The Bermuda Triangle: How a Legend Was Built — and How Statistics Took It Apart

2026-07-06 · Enigmatic Places · 8 min read

At ten past two on the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers lifted off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale for a routine navigation exercise, with a practice bombing run at Hens and Chickens Shoals. Fourteen men were aboard. One detail rarely survives into the legend: the flight leader, Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, a combat-hardened pilot with some 2,500 flying hours, had arrived late to the briefing and tried to get out of the assignment. "I just don't want to take this one out," he told the duty officer, and could give no reason. His four trainee pilots each had about 300 flying hours, only 60 of them in the Avenger. By late afternoon, radio operators along the Florida coast heard something going wrong. Taylor reported both his compasses dead and believed he was over the Florida Keys. He was almost certainly over the Bahamas. Convinced the flight had to head northeast to reach Florida, then doubting himself, he led his students back and forth across a darkening ocean until the transmissions faded and the fuel ran out.

The rescue deepened the disaster. That evening a Martin Mariner flying boat with thirteen men aboard took off from Naval Air Station Banana River to search - and vanished about twenty minutes later. This time there was a witness: the crew of the tanker SS Gaines Mills reported an explosion in the sky and steamed through a spreading pool of oil at the spot. Mariners leaked fuel vapour so notoriously that airmen called them flying gas tanks, and a single spark in one of those tanks would leave exactly what the tanker saw. The Navy's board of inquiry, convened in Miami on 10 December 1945 at the order of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, ran to some five hundred pages and blamed Taylor's confusion - until his mother, pointing out that the Navy had produced neither bodies nor wreckage, hired a lawyer and petitioned for a correction. In 1947 the verdict was amended to the two words that keep the case alive: cause unknown.

Reader comments (0)