How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-disappearance-of-flight-19-a-navy-squadron-lost-in-1945-fueled-the-legend-of-the-bermuda-triangle-180987759/

by pseudolus • 8 months ago

60 23 8 months ago

smithsonianmag.com

PearlRiver• 8 months ago

There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal human navigators with maps and sextants!

I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.

macintux• 8 months ago

Your comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed across the U.S. for pilots.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-n...

According to that, Montana still uses them.

abbycurtis33• 8 months ago

Absolutely unbelievable there's not an overhead picture in that article.

buildsjets• 8 months ago

Unfortunately, they de-commissioned the airway beacon system as an official navaid and stopped maintenance for the ground markers during the pandemic. Most are still there, but unlighted and unmaintained. A limited few are being operated by a historical society.

https://www.mdt.mt.gov/aviation/beacons.aspx

andy99• 8 months ago

Reminds me that there were a number of planes that landed accidentally on the runway of an Air Force base close to Heathrow, apparently because it shared some similar landmarks, some kind of gas tanks the pilots were using as waypoints:

https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/

EdwardDiego• 8 months ago

IIRC some passenger aircraft had a sweet periscopic sextant installed, and even the 747 still had a sextant port - not that it stopped KAL-007 crossing the Kamchatka peninsula...

aitchnyu2• 8 months ago

The British hid the Taj Mahal in WW2 from planes. In Indo-Pak war in 1971, cities and towns far from the border had to blackout. There was blackout in Punjab in 2025 war too.

pjc50• 8 months ago

.. how do you hide the Taj Mahal? Was there significant bombing against India, and if so from where?

linksnapzz• 8 months ago

This story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated by this scene:

https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7

fleahunter• 8 months ago

[flagged]

ofalkaed• 8 months ago

The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.

I think the myth is comforting simply because it was fun to believe and a lot more interesting than the banal truth. I don't think many actually believed it, other than children who mostly grow out of it by the time they learn that Santa is not real. Folklore, ghost stories, urban legends, etc, are fun and a part of who/what we (humans) are.

SiempreViernes• 8 months ago

It is documented[0] that at its peak around 35 000 people were taking horse de-wormer against a virus, not sure if that counts as many or not but there were for sure pretty serious believers.

[0] doi: 10.1007/s11606-021-06948-6

technothrasher• 8 months ago

Back when I was a kid and paid any attention to the Bermuda Triangle myth (do kids still pay attention to it? I have no idea), we didn't have any idea about the details of Flight 19. It just got mushed into a vague "planes drop out of the sky". Because, I think, we didn't actually care about explaining anything. It was just fun to believe in spooky things, as you say.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

Not sure what exactly is "comforting" about people going missing and presumably dying at sea.

Tiberium• 8 months ago

It looks to me that you're generating your comments entirely with LLMs? Lots of the general stylistic choices look very LLMish, especially looking over your history. A lot of "interesting point" repetitions too.

Plus this comment is basically a summary of the article, not giving anything new, very much what LLMs often give you.

It's interesting that no one commented on it before me, perhaps the HN crowd doesn't interact with LLMs enough :)

ternus• 8 months ago

This is still a concern in 2025. If your aircraft systems break, or if you don't want to be identified, there are surprisingly few ways of identifying you nonetheless.

It surprises many people to learn that we do not have full radar coverage of the continental United States, much less the oceans. Outside of the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone), military bases, large airports, etc., planes are more or less tracked voluntarily by systems like ADS-B.

From the excellent Computers Are Bad newsletter, https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html :

""" It is a common misconception that the FAA, NORAD, or someone has complete information on aircraft in the skies. In reality, this is far from true. Primary radar is inherently limited in range and sensitivity, and the JSS is a compromise aimed mostly at providing safety of commercial air routes and surveillance off the coasts. Air traffic control and air defense radar is blind to small aircraft in many areas and even large aircraft in some portions of the US and Canada, and that's without any consideration of low-radar-profile or "stealth" technology. With limited exceptions such as the Air Defense Identification Zones off the coasts and the Washington DC region, neither NORAD nor the FAA expect to be able to identify aircraft in the air. Aircraft operating under visual flight rules routinely do so without filing any type of flight plan, and air traffic controllers outside of airport approach areas ignore these radar contacts unless asked to do otherwise.

There are incidents and accidents, hints and allegations, that suggest that this concern is not merely theoretical. In late 2017, air traffic controllers tracked an object on radar in northern California and southern Oregon. Multiple commercial air crews, asked to keep an eye out, saw the object and described it as, well, an airplane. It was flying at a speed and altitude consistent with a jetliner and made no strange maneuvers. It was really all very ordinary except that no one had any idea who or what it was. The inability to identify this airplane spooked air traffic controllers who engaged the military. Eventually fighter jets were dispatched from Portland, but by the time they were in the air controllers had lost radar contact with the object. The fighter pilots made an effort to locate the object, but unsurprisingly considering the limited range of the target acquisition radar onboard fighters, they were unsuccessful. One interpretation of this event is that everyone involved was either crazy or mistaken. Perhaps it had been swamp gas all along. Another interpretation is that someone flew a good sized jet aircraft into, over, and out of the United States without being identified or intercepted. Reporting around the incident suggests that the military both took it seriously and does not want to talk about it. """

ghandni• 8 months ago

The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for mystery over mundane failure.

I’d argue that skeptics have the easiest job in the world. They just have to provide a plausible and well-regarded answer to a mystery without providing adequate evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but ordinary claims don’t require much evidence at all.

joshuaheard• 8 months ago

I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

Compass anomalies around there do seem well attested. Pretty plausible explanation for why things have gone haywire there. Not the only place.

I believe it is very hard to orientate yourself by landmarks around there too.

nephihaha3• 8 months ago

There are better explanations than the vanilla call card of "conspiracy theory". One of them is that it is easy to get disorientated around there due a combination of many similar small islands in some areas and remote open ocean in another section, so it would be difficult to navigate by sight.

There are also widespread reports of magnetic anomalies which would mess with compasses, and it is within the hurricane zone providing another possible cause.

joshstrange• 8 months ago

Well I couldn’t get through that article on mobile. What a horrible website. Ads every paragraph, reflow of content while not even scrolling jumping the content around, header and footer and full page pop ups at various points. Ads rotating moving content around. Just insane.

How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

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