Mystery of ‘Lost Patrol’ May Be Solved

Treasure hunters working a corner of the Bermuda Triangle may have ended one of the deepest mysteries of the last 45 years with the announcement that they had found five World War II planes sitting on the ocean floor.

The aircraft, TBM Avengers, appear to be the missing Flight 19, the legendary “Lost Patrol” in which 14 Navy airmen took off on a training mission on Dec. 5, 1945, and never returned.

The disappearance of the five planes and their crew--as well as the loss of 13 more men who later went to look for them aboard a sixth Navy plane--fueled the myth of the Bermuda Triangle as a virtual black hole into which ships and airplanes strayed only to vanish without a trace. “I think we’ve put one of aviation’s greatest mysteries very much to rest,” Graham Hawkes, project director of Scientific Search Project, said Friday. “And if it’s not Flight 19, then we’ve created another mystery of equal proportion.”

Eerie videotape taken by submersible cameras at a depth of 600 feet shows the planes upright as if they had simply come in for a landing, almost in formation. The cockpits of four of the planes are open and empty. All the Grumman torpedo bombers are apparently in good condition; the windshields and gun turrets remain intact. The five aircraft are within a mile radius of each other.

No human remains can be seen.

The aircraft were discovered last week about 10 miles northeast of Ft. Lauderdale by the crew of the Deep See, a high-tech salvage ship that is sweeping northward up the Florida coast, hunting for sunken Spanish galleons laden with gold. In six months, Hawkes said, the treasure hunters have not turned up any gold, but they have located the wrecks of 114 ships and airplanes.

But none of those ghostly finds were anything like what they came across within 24 hours last week. “We’ve seen some pretty strange sights on the ocean floor, but it was with amazement and disbelief that we saw this,” Hawkes recalled.

“The most logical explanation for finding five aircraft was that they were pushed off the back of a carrier. But some of the propellers are actually bent backward, an indication that they were spinning when they hit the water. They are not stripped of parts, and all are sitting upright.”

A number 28 spotted on one corresponds with the one known to have been the lead plane. And while 144 TBM Avengers