Flight 19: Five United States Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers went missing 75 years ago today on Dec. 5, 1945

One of the most famous aviation disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle was that of Flight 19, known as the “Lost Patrol” or “Lost Squadron” on Dec. 5,  1945. Or did they disappear in the Bermuda Triangle?

Made up of five United States Navy TBM-3 Avenger Torpedo Bombers, with 14 airmen on the five planes, Flight 19 took off on a routine overwater navigation and bombing training flight exercise from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, and all five planes and 14 airmen vanished without a trace over the Bermuda Triangle, it was long believed, as did all 13 crew members of PBM-5 Bureau Number 59225, a Martin PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat sent out from Naval Air Station Banana River in Florida to look for the Lost Patrol.

Jon Myhre, a former Palm Beach International Airport controller, and Andy Marocco, a California businessman, told the Deerfield Beach South Florida Sun Sentinel in April 2014 they believe a torpedo bomber discovered in western Broward County in 1989 belonged to Lt. Charles Taylor, the commander and lead pilot of Flight 19, and that some of the other planes also crashed on land (Flight 19: Has mystery of Lost Patrol been solved? – South Florida Sun Sentinel – South Florida Sun-Sentinel (sun-sentinel.com). Marocco went to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland and obtained the Navy’s 500-page “Board of Investigation Report on the loss of Flight 19.”

In it, he found that the USS Solomons aircraft carrier, while off the coast of Daytona Beach, picked up a radar signal from four to six unidentified planes over North Florida, about 20 miles northwest of Flagler Beach. That was at about 7 p.m. on Dec. 5 1945, or about an hour and half after Flight 19 was due back at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale – today, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The USS Solomons was built at Vancouver, Washington, and commissioned on Nov. 21, 1943. Named for an island in the mouth of a river in Maryland, the ship was designated an escort carrier, CVE-67. After an initial ferrying and transport run to Hawaii, the ship was then sent to the Atlantic.

Her next assignment was to help with anti-submarine patrols in the South Atlantic off of the South American coast. On her third patrol, the ship engaged and sank a German submarine in June 1944. During these operations, the ship lost two aircraft, but captured dozens of German prisoners. She conducted other submarine patrols before going back to transport a few months later.

Later in 1944, the ship went to Staten Island and then transported a group of airmen and their planes to Casablanca in French Morocco. For the rest of the war, the ship was used for qualification runs. Both the Navy and Marine Corps used the ship to get their pilots ready for combat duty. She started this off the coast of Rhode Island and later near Port Everglades in Florida. She continued operations until the end of the war.

The ship was decommissioned on May 15, 1946.

The disappeearance of Flight 19, known as the “Lost Patrol” or “Lost Squadron” became come fodder for all manner of wild theories and speculation. In the 1960s and 1970s, pulp magazines and writers such as Vincent Gaddis and Charles Berlitz helped popularize the idea that Flight 19 had been gobbled up by the “Bermuda Triangle,” a section of the Atlantic supposedly known for its high volume of freak disappearances and mechanical failures. Other books and fictional portrayals have suggested that magnetic anomalies, parallel dimensions and alien abductions might have all played a role in the tragedy. In 1977, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind famously depicted Flight 19 as having been whisked away by flying saucers and later deposited in the deserts of Mexico.

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Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon.  Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21,  when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back  to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. The oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?

“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That’s a rather famous quote from Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast in October 1939 in reference to the difficulty in forecasting the actions of Russia.  It might well be applied today to the difficulties of solving the mysteries in and around the Bermuda Triangle between Florida, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas in the Atlantic Ocean. But some of the causation behind the secrets of one of the world’s most infamous areas of water may have been demystified for many last week.

The Science Channel, founded 20 years ago this month in October 1996, and owned by Discovery Communications of Silver Springs, Maryland,  aired a brief 4:05 clip (http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/what-on-earth/what-can-these-hexagonal-shapes-tell-us-about-the-bermuda-triangle/) from its television series What on Earth? examining a pattern of unusual straight-edge [most clouds are random in their distribution] hexagonal clouds hovering over the western tip of Bermuda Island. According to the clip, hexagonal cloud formation might explain why numerous ships and at least 75 airplanes have vanished in the area of the approximately 193,000-square-kilometre Bermuda Triangle. The hexagonal clouds, which range from 20 to 55 miles across, are described by Randy Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe, as potential “air bombs” capable of generating 170 mph hurricane-force wind blasts, which could generate 45-foot high waves, and potentially down a plane underneath one, or sink a ship at sea.

