to the radio chatter, no one in flight 19 could see Great Stirrup Cay. And it's not a visibility issue. They can see just fine. It's just that all they see for miles around them is open ocean.

Making matters worse, Lieutenant Taylor, who's supervising the four student pilots, is starting to have doubts that his gyro compass is functioning properly. So he instructs the group to turn north as planned, but to climb to a higher altitude. If they can get a better picture of what's around them, they'll be able to get back on course. Except the visibility gets worse at a higher altitude. The impending storm meant that the planes were shrouded in cloud cover. They couldn't see anything. But Taylor keeps his cool. This is dead reckoning after all, right? Like you don't have to see where you're going. That's the whole point. He knows his directional heading, his speed, and how long it's supposed to take to get to the next checkpoint. He sets his clock for 34 minutes and he keeps flight 19 heading north. When the time's

up, Taylor takes the crew down out of the cloud cover, expecting to see Great Sailkey up ahead. But again, it's just vast, empty water. Feeling like they must have overshot the island, Taylor turns the flight around. They go back the way they came, and he reassures the group, we're going to see the checkpoint any minute. But they don't. This makes absolutely no sense to Taylor, and it's just made all the more confusing by his compass readings. He asks the other pilots multiple times over the radio, like, what does your compass say? What does your compass say?

And none of their readings match his. Taylor's gyro compass must be busted. And his backup, the magnetic compass, the winds that they're flying through are too rough for an accurate reading. So he can't even use that one. At 3.40 p.m., another pilot flying over the Fort Lauderdale Air Base, Lieutenant Robert Cox, overhears some radio chatter from Flight 19. One of the pilots admits, I don't know where we are. But at just about that time, Taylor looks down and realizes he can see land. Except it's not the islands they've been looking for. It's a bunch of small reefs and sandbars, a row of small broken up pieces of land.

He suddenly realizes where he is, the Florida Keys. His compass must be malfunctioning so severely that instead of flying east towards Great Stirrup Key, they flew southwest. Then, when they turned north, they must have gone all the way up to the Keys. At about the same time Taylor came to this determination, Lieutenant Cox reaches out to the group on the radio, and he asks what their trouble was. Taylor explains, both my compasses are out, and I'm trying to find Fort Lauderdale should be a generally straight shot north. It's just a matter of distance. And even if his compasses aren't working, with the sun still in the sky, it should be fairly easy for him to determine which way is north.

How did he get this disoriented? Lieutenant Cox reminds him, if the sun is on your left wing, you're pointed north. Just keep coming in this direction and you'll get home. But just to be safe, Cox decides that he's going to fly south to meet them. He'll find them somewhere over South Florida and then escort them back to base. Taylor tries to wave him off. I mean, it's already embarrassing enough that he's gotten this lost on a test flight, and being escorted back to base by another pilot is mortifying. But Cox is worried enough about the safety of Flight 19 that he heads south to meet them anyway. He makes sure they're flying at the same altitude and then tells Taylor he'll see

him soon. But 45 minutes go by. Taylor still hasn't made landfall in Florida. Cox is now down over the Keys himself and has seen no sign of Flight 19. Even worse, Taylor's radio transmissions are getting fainter and more garbled. This means the signal is getting weaker, meaning that Flight 19 is somehow flying even further away from base. It makes absolutely no sense at all. In the cockpit, Lieutenant Taylor is starting to get rattled. Every decision he makes, every direction he turns only makes him feel more lost. He knows the sun is going to go down in less than an hour, meaning he'll lose the only reliable sense of direction he has. On top of that, the promised storm is rolling in. I mean, the clouds are thickening and it's

starting to rain. In the briefing room before takeoff, Taylor had reviewed the standard protocol with his team for what to do if they should find themselves lost over the Atlantic Ocean. Turn your nose toward the sun and fly west until you hit land. At 4.30 p.m., the tower overhears Flight 19 discussing this option. Should they just head west? But Taylor hesitates. He can't trust any of his instruments. They haven't seen land in miles, not since they were over the Keys, and they've been going north for almost an hour now. They should have made landfall. Why haven't they? Then it hits him. They must be west of Florida, flying parallel to the coast. Somehow, they've strayed into the Gulf of Mexico.

