Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle
The account
Five U.S. Navy planes vanished without a trace, and the case became the cornerstone of Bermuda Triangle abduction stories.
What investigators found
The most accepted explanation is a navigation error with failed compasses, low fuel and a crash into rough seas; no wreckage was ever found.
The story
On December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a training flight. The flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, radioed that both of his compasses had failed and, by all indications, mistook the Bahamas for the Florida Keys. The 14 airmen were never found. A PBM Mariner flying boat sent out on the search, with 13 crew aboard, also disappeared; a tanker reported flames from what looked like an explosion at sea.
The Navy report first blamed navigational error, but later changed its finding to cause unknown after Taylor's mother challenged it. That gap fueled decades of theories, including UFO abduction, immortalized in the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". For investigators, the combination of disorientation, running out of fuel and a dark night sea is enough to explain the tragedy.