The land-based equivalent might be something like the windshear and microburst that brought down Delta Air Lines Flight 191 as it was landing in Dallas on Aug. 2, 1985. A fictional but-not-totally implausible [if you can suspend your belief momentarily over some of the sketchy physics] more recent example would be the helicopter crash scene in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, where three Royal Air Force (RAF) helicopters on a mission to rescue the Royal family crash about 25 miles from Balmoral Castle in Scotland, when they fly into the super-cooled air from the upper troposphere, as they enter the eye of a cyclonic weather disturbance, analogous to a cold-water hurricane, where the air in the eye is so cold their aviation fuel freezes almost instantly at -150°F.

Bye, bye whirling rotor blades. Crash, as the helicopters, dropping like stones, fall out of the sky.

The first shipwreck blamed on the Bermuda Triangle effect was in 1609 when the English sailing ship Sea Venture, the flagship sailing from London, England to Jamestown, Virginia as part of a flotilla of nine ships commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers. The Sea Venture was the flagship of the “Third Supply” (made up of six ships and two pinnances). A hurricane at sea on July 23, 1609 separated the Sea Venture from the other vessels. After four days, she began taking on water. Land was sited and she shipwrecked between two reefs offshore on the eastern end of Bermuda Island on July 28, 1609. All 150 or so passengers safely made land. Two more pinnances were built during the following nine months, the Deliverance and the Patience, and they sailed on to Virginia on May 10, 1610.

In January 1881, the Ellen Austin, a three-mast schooner working as a packet ship and built in Damariscotta, Maine in 1854, reportedly came across a ghost or phantom ship, such as the Flying Dutchman of long legend reportedly is, in the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and near the western edge of the Bermuda Triangle, that appeared to be sailing with no living crew on board.  The Ellen Austin transferred four of its most able crewmembers to the mysterious unidentified schooner and  found no sign of any violence, nor was there any sign of a crew. The only things missing were the ship’s log and its nameplates, which appeared to have been removed from the bow. For the next two days the small crew from the Ellen Austin temporarily seconded to the phantom schooner sailed on calm waters toward New York with crews from the two ships within earshot of each other. However on the third day the schooners were separated by a fierce Atlantic storm. The ghost ship suddenly disappeared – only to then reappear two days later without a person on board from either the old or new crew before vanishing forever without a trace.

Sometime after March 4, 1918, nearing what would prove to be the end of the First World War, the USS Cyclops, a Proteus-class collier with a crew of 309, assigned to Naval Overseas Transportation Service, was sailing deeply loaded at or beyond her marks with 10,800 long tons 0f manganese ore from Rio de Janeiro via Bahia, Brazil, to Baltimore Maryland, when it disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle after leaving the Barbados. Cyclops departed Barbados for Baltimore on March 4, 1918 but never was seen again.

In April 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and other Central Powers, the U.S. Navy was in transition from coal burning warships to ships powered by oil. The disappearance of the USS Cyclops in the Bermuda Triangle represents the “largest [non-combat] loss of life in the history of the United States Navy of a U.S. built steel hulled warship where there simply is no direct evidence of why it happened, when it happened, or exactly how it happened,” says the U.S. Naval Historical Foundation based at the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia. But when it comes to the Bermuda Triangle, John Reilly, a historian with the U.S. Naval Historical Foundation, told National Geographic magazine: “The region is highly traveled and has been a busy crossroads since the early days of European exploration. To say quite a few ships and airplanes have gone down there is like saying there are an awful lot of car accidents on the New Jersey Turnpike – surprise, surprise.”

One of the most famous aviation disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle was that of Flight 19, known as the “Lost Patrol” or “Lost Squadron” 0n Dec. 5,  1945.