If they go even further west, they'll run out of gas long before they reach Texas. They have to turn around back east. They'll run right into Florida. So once again, Flight 19 turns around. But once again, their radio signal gets weaker. And this indicates that they're getting farther from base, not closer. The radio signal is now so weak, no one is able to communicate directly with Flight 19. The pilots can hear each other, and a few towers are able to pick up snippets of their conversations, but no one can get new information to them. Another 45 minutes goes by, and the sun is now almost set, and it's pouring rain. Most importantly, the pilots are starting to run low

on fuel and Taylor is starting to panic. Another one of the pilots in the group urges him, we need to turn around. We need to head west. I know that's the way home. Taylor is so turned around at this point, so desperate for one of his decisions to be correct that he agrees. At 5.15 p.m., they make another U-turn and head back west, hoping that they'll see some kind of land soon. At 5.50 p.m., the Gulf and Eastern Sea Frontier Station, which is a command center that uses high-powered radar to track the location of enemy ships, is finally able to get a fix on Flight 19's position based on their radio transmissions. They determine that the crew is definitely not in the Gulf of Mexico. Actually, they're nowhere near the Florida Keys either. They estimate that Flight 19 is far out in the

Atlantic Ocean, like 120 miles east of Daytona Beach. But that's okay. That's actually a good thing. Because that means that the trainee pilot was right. They just need to keep heading west and then they'll make it back home. Except no one is able to communicate this to Lieutenant Taylor. And at 6.04 p.m., 50 minutes after they U-turned, he is once again convinced that they're going in the wrong direction. It's been too long. They should have hit land by now. Taylor radios to the other pilots. If we're near land, we should be able to see a light or

something. I suggest we fly due east until we run out of gas. We'll have a better chance of being picked up close to the shore. The other pilots try and reason with him. How could they be in the Gulf? They went east of Florida, not west. They remind him that his compass might be malfunctioning, but theirs were all working the whole time. They just need to keep heading west. But Taylor will not be moved. It's like something has possessed his mind and robbed him of all reason, of all of his years of experience. He's ignoring the tower, he's ignoring his crew, and frankly, he's ignoring all logic. Whatever voice is telling him to head east, it's the only one he's listening to. And at the end of the day, he's the flight leader.

He's the senior officer. So the rest of the planes fall in line. And they turn back east, back out into the open ocean, back into the storm clouds, the thunder and the lightning crashing all around them. And they're going to run out of gas any minute. At 6.30 p.m., Taylor radios to his crew. All planes close up tight. We'll have to ditch unless landfall.

When the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together. And that's the last message that anyone picks up from Flight 19. Those are the final words of the mission. And no one sees or up from Flight 19. Those are the final words of the mission, and no one sees or hears from Flight 19 or any of the 14 men ever again. But that's not the final tragedy of the night. The Navy immediately scrambles a search and rescue team. If the planes went down, they have to find them. Two Martin PBM Mariners are launched from

another naval base in Jacksonville. These are giant plane boats, like they can fly out over the ocean, but can also land on the surface of the water if needed. So two Mariners take off, but only one returns. Just like Flight 19, the other plane completely vanishes. We'll explore what might have happened to Flight 19 and that other plane after this. Now we're back to the story. After Flight 19 disappeared on December 5th, the Navy immediately scrambled a search and rescue team. But one of their rescue planes, a Martin Mariner seaplane, left from Jacksonville with a 13-man crew and then never returned. There was no SOS, no distress signal.

They just vanished into the storm, just like Flight 19. So at this point, having lost 27 men and six planes in the course of a few hours, the Navy grounds everyone. They call off all the relief efforts until morning. It's dark, it's raining, and they just can't risk losing anyone else. The next day, December 6th, the search and rescue efforts start again, but they didn't make much progress. As predicted, the storms that started the night before continued unabated. They had to abandon their search efforts or risk losing more planes. By December 7th, the Navy is desperate for some kind of answers. Throughout the course of the day, they send planes out to scour over 100,000 square miles of open ocean looking for any sign of Flight

19 or the missing Mariner seaplane. And they find nothing. No debris, no parachutes, no bodies. So what actually happened here? Over the years, the story of Flight 19 has been immortalized in the pages of pulp magazines and science fiction novellas. They take the report's assessment of flying to Mars and kind of run with it. Lieutenant Taylor's last words are now rumored to be, I know where I am now. Don't come after me. They look like they're from outer space. Another story that was popularized was that the family of one of the crew members received a telegram shortly after his disappearance. And it said simply, I am very much alive. And it was signed Georgie.

Apparently, no one outside of the family called him by this name, making the family trust its authenticity. So with this slant, the story of Flight 19 becomes connected to UFOs. The prevailing theory of the 1960s suggests that the pilots and their planes were all abducted by aliens. That's why the Navy was never able to find any trace of them. And that's how Georgie was able to send his message to his family. It fuels entire theories about the Bermuda Triangle as a whole. Anyone who disappeared there was actually abducted. But we have the transcripts from Flight 19's radio.

