Transcription
The whole triangle mystery might never have come about, but for one story: Flight 19. The events of Flight 19 happened 30 years ago here at what is now Fort Lauderdale International Airport. Then, it was the scene of the biggest triangle story of them all.
The legend version is told in Richard Weiner's film. The tower was old and wooden, as were the barracks that housed the officers and men stationed at Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station during and right after World War II. And it was in these barracks that 15 men, in particular, were quartered. 15 men who, on December 4th, 1945, were scheduled to participate on a routine training flight aboard five Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers. A mission that, to this day, remains one of the most baffling mysteries of the sea.
One marine gunner, Corporal Alan Kosner, missed the flight. What strange distortion of fate caused Corporal Kosner to take this flight into oblivion?
The mission of the day was a routine patrol flight: east for 160 miles, north for 40 miles, then southwest back to Fort Lauderdale. A triangular course within the larger devil's time. It was two o'clock when Squadron Leader Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor felt the ground give way beneath his plane. Once airborne, Flight 19 grouped into formation and headed east out over the Atlantic. What were Lieutenant Taylor's thoughts as he looked out of the other four planes? Was he thinking of the day's mission? Or is it possible he had that same peculiar feeling that Corporal Kosner had had back at the base? But for Flight 19, it was too late to turn back.
Fort Lauderdale tower received radio contact from the five planes 15 minutes before they were due to land, but they did not request landing instructions as expected. "We need to be off park. We cannot see land. We speak. We cannot see land. We're not sure of our position. We seem to be lost. We don't know which way is where. Everything is wrong. Strange. You can't be sure of any direction."
These panicky messages about the strange ocean, the skies looking wrong, are central to the mystery of Flight 19. But did they, in fact, happen? Who reported them? All the books quote them, including Richard Weiner's. Did they come from Cosner? "I quoted Cosner in both my film and in the book that the plane, that the message from the planes, the last that he remembers distinctly and he's sure of, is that there was talk about entering white water. There was static, broken talk, and the very last thing he heard them say is, 'We're completely lost.'"
Two officers in the tower during the flight were Training Officer Don Poole and Safety Officer Walt Winchell. "We monitored all the transmissions coming in, going out, and I don't recall ever hearing some of the transmissions that were claimed to have been made by Mr. Taylor about the wild water and we're upside down and we don't know which way is west and their compasses don't work and all that. They were lost, yes, and that, that was a, that was very evident from uh Lieutenant Taylor's transmissions. But there was, there was nothing like that that water was white or that we understand that all kinds of stories out, but it can't be confirmed at all by by me. Walt and I were both in the tower the entire time."
"You say the record shows the following," and then you have the message from Taylor about not knowing which way west is, not sure of his position, even the ocean doesn't look right. What record is that? The record of the people who were there at the time, uh, in the tower. You see, uh, when the word got out that the planes were in some sort of difficulty, which no one could understand, people who are on the field, especially uh staff officers, came and from the command post, came to the tower. So there's a big crowd there. We talked to two of the people who were there all the time, and they say they never heard that message. I thought I've talked to people too, including the intelligence officer who was there at the time. And of course, you must remember that when this first became noon, and it's been known for several years, that the records of that is the records and memories of the people who were there at the time, were, were well, well documented. We haven't talked, in fact, to the, it must be the intelligent, uh, officer. Would it be possible to get his telephone number off you so we could talk to him? Because this is obviously something we need to change. He'd be, uh, very happy to, uh, uh, Lieutenant Commander Wishing. Still, many of these people, of course, are still alive and have a clear memory of what happened."
Commander Wishing didn't keep first-hand notes, as Charles Burlett says, but did he remember the messages he is quoted as giving? "No, I never did, and I've never heard the message about the, where everybody said, 'This looks strange, and even the ocean doesn't look the same,' because I didn't get there, uh, to the base of the tower until after, uh, the tower no longer could be heard by the airplanes. And that message probably came in before we heard the ones about the compasses all being wrong, where pilots talk to pilots, and we, those are the only worth the things we heard."