Made up of five United States Navy TBM-3 Avenger Torpedo Bombers, with 14 airmen on the five planes, Flight 19 took off on a routine overwater navigation and bombing training flight exercise from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, and all five planes and 14 airmen vanished without a trace over the Bermuda Triangle, as did all 13 crew members of PBM-5 Bureau Number 59225, a Martin PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat sent out from Naval Air Station Banana River in Florida to look for the Lost Patrol.

Meanwhile, Friday coming – Oct. 28 –marks the 73rd anniversary of the mystery of the USS Eldridge.

Was the ship, on its first shakedown cruise in the Bahamas, situated in the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, as its official logs claim, or did the warship USS Eldridge (DE-173), a Cannon-class destroyer escort, vanish from its berth in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in a flash of blue light and teleport to Norfolk, Virginia, more than 200 miles south, sitting in full view of some of the sailors aboard another Navy vessel, the USS Andrew Furuseth, a merchant marine type EC2-S-C1 standard Liberty-class ship, before reappearing in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the berth it had originally occupied, although also travelling about 10 minutes back in time?

Had a top-secret United States Navy military experiment cloaked the USS Eldridge, rendering it invisible to both the human eye and electronic detection with a “greenish fog” appearing in its place, according to some alleged witness reports?

The Truth, or perhaps lower case truths (who really knows?), are Out There.

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Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge

Star Trek fans will recall the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701),  a Federation Constitution-class starship operated by Starfleet, under the command of Capt. James T. Kirk, first encountered a cloaked Romulan Bird-of-Prey in 2266, when one crossed the Romulan Neutral Zone, an area of neutral space between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulan Star Empire, established after the end of the Earth-Romulan War in 2160, attacking and destroying Earth outpost stations 2, 3, 4, and 8, which were constructed along with four other outposts on asteroids located in Sector Z-6 and in neighboring sectors, along the Federation side of the Romulan Neutral Zone.

But what on Earth, if anything, happened with the USS Eldridge  (DE-173), a Cannon-class destroyer escort, in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on or about Oct. 28, 1943? Did a Second World War top-secret United States Navy military experiment cloak the USS Eldridge rendering it invisible to both the human eye and electronic detection with a “greenish fog” appearing in its place, according to some alleged witness reports? Was the ship on its first shakedown cruise in the Bahamas, situated in the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, as its official logs claim, or did the warship USS Eldridge vanish from its berth in the Pennsylvania naval yard in a flash of blue light and teleport to Norfolk, Virginia, more than 200 miles south, sitting in full view of some of the sailors aboard another Navy vessel, the USS Andrew Furuseth, a merchant marine type EC2-S-C1 standard Liberty-class ship, before reappearing in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the berth it had originally occupied, although also travelling about 10 minutes back in time?

No, says the U.S Navy. The whole story is a hoax.  Refracting light to create even a mirage of invisibility by generating an intense electromagnetic force field as part of a unified field theory experiment uniting electromagnetic radiation and gravity into a single field defies the known laws of applied, if not theoretical, physics. What else would they say? We did it?

Apparently the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) at one time had its debunking attempt for the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment” posted online, according to an August 1999 story by Frank Lewis in the Philadelphia City Paper, headlined “The Where Ship? Project,” tracing the origins of the story to either a man known as Carlos Miguel Allende, whose real name was Carl Allen from New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and who told a writer and, separately, two naval officers, that he’d witnessed the experiments, or alternatively, the naval research office apparently said online, the story’s origins could lie in misinterpretation of real attempts in the early 1940s to demagnetize the hulls of ships, thereby making them “invisible” to the Germans’ magnetic mines. I say apparently because when I tried to access the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) HTML page link at http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.html earlier today, all that came up was a blank page. No HTTP 404 Not Found, HTTP 403 Forbidden, or HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons standard response status code message, all of which would indicate that the client was able to communicate with the given U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research server, but the server could not retrieve what was requested. Instead, just a wall of white. Same result using the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, although it did tell me 132 other users had tried using the http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.htm link there between Jan. 30, 2000 and Oct. 15 of this year. No word on if their luck was any better than mine.

