In the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, scientists discover five propeller-driven US Navy torpedo bombers parked in a neat circle in the southwestern desert of the United States. “They look brand-new,” someone remarks. As they would, I expect, if they’d been looked after well by aliens who’d taken them thirty-two years earlier. But while their discovery in the Sonoran Desert was fantasy, the planes themselves were real. And so too was their disappearance.
On December 5, 1945, Flight 19, a formation of US Navy Grumman TBM Avengers, vanished without a trace off the coast of Florida. The five aircraft took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station at a quarter to two for a training mission out over the western Atlantic. Apart from practicing low-level bombing, it was also a navigation exercise. The bombing went well, the navigation less so. Flight 19 dropped its last bomb at around three o’clock. Three and a half hours later its last radio transmission was heard. Lost and out of fuel, the flight leader thumbed his radio and reported, “We’ll have to ditch.” Within a few hours of that last transmission, a Martin PBM Mariner flying boat launched to find them had also been lost.
The story of what happened that night has become one of the foundation stones of the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. And along with the Roswell Incident and the Philadelphia Experiment, it became part of a sort of holy trinity of conspiracies laid at the door of the US military.
Of course, it wasn’t just the “unexplained” disappearance of Flight 19, or that of their would-be rescuers, that built the legend of the triangle. There were other mysteries . . .
In a magazine advertisement for Britain’s Avro Tudor airliner, the boss of British South American Airways claimed, “It is one of the finest propositions ever known in the field of long-range air transport.” It was anything but. After a crash in 1947 that killed the man who’d designed it, another Tudor vanished in the Bermuda Triangle in January 1948, then another a year later. No trace of either aircraft was found. In 1950 a USAF Globemaster was lost. In 1954 a US Navy Constellation vanished. Two years later the US Navy lost a Martin Marlin flying boat, and in 1962 a USAF KB-50 tanker disappeared. Reportedly, no wreckage was found from any of these aircraft. I could go on, heaping incident upon incident until you felt sure that something inexplicable was going on in this mysterious patch of water. This is more or less what Charles Berlitz, the author of the global bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, does.
What he fails to mention is that, according to the United States Coast Guard, there’s nothing statistically unusual in the number of aircraft and ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Or that the Avro Tudor was a terrible aircraft, rejected by BOAC, prone to fuel leaks, and with an unreliable cabin heating system that ran off aviation fuel bled from the engines’ tanks. Or even that in the 1940s and 1950s planes went down with frightening regularity, and that in the huge expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, it was easy to find no trace.
“Some say it’s UFOs. Others say it’s a lost civilization. You may decide it’s both.” Hmmm.
Berlitz touches on a US Navy investigation into “electromagnetic gravitation and atmospheric disturbance.” The US Navy confirmed that Project Magnet was an effort to survey Earth’s geomagnetism for navigational charts. UFO enthusiasts drew the conclusion that the real purpose was to detect the presence of aliens by tracing the disruption caused by the anti-gravity engines of their flying saucers. Berlitz and others certainly fueled this kind of speculation.
In his book Berlitz follows one chapter called “Is there a logical explanation?” with another titled “Space-time warps and other worlds.” The answer to the question he poses is, I’m afraid, “yes.” Much as I’d love to learn of proof of alien visitation, the discovery of Atlantis, or even some top-secret military research program, it’s just wishful thinking. And even wishing really, really hard, won’t, sadly, make it otherwise.
