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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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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