A similar response to the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research in the so-called Philadelphia Experiment was proffered in the Roswell, New Mexico “incident” near Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) on July 8, 1947. Or at least it would be after the fact. Contemporaneous with the actual events on July 8, 1st Lieut. Walter Haut, the public information officer (PIO) airman on duty at the United State Air Force’s Strategic Air Command 509th Bombardment Group, Very Heavy, based in Roswell, was ordered by base commander, Col. William Blanchard, who later rose to the rank of four-star general and served as vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force, to draft a press release revealing that the United States Army Air Force had recovered a crashed “flying disc” from a nearby ranch. The U.S. Army Air Force retracted the claim later the same day, saying instead that a weather balloon, still later described as a top-secret Project Mogul microphone-equipped high-altitude balloon, had been recovered at Roswell. In interviews decades later, Haut said he believed there was “no chance” senior officers who handled the recovered material, including Blanchard, mistook a balloon for a flying saucer.

Here in Canada, four federal government departments – the Department of Transport, Department of National Defence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)and the National Research Council – all dealt with reports, sightings and investigations of UFOs across Canada between 1947 and 1970 and were involved with collecting data and conducting investigations on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The Defence Research Board, chaired by Winnipeg-born Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, through an inter-departmental committee, beginning in April 1952 co-ordinated “Project Second Story,” which had as its main purpose collecting,  cataloging and correlating data from UFO sighting reports. The committee created a questionnaire and interrogator’s instruction guide. The reporting method used a system intended to minimize the “personal equation.”  In other words, a weighting factor was created to measure the probability of truth in each report. The committee’s minutes were declassified on July 3, 1968.

The most famous UFO sighting in Manitoba history took place a year earlier in 1967. Known as the Falcon Lake Incident, it occurred on May 20, 1967, when Stephen Michalak claimed that he encountered a unidentified flying object (UFO) near Falcon Lake, while taking a short vacation in Whiteshell Provincial Park, not far west of the Ontario provincial boundary.

Michalak claimed to have been burned by the craft’s exhaust vent, which was covered by an ovular grid, he said.

Michalak, an industrial mechanic born in Poland was a resident of Winnipeg, but had taken a short vacation in the Falcon Lake area, where he had prospected as an amateur geologist before, to search for veins of quartz he had been told could be near the lake.

Shortly after noon, Michalak said he was disturbed by a noise similar to geese grunts. When he looked up, he spotted two cigar-shaped objects, which were red and brilliant as fire. They were descending at 45 degrees, he said, adding the more they approached the more oval they became.

One of the objects stopped in the air, he said, while the other landed on a big rock 160 feet away from him.

After some moments, the object floating above Michalak changed its color to grey, and then flew directly west, disappearing through the clouds. The landed object also changed to grey, and then to a color similar to incandescent stainless steel.

From the interior opening of the object, some violet light rays were emitted, he said, but as Michalak was already using special glasses to examine the quartz, the rays didn’t affect him, he claimed. The object was said to have a sulfurous smell and made a humming noise.

Half an hour passed, and Michalak still was observing the spaceship. Suddenly, a door opened, he said, and he could see that the interior of the UFO was very illuminated. He approached closer and heard some voices coming from inside the ship.

Believing that the object was an experimental American flying object, he tried to make a contact in English. As no answers were given, he tried other languages in vain. Nervous, he walked to the open door, and saw a panel and some lights inside the ship.

He did not see anybody, he said, so he waited. Suddenly, the door closed. Despite the surprise, he discovered a colourful glass around the UFO. It was very well conserved, with no cracks. He attempted to touch it, but his glove simply melted, the heat hurting his hand through the glove’s protection.

A metallic box full of holes came off the UFO in what seemed to be a grid-like exhaust vent. A steamy explosion occurred, he said, and some kind of gas was expelled in his direction. Immediately, his clothes started to burn, Michalak said. As the object flew after the other one, Michalak was left behind desperately trying to extinguish the fire.

Once the fire was extinguished, Michalak said he felt pain and sickness and noticed a metallic odour from the inside of his body, like the smell of something electric that is burning. He initially claimed the burns were caused by airplane exhaust. The RCMP later confirmed that Michalak had been drinking beer the night before the sighting he reported.

The Department of National Defence still identifies the Falcon Lake case as unsolved. Michalak died in 1999 at the age of 83.

Since 1970, the task of investigating UFO reports has fallen largely to the Mounties.