So everyone agrees that the planes were lost, but the really strange messages cannot be vouched for by anyone at the base at the time, as they're quoted in all the books. Where did they come from?
I've traced the strange messages of Flight 19 back to this article: "The Mystery of the Lost Patrol" by Alan Eckert in American Legion Magazine, April 1962. I've corresponded with Mr. Eckert, and he can't remember now where he got these quotations from. I've also contacted Boston University, which the library there has his papers, and there's nothing in the files there to show where he got the information. So this is as far back as anybody can trace the message of Flight 19. Now, like many other, uh, parts of the story, this was picked up by Vincent Gaddis, uh, practically word for word, and then it goes on. Everybody else has it. Weiner, Burlett, Jeffrey. The story of Flight 19 as we know it basically came from this article by Eckert.
That source came from the man that coined the phrase Bermuda Triangle, Vincent Gaddis, in his book *Invisible Horizons*. He had one chapter called "The Bermuda Triangle," which he brought to light all these disappearances. And I used him as my source. And, uh, the Navy says that's not what they say, but they haven't out now denied it. This is the report, the Navy report of the incident on microfilm. And this right here is that microfilm converted into paper. It's about a 500-page report, and I've spent probably a thousand hours over several years now going over and over this report and finding out what really happened. And it's nothing like the story of Flight 19 as we commonly know it. That story has grown up over the years as folklore. Everybody has repeated what the previous writer said, and it's been added to and deleted from. And like so many other incidents in the triangle, the loss of these five points did not happen anything like what all the writers would have us believe.
To try to find out what really happened to Flight 19, we flew with the Coast Guard the exact route of the missing planes. This story is based on what we saw and on the official report of Flight 19. The flight headed east from Fort Lauderdale to carry out a bombing run that "Hens and Chickens" show. Continue east for 67 miles, turn north for 73 miles, then west-southwest back to base. The practice bombing of "Hens and Chickens" appears to have gone according to plan. The planes then continued east until the turn north onto the second leg.
"Okay, this is the, uh, this is what he would have seen, which is virtually nothing. Virtually no horizon. It's kind of hazy, and just water meets the sky. It's kind of a, it was." Now that things apparently began to go wrong. The first messages from Flight 19 were not those of the legend. They were picked up by Commander Robert Cox, who at 3:40 p.m. was flying over Fort Lauderdale. He reported the following reenacted messages from Flight 19: "I don't know where we are. I must have got lost after the last turn. Both my compasses are out. I'm trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I'm over land, but it's broken. I'm sure I'm in the Keys, but I don't know how far down. I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale."
Flight 19's commander, Lieutenant Taylor, had recently moved from South Florida. Now, as he reassumed lead position over his student pilots, he believed he was here, over familiar territory: the broken islands of the Florida Keys. In fact, he was probably far to the north, here, over Great Sail Key. How could he have been so mistaken?
"Okay, I'd say, uh, somebody that they would probably use the Florida Keys was disoriented and a bad day considerably, even worse than today. Breaking out into the situation, kind of as we are now, would mistake the islands that we're coming up on for part of the Florida Keys. You almost see how this could take somebody out that wasn't really terribly familiar with the area." So Taylor's flight was over these islands north of the Bahamas, and they are remarkably similar to these islands, the Florida Keys, where he thought he was. So similar, in fact, to the Florida Keys, to this chain north of the Bahamas, that Taylor could have relied on this mistaken identification and disbelieved his compasses.
"First of all, if you have no reference to a shoreline that you're familiar with, it's very easy to not believe your instruments. Like you can see that you're flying north or south, east or west, and not not want to believe it and end up doing something very ridiculous. It happened to me once about three years ago. It was just that two of us were on the airplane. We decided we're doing something absolutely wrong, and we just settled down and decided that we had to remove our instruments. But if I think if that happened to us in the airplane, I could've gotten in trouble. But this happened on the west coast on a very dark night."
