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

 

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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: 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). But Flight 19 really did disappear. So what happened? 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.

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.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as: 

“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?

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