Today’s defence intelligence operations are less likely to be focused on UFOs or cloaking naval warships as to be invisible, as to more prosaic efforts, such as that by Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) to use its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects. It has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. Not so surprising given that Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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On Nov. 24, 1971 – 43 years ago today – a man who would forever after be known by the alias ‘D.B. Cooper,’ skyjacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington in the most audacious and only unsolved act of air piracy in U.S. history

On Sept 21, 2013, I received a three-sentence e-mail from a reader out of the blue saying, “I just read your article on James Macdonald. I would never want to disrespect the deceased/missing, but he fits the description of Dan Cooper. The FBI suspects D.B. Cooper was from Canada.”

The Dec. 7, 2012 story he referred to was about James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, who climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 to make his return flight home and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

To this day, the Winnipeg private pilot and civil engineer, who would be 89 if he were still alive, is still listed by the RCMP as a “missing person,” as no remains or wreckage were ever found, and is featured on the website of “Project Disappear,” Manitoba’s missing person/cold case project managed by the RCMP “D” Division historical case and major case management units in Winnipeg at: http://www.macp.mb.ca/results.php?id=76. “The file is currently still under investigation and is with the RCMP “D” Division historical case unit,” retired Sgt. Line Karpish, then senior media relations spokesperson for the Mounties in Winnipeg, said Dec. 6, 2012. The file number for the Macdonald missing person case  is File #: 1989-10514. Anyone with information on Macdonald’s disappearance almost 43 years ago is asked to call Winnipeg RCMP at (204) 983-5461 or contact them by email at: ddiv_contact@rcmp-grc.gc.ca

From the disappearance and still ongoing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people aboard (227 passengers and 12 crew), which took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight Malaysia Time (MYT) on March 8, never making it to its 6:30. a.m. scheduled arrival in Beijing, disappearing from civilian radar over the Gulf of Thailand as responsibility was being handed from Malaysian ground control to Vietnam, to an Argentine military plane carrying 69 people that disappeared in 1965 and has never been found, to Amelia Earhart in 1937 through the disappearance of Flight 19, the five United States Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers that went missing over the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean on Dec. 5, 1945, and then D.B. Cooper on Nov. 24, 1971 – just 2½ weeks before Macdonald disappeared – there has long been a huge public fascination with the mystery of missing aviators or similar aviation-related stories before Macdonald disappeared. His widow, Claire Macdonald, told me in an interview in December 2012 that someone once wildly jokingly said to her, “Maybe he flew to Mexico.” She said her reply was: “How far can you go in that little plane in that winter weather?” But the close nexus in time between the two aviation disappearances in late 1971 and the fact both men were Caucasians in their mid-forties made at least some Cooper and Macdonald comparisons inevitable.

J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd. was a small firm with about seven employees. Jim Macdonald was the only professional engineer on staff and a few months after his disappearance, its business affairs were wound down.

One of Macdonald’s last projects as a consulting structural engineer was the construction of additional classroom space for special needs students at Prince Charles School on Wellington Avenue at Wall Street in Winnipeg. He was in Thompson on business the day his plane disappeared on Dec. 7, 1971 for what was to be an in-and-out single day trip, but it is not certain now exactly what the business was. It may or may not have been related to proposed work for the School District of Mystery Lake since school construction projects were one of his areas of expertise.

Macdonald, who graduated from the University of Manitoba with his civil engineering degree in 1950, often worked with architectural firms, including his brother’s. Other than working for a year in Saskatoon, he spent his entire career living and working in Winnipeg. Macdonald, who was born on March 20, 1925, trained as a pilot when he was 19 and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) shortly before the Second World War ended in 1945 and before he could be shipped overseas into the theatre of combat operations.  His son, Bill Macdonald, was 15 when his dad disappeared in 1971 and is a Winnipeg teacher and freelance journalist, who in 1998 wrote The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents, telling the story of the British Security Coordination (BSC) spymaster – codename Intrepid – set up by British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Ian Fleming, the English naval intelligence officer and author, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, once said of his friend Stephenson, a Winnipeg native: “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is … William Stephenson.”

