What do you think about this?
On the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five Navy torpedo bombers lifted off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a routine training run over the Atlantic. Fourteen airmen, clear skies, a simple flight plan. They called it Flight 19.
About ninety minutes in, the lead pilot, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, radioed that something was wrong. His compasses were spinning. He could not tell which way was land. The other pilots heard him grow more and more uncertain as the flight wandered, the men arguing over which direction led home. As the weather turned and the fuel ran low, the radios slowly faded into static. Five aircraft and every man aboard were gone.
Then it got worse. A massive flying boat, a PBM Mariner, launched with thirteen men to search for them. It too vanished without a trace. A tanker crew reported seeing a fireball over the water that night. Twenty seven men lost in a single evening, and not one body, not one piece of confirmed wreckage, ever recovered.
This is the disappearance that gave the Bermuda Triangle its legend. Investigators point to a disoriented flight leader, worsening weather, and an ocean that swallows wreckage whole.
Is it possible that the simplest answer, men lost and out of fuel above a dark sea, is the whole truth, and the rest is just our refusal to accept how easily the ocean takes people?
Navigation failure, freak storm, or something stranger over those waters? What do you think happened to Flight 19?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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