19 still headed north. As he approached the island here, he decided that he was in the Florida Keys and took a steered a course to get him back to Florida mainland. He could run into absolutely nothing between here and Africa except deep water. Radio communications were bad. The tower couldn't contact Flight 19, so Taylor remained uncertain of his position.
Believing he was around the Keys, he would head north and east to return to the mainland. But the same course, if taken from the area where he really was, would carry him away from Florida and out into the Atlantic. And by now, the weather was deteriorating. "Here we are heading into nothingness because of lousy weather, which is just about what he would have experienced, I would imagine. Of course, the man was, uh, confused and probably a little frightened at the time that he was trying to hurt about three or four inexperienced students around the skies where they can't output. Had his hands filled."
"We heard one of the students, he was unidentified, but he was one of the students in the flight, who said, 'Damn it, we'd head west, we'd get home.' And this was very loud and clear. Then at one time turned west and flew west for a few minutes, and then the next thing we knew, he turned around and flew back east again because he was convinced that he was in the Gulf. But Taylor ordered an opposite heading. 'We're heading 0-3-0 for 45 minutes, and we'll fly north to make sure we are not over the Gulf of Mexico.' A course that would take them away from base. Slices later, change course to 0-9-0 for 10 minutes. 10 minutes now flying due east. 'I receive you very weak. We are now flying 2-7-0 and back west again. We will fly 2-7-0.' Like this. Later, when the first man gets down to 10 gallons of gas, we'll all land in the water together." But later, the flight again turned east.
At 6 p.m., a radio fix at last located Flight 19 north of the Bahamas. The legend ignores this. "How do they know it was north of Grand Bahama Island? How do they know the distance with only one bearing? You cannot take a pinpoint and plot a position with only one bearing. Any airman or any mariner will tell you that it's impossible. You can get them along that line someplace, but you can't tell how far. Just like a car on a road. If he's talking to you on radio, he can tell you, 'Well, I'm driving along Highway One, but I don't know how far I am out on it.' Well, it's the same thing. They knew that he was along that, uh, direction, but they didn't know how far out he was. They had two radios. They did not have two radio fixes on it. They could have had few, two radio fixes. And as I said in my book, that the government goofed up, and you don't see anything of this in the government record."
There were more than one radio fix. In fact, six separate radio stations, each obtained numerous fixes over a period of about an hour. These gave an approximate position within a 100-mile radius of 29 degrees north, 79 degrees west. This placed the missing Flight 19 some 150 miles north of their base, way off course and totally lost. It was just disorientation. He was just mentally confused and panicked. As my estimated situation was what really happened. Where she milled around out there, they ran out of gas that night.
Flight 19's last message came, according to all the writers, in late afternoon. In fact, the planes were heard until after 7 p.m. By putting the last message too early, another mystery is created. And then, immediately, according to the stories, the Martin Mariner search plane took off. So we picture the search plane going out in nice, sunshiny weather and late in the afternoon and just simply vanishing in the sky, a nice, friendly sky.
Minutes after the appalling messages were received from Flight 19, Banana River Naval Air Station dispatched a giant Martin Mariner flying boat with a crew of 13 to assist the afflicted Avengers. In fact, the Mariner took off not at 4:25 p.m. in daylight, but at 7:27 p.m. at night. The legend has it disappearing before it even took off. All the writers have its departure far too early, so causing confusion as to what really happened.
In charge of Mariner rescue missions at the time was Richard Adams. "The Mariner carried a very large load of gasoline, which permitted it to stay in the air for many hours. In fact, we used to call it the flying gas tank because it was carried so much gasoline. And the fumes which we collect inside the whole can make it a potentially flying bomb. It could have happened in the excitement of the search that they did not take the normal precautions that we always took in the PBMS to make sure nobody smoked in the in the gasoline compartment." The Mariner was tracked on radar until 20 minutes after the real takeoff time, when it suddenly disappeared from the screen. At this precise position on time, a huge mid-air explosion was seen. The Mariner had indeed blown up.