Macdonald had filed a 3½-hour flight plan to fly Visual Flight Rules (VFR) via Grand Rapids to Winnipeg that Tuesday. It was around -30 C at the time of takeoff on Dec. 7, 1971 and the winds were light from the west at five km/h, according to Environment Canada weather records, said Dale Marciski, a  recently retired meteorologist with the Meteorological Service of Canada in Winnipeg. Macdonald was reportedly wearing a brown suit jacket when he took off from Thompson and it was unknown whether the plane was carrying winter survival clothing and gear.

While there was some ice fog, Marciski said, the sky was mainly clear and visibility was good at 24 kilometres. Transport Canada’s VFRs for night flying generally call for aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace to be at least 1,000 feet above ground with a minimum of three miles visibility and the plane’s distance from cloud to be at least 2,000 feet horizontally and 500 feet vertically. Transport Canada investigated the disappearance of Macdonald’s flight in 1971 because the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) had yet to be created.

Macdonald’s disappearance triggered an intensive air search that at its peak in the days immediately after the aviator went missing involved more than 100 personnel covering almost 20,000 miles in nine search and rescue planes from Canadian Armed Forces bases in Edmonton and Winnipeg, including a Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer and two de Havilland short takeoff and landing CC-138 Twin Otters, two RCMP planes and 11 civilian aircraft.

The search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D began only hours after his disappearance, on the Tuesday night. The Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer flew the missing aircraft’s intended flight line from Winnipeg to Thompson and back to Winnipeg. The T-33 carried highly sophisticated electronic equipment and flew Macdonald’s flight plan both ways at extremely high altitude hoping to pick up signals from the Mooney Mark M20D’s emergency radio frequency, or the crash position indicator, a radio beacon designed to be ejected from an aircraft if it crashes to help ensure it survives the crash and any post-crash fire or sinking, allowing it to broadcast a homing signal to search and rescue aircraft, which was believed be carried by Macdonald on the Mooney Mark M20D.

The next morning –  Dec. 8, 1971 – search and rescue aircraft re-flew the “track” in a visual search both ways, assisted by electronic listening devices, to no avail.

The area between Winnipeg and Thompson on both sides of the intended flight pattern was then zoned off and aircraft were assigned to particular zones and then flew the zones from east to west at one mile intervals until the entire area was over flown – first at higher altitudes and then again at lower altitudes.

Every private or commercial pilot flying the area assisted the organized search. Thompson Airport’s central tower was issuing a missing plane report at the end of every transmission, asking pilots in the area to keep a visual watch for Macdonald’s aircraft, and to listen for transmissions on the emergency band on their radios.

A second search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft was commenced almost six months later in May 1972, after spring had arrived in Northern Manitoba and all the snow had melted. Nothing turned up.

Who then was D.B. Cooper? The question still preoccupies old-time FBI agents and mystery aficionados alike.

There were nine frequently discussed suspects – all Americans, as far as I am aware –  over the years: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience. All the suspects are in fact dead now, with the exception of Mayfield, who denies being D.B. Cooper.

On Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971  –  43 years ago today and the day before American Thanksgiving that year – someone using the alias Dan Cooper, which quickly got mistakenly turned into D.B. Cooper, committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

He paid $20 cash for his airline ticket in Portland. Once on board, Cooper passed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner demanding $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two back parachutes and two front parachutes.  Initially, Schaffner dropped the note unopened into her purse, until Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

The day-before-Thanksgiving flight landed in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out.

The plane took off again with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the takeoff and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

He bailed out into the rainy night through the plane’s rear stairway, which he lowered himself, somewhere near the Washington-Oregon boundary in Washington State, probably near Ariel in Cowlitz County, or possibly around Washougal or Camas in Clark County.

In February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of $5,800 of the ransom cash, disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank beachfront at an area known as Tina’s Bar to build a campfire on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel.

So why do we remember D.B. Cooper some 43 years later? Was the 1971 jump from 10,000 feet into the sub-freezing temperatures and bitter wind-chills during freefall even survivable?

Geoffrey Gray, a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author of Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, suggested in a New York Times article on Aug. 6, 2011 that it’s the “not-knowing” that makes Cooper so compelling for us. “In an age when we receive answers to our questions so quickly – now as fast as a midsentence trip to Wikipedia – the fact that we still don’t know who Cooper is feels somehow unfair,” Gray argues.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

But no trace of Cooper or Macdonald have ever been found.

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