AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
FORT LAUDERDALE: Sixty years after Flight 19 flew into oblivion, the disappearance of the five planes and 14 crew members near Florida remains a mystery that some attribute to supernatural forces emanating from the Bermuda Triangle.
Navy veterans Monday marked the anniversary at a small park by Fort Lauderdale airport's control tower, where a propeller mounted on a cement bloc commemorates the airmen who disappeared on the fateful training flight.
They dismissed theories that strange powers were behind the deaths of the 14 men, as well as another 13 who went looking for them.
“It was human error… I don't believe in that supernatural stuff,” said Alan McElhiney, a retired navy machinist who organizes the annual ceremony.
“I've been all through that Bermuda Triangle on ships many times, many times,” said McElhiney, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War.
It was a sunny Florida morning on December 5, 1945, when the five Grumman Avenger bombers took off from the US Naval air station in Fort Lauderdale for a navigational training flight over the so-called triangle that covers an area of the Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, southern Florida and Puerto Rico.
Several hours later, a radio message gave the first clue that something was wrong. “I don't know where we are, me must have got lost… My compasses have broken down,” said Lieutenant Charles Taylor, who led the ill-fated Flight 19.
Flight controllers soon lost all contact with the airmen.
“Something went terribly wrong that day. Technology, human error, weather, the onset of night, fate? We don't know,” Keith Taylor, who commands the Coast Guard in Miami said Monday.
An official investigation initially blamed the flight leader, but the US Navy later ruled that the incident remained unexplained.
A search aircraft sent out the same evening was never seen nor heard of after it took off from Fort Lauderdale, though a merchant ship in the area reported seeing what appeared to be an explosion.
The events of that day 60 years ago “really started the legend of the Bermuda Triangle,” said David White, who took part in search-and-rescue missions for the missing airmen.
Numerous books and movies have capitalized on the mystery, including Steven Spielberg's 1977 “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which a team investigating UFOs discover the lost squadron in the Sonora Desert.
Believers point to what they say is an unusually large number of planes and ships that vanished in the triangle, and claim magnetic fields render navigation instruments useless and that huge waves carry vessels to other dimensions or extra-terrestrial outposts.
White, who clocked many flight hours over the area, dismissed such explanations as the stuff of legends.
“I don't believe in that, I've never seen anything like that,” he said.
The planes may simply have run out of fuel and crashed at sea where the strong Gulf Stream currents carried away the wreckage, which has never been found, said White.
But he admitted what exactly happened to Flight 19 remains a mystery. “We searched everything, every little island, absolutely no trace of anything, which was unbelievable.”
