The Disappearance of Flight 19: The Bermuda Triangle’s Most Bizarre Mystery (Even Without Aliens)

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re taking a flight into the Bermuda Triangle in search of what is probably its most famous “paranormal” disappearance: Flight 19.

Flight 19 was actually a group of five US Navy planes on a training exercise on December 5, 1945. They vanished somewhere off the coast of Florida with the loss of 14 men. Why is Flight 19 so famous? Because after the disappearance, people made up a bunch of stuff about space aliens. No, really.

“Everything looks wrong, strange, the ocean doesn’t look as it should. Don’t come after us. They look like they’re from outer space!”

Yeah, so nobody actually said that. Magazine and book writers made it up (as we writers tend to do, only it’s probably better if we admit it). The Triangle-washing continued with a tale about a plane that also supposedly disappeared while searching for Flight 19. Sadly, the plane did go down with the loss of 13 lives, but it didn’t vanish. The crash site was quickly found.

Flight 19, on the other hand, really did disappear. So what went wrong? Here’s what we know:

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 dead reckoning using elapsed time, by compasses, and by 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 east to the mainland. 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.

Eventually, Flight 19 went down from lack of fuel somewhere in the Atlantic ocean, far from home. Every time someone finds a downed WWII plane off the coast of Florida, there are hopes that it’s part of Flight 19, but so far, none of the planes have been found.

• “They look like they’re from outer space!” In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Flight 19 reappears in the deserts of Mexico in 1977, with all crewmen alive and well. If only that had been the case. The idea behind the Bermuda Triangle and other such triangles is that certain places on earth are more prone to disappearances of planes and ships. Statistically speaking of course, that’s not true, but if it was aliens, why would they pick a specific place on Earth to operate? Are they conducting a scientific, controlled study? Did they win dominion over a small sliver of Earth in a dice game? Do they think the Beach Boys invited them?  

• “We all go down together.” You don’t need aliens to write a Flight 19-type horror story. Things Taylor actually said are creepy enough, showing his increasing confusion. His last transmission was, “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.” The psychological horror of being lost and confused as night falls and 13 other lives are on the line would make for a tense, desperate story. And how would those in the search parties feel, as the time ticks down to missing planes running out of fuel?

• “Both of my compasses are out.” That’s a quote from Taylor too, which helped spawn another common Bermuda Triangle theory: not aliens, but magnetic anomalies from the Earth itself. For this story, you could write all the compasses on your planes going out at once, either spinning or all pointing in different directions, which would be creepy. Creepier still would be if each plane reports the sun and other landmarks in different locations out their windows, even though they’re all flying together. What would be responsible for this? Mass hallucinations? Some drug the aviators ingested unknowingly before the flight? A wrinkle in space-time? The military testing a secret weapon?

• “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?

• A “burst of flame.” The doomed rescue plane didn’t give off a distress call, but a ship reported seeing flames, which helped pinpoint the crash site. The type of plane, a Martin PBM Mariner flying boat, was known to have fuel lines come loose in bad weather, and it’s assumed the plane exploded without warning. But you could have a paranormal explanation in a story. Maybe the crew of your rescue plane sees something they shouldn’t, so the aliens shoot them down. Maybe your plane runs into a forcefield around an alien craft, or a giant octopus bats it out of the sky. Or your story could have the rescue plane vanish as well. Another common Bermuda Triangle theory is time skips. All your missing fliers could end up far into the past or future.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! I hope you find your way home—or at least to the Bahamas.

Sources & further reading:

The Mysterious Disappearance of Flight 19: US Naval Institute

The Mystery of Flight 19: Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale Museum

Flight 19: Wikipedia

The Disappearance of Flight 19 — Shedding Light on the Mystery of the Missing Torpedo Bombers: Military History Now