The final mystery is why nothing was ever found of Flight 19. Every type of vessel, from Navy submarines just returned from Pacific war duty to sleek new Coast Guard cutters, joined the search, which stretched for over 200 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico, to 400 miles into the Atlantic. The search continued in a crisscross pattern that covered 280,000 square miles. But when the ships and planes returned to their bases, the story of the missing men and planes was the same: no survivors, no victims, no wreckage found. No survivor, no sickness, no wreckage found.
But is this really mysterious? This is how many mysteries come about because people just look at the end result, but they don't bother finding out about the details of how it actually happened. For instance, the ditching actually occurred in the dark during the storm. And these are, there was a ship in the area that reported rough, very rough seas. So what we had here was not a flight of five planes with five experienced pilots ditching on a nice, sunny afternoon, which is what the story is. But we had four student pilots and a disoriented instructor coming in, ditching in the dark in a storm. And as a pilot, that's something that I would prefer not to spend my evenings doing because, uh, it could be, the chances of a successful ditching under circumstances like that are practically negligible.
This is a similar plane to the Avenger. The Avenger's ditching capability is about the same. Now, according to the pilot's handbook, under the section of ditching, this airplane should have good water landing characteristics. Actual water landings indicate that the airplane will remain afloat for approximately 15 to 20 seconds. So I've talked to several Avenger pilots, and they say, actually, this manual is maybe a little bit too quick. They would give it as much as 45 seconds. So again, it's not exactly a leisurely bailout. Once they're in the water, assuming that they survive the crash, which is unlikely, I really didn't think we'd find anything because the weather that night deteriorated. Time they went down, that they couldn't possibly survive. When the planes hit, if they'd been lucky enough to get out, they still couldn't have survived in a raft for that with that high and heavier seas. It's just impossible.
There are many reasons for the loss of Flight 19, but the legend version, with its untraceable messages, its incorrect times, its omission of relevant facts, makes it more mysterious than it ever was. It's the cornerstone of the triangle mystery and is typical of the whole triangle approach. The facts look authoritative, but they simply are not.
I visited this fourth or fifth-grade class that I had talked to, and we talked a little bit about the triangle and techniques that they had used. When I visited them again several weeks ago, they had seen, I think it was *The Outer Space Connection* or one of the ancient astronaut films, and they had just ripped it to shreds. Instead of saying, "Gee whiz, look at those planes out there, how could there possibly be airports in Peru?" or "How could they have made those figures on the ground?" Instead, what they were doing was asking questions like, "What is the source of their information? Is their interpretation right? Are there other alternatives that they might come up with? Or have they left anything out?" Now, this is an entirely different set of questions, and this is the open-minded skepticism that I'm after.
There is nothing wrong with a good mystery, provided such stories are recognized as science fiction and not science fact. Today, many books on similar mysterious themes claim to deal with phenomena that are beyond the grasp of rational science. These books are popular. They claim to stretch the mind. Those who don't believe are dismissed as short-sighted skeptics. But this dismissal is only valid if the evidence for such claims is good evidence. In the case of the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, it hardly ever is. And when the inaccuracies are exposed, the mystery disappears. Science doesn't need to find an answer to the questions posed by the triangle because those questions aren't valid in the first place.
The only support, um, that I have seen for there being a mystery in the Bermuda Triangle, uh, comes from a number of writers whose basic facts are grossly inaccurate. The Bermuda Triangle mystery is probably one of the best hoaxes that's ever been pulled off.
The United States Coast Guard reported that after an all-day search for a boat that sailed two days ago, nothing has been seen or heard of the boat or its passenger since.