There's no mention of anything coming from outer space. So let's just go ahead and assume that at least in this story, aliens had nothing to do with it. I mentioned earlier the strange disappearance of the USS Cyclops. Like Flight 19, it seemed to vanish into thin air. Even stranger, the Cyclops had two sister ships that also disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. That's the common theme here. People just seem to disappear. And that feeds into these theories that something truly paranormal is happening in this corner of the ocean.

In addition to UFOs, it's been suggested that the Bermuda Triangle is the site of the lost city of Atlantis. Whatever force plunged the ancient city into the depths of the ocean now preys on unsuspecting ships and planes, dragging them to the watery grave, never to be seen again. Other theories say that the Bermuda Triangle is home to a portal to another dimension. Ships go in and they don't come out. It's basically a black hole in the middle of the Atlantic. And with a number of cases of people and boats just vanishing without any explanation, you can see why these theories get traction. It's bizarre enough that scientists start looking into the triangle disappearances.

And over the years, they've been able to provide some pretty compelling explanations of their own. For one, the Gulf Stream runs directly through the Bermuda Triangle. This is an ocean current that runs north from the Gulf of Mexico along the east coast of the United States and Canada. You can think of it like a river running through the middle of the ocean. And all this water moves at a constant speed, about four miles an hour. So when a ship sinks or a plane crashes, any debris that's left behind and any survivors left floating in the

water, they're constantly being pushed north four miles every single hour. In the case of Flight 19, the Navy wasn't able to mount an effective search until the morning of December 7th, almost 40 hours after the plane entered the water. That means that any debris had already traveled close to 160 miles before anyone had a chance to look for it. And even if the search and rescue crew were able to account for all of the movement, finding a person in the open ocean is a needle in a haystack. I mean, today, with all the technology at our disposal,

the Coast Guard has only a 78% chance of recovery in the open ocean. And that's at peak conditions. The chances only go down if there is any kind of adverse weather. In 1945, with limited technology and battling the elements, the odds were wildly stacked against them. The chances of finding anyone from Flight 19 were basically nil from the start. And as for the Mariner seaplane that disappeared during the search, it's basically the same reason. Those planes were known to have mechanical problems. Apparently, the fuel lines were so notoriously faulty, all Mariners constantly smelled of gasoline. Now, another ship reported seeing a fireball crash into the ocean

on the night of December 5th. So it's likely that the Mariner experienced a massive mechanical failure, exploded without warning, and then the wreckage just washed away. So that sheds some light on why we maybe never found any sign of Flight 19 or the other vanished ships we mentioned. But what made them crash in the first place? Again, the Gulf Stream provides some of the answers. It brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up to meet the cold water from the northern Atlantic Ocean. When these two temperatures meet, they release a ton of moisture in the air, causing storms. And sometimes this is happening so rapidly, raging hurricanes seemingly appear out of nowhere. Ships get caught in them, they crash or they abandon ship, and then the Gulf Stream current

just spirits them away. But for a freighter like the USS Cyclops, it would take a huge storm with massive waves to capsize. And the Bermuda Triangle isn't really known for waves that size. And don't forget, a lot of these missing ships reported fair weather before they disappeared. Some scientists think the culprit is pockets of methane gas along the seafloor. When one of them erupts and releases all that gas into the ocean, it actually changes the density of the water. This change can be so dramatic that it might cause a ship to sink rather than float. So the Cyclops could be sailing through the calm waters, not a cloud in the sky,

and then suddenly start to take on water out of nowhere. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. But Flight 19 wasn't in the water, so that wasn't the issue this time. We can explain why the planes were never found with the scientific theories, but what's more intriguing to me is how did Flight 19 get so lost in the first place? The flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, was an incredibly experienced pilot. He'd flown over 2,500 hours, and yet he completely fell apart in the air. He was so flustered, at one point he actually gave the wrong call sign over the radio. He went against every protocol pilots are taught. He ignored reason. It was like

something took a hold of him over the ocean. Every time he got close to shore, some kind of force convinced him to turn back around and go back out over the ocean until finally he and his crew were just done for. Remember, Taylor didn't want to fly that mission that day. He had a bad feeling about something. And I have to wonder, had he sensed something supernatural in the works? In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, the Navy actually concluded that Taylor was at fault for the whole thing. Some people even suggest that he'd been out partying the night before his mission, and maybe when he tried to excuse himself from flying, it was because he was too hungover. But there's really no evidence to suggest that this was the case. Taylor's mother even petitioned

the Navy on her son's behalf and had his name cleared of any wrongdoing. So what happened then? This case has been studied by dozens of people over the years, ufologists aside. One of the leading experts on this is a former pilot named John Myrie. He spent over 30 years looking for the answers to Flight 19, and he believed the answer could be found in the purpose of the mission, dead reckoning. Like I said, dead reckoning is based on the idea that if you know what direction you're going in and how fast you're going and how long you've been flying, you have all the information you need to get to your destination.

While some Flight 19 theorists have suggested otherwise, Myri speculated that Lieutenant Taylor's gyro compass did malfunction. And this is actually a common trope of the Bermuda Triangle stories. Some people who pass through the triangle report that not only does their compass fail, but the needle spins wildly, totally out of control. But in Lieutenant Taylor's case, the explanation is much more banal. It was likely human error. Just like Flight 19 was made up of an experienced pilot and trainee pilots, so was the ground crew. It's likely that Taylor's compass was checked by a student who just didn't notice any issues before takeoff. And normally, the magnetic compass would serve as a failsafe,

but by the time Taylor realized the issue, he was in rough winds. His plane was bouncing around, making the needle skip. He couldn't get an accurate reading even if he tried. So without a functional compass, Taylor's ability to guide his flight was severely compromised. And that planted a seed of doubt in his mind that grew and festered as the flight faced more uncertainty. So right off the bat, one of the elements of dead reckoning is off, direction. But their speed was off as well. The calculations they used were based off readings taken on the morning of the 5th. By the time flight 19 took off that afternoon, the wind speed had increased from 36 miles per hour to 49 miles per hour. Finally, the direction of the wind had also shifted from 241

degrees to 220 degrees. Now, alone, none of these factors would have had that great of an impact, but combined, they became a perfect storm of confusion that completely enveloped Lieutenant Taylor until he wasn't sure which way was up. Even though he had thousands of hours of experience in the cockpit, he was relatively new to the Florida area. So once Flight 19 strayed from the designated route, Taylor didn't know how to get them back home. John Murray theorized that after the bombing exercise, Flight 19 unknowingly overshot their next checkpoint, Great Stirrup Key, by about 50 miles. Instead, they turned north at the next island they saw, Great Abaco. But this throws off the next checkpoint as well, because now they're so much farther east. When they finally see some kind of

land, it's these small broken reefs and sandbars. So Taylor, who can't trust his compass, knows that he's missed his checkpoints and is generally unfamiliar with the area, becomes absolutely convinced that he's southwest of Florida in the Keys instead of where he actually is northeast of Florida in the Bermuda Triangle. Once he has this in his head, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, he can't let it go. He just gets complete tunnel vision. When the tower and the other pilots try to convince him that safety is to the west, he is convinced that they're flying farther out into sea, into the Gulf. But sadly, the opposite is true. There's not a lot of emotion conveyed in the radio transcripts, but one thing that is clear is Taylor's utter confusion. He knows something

isn't right, but he can't figure out what it is because so many things are wrong. The compass, the airspeed, the wind direction, the checkpoints. It completely confounds him. And he spends so much time flying in circles, trying to figure it out, he eventually runs out of options. He has to crash land into the water. Taylor's not the only highly experienced person to lose themselves in these waters. Joshua Slocum was the first person to sail around the world solo. There was possibly no one more seasoned in the ocean than he was, but he vanished along with his boat while crossing the Bermuda Triangle in 1909. As recently as June of 2003, a Florida couple went missing in the triangle.

They sailed out in a 16-foot boat on June 18th, never to be seen or heard from again. No wreckage, no SOS. When you look at the sheer number of shipwrecks and disappearances, it seems like overwhelming evidence that something is going on here. A thousand disappearances have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle in the last century. But the U.S. Coast Guard insists that it's just a numbers game. They say millions of planes and ships travel through that area of the Atlantic every year. It's one of the most highly trafficked areas in the ocean. John Riley of the U.S. Naval Historical Foundation explained, the region has been a busy crossroad since the early days of European exploration.

To say quite a few ships and airplanes have gone down there is like saying there are an awful lot of car accidents on the New Jersey Turnpike. Surprise, surprise. So if there aren't any dark forces at work in this corner of the ocean, what convinced Lieutenant Taylor to fly out to sea? Today, what Taylor experienced

is called spatial disorientation. It's actually a common danger for pilots, even those with years of experience, and we know a lot more now about the warning signs and how to prevent it. One of the most important pieces of advice? Trust your instruments, not your gut. Though maybe Taylor's real mistake was ignoring his instincts when he was still on the ground. That's honestly the only thing we can't explain about Flight 19. maybe Taylor's real mistake was ignoring his instincts when he was still on the ground. That's honestly the only thing we can't explain about flight 19. What was that bad feeling he had?

That premonition? Taylor was so uneasy about his upcoming flight, he had even mentioned it to his mom the night before when she called. What was his gut trying to tell him then? And what if he had listened? Thank you for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.