Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle

1945NotableContested

Five Navy Avenger bombers get lost off Florida and a rescue plane vanishes too. The loss becomes the founding story of the Bermuda Triangle legend.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Alexandria founded → Library of Alexandria → House of Wisdom → Al-Khwarizmi and algebra → Fibonacci's Liber Abaci → Bills of exchange → Medici Bank → Double-entry bookkeeping → Muscovy Company → English East India Company → Seven Years' War → American Revolution → Declaration of Independence → French Revolution → Revolutions of 1848 → German unification → World War I → Treaty of Versailles → Great Depression → Nazis take power → World War II → Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle

Contested history

Consensus: On 5 December 1945 five Navy Avenger bombers on a training flight got lost off Florida, and a PBM Mariner sent to search for them was also lost.

Navigation error and fuel exhaustion over the seaEstablished

Radio logs show the flight leader believed he was over the Florida Keys and led the planes the wrong way until fuel ran out.

The search plane exploded in flightEstablished

A passing ship reported a fireball where the Mariner should have been, and the type was known for fuel-vapor leaks.

The Bermuda Triangle has unusual or paranormal dangersDebunked

NOAA and the Coast Guard find no evidence of more disappearances there than in other busy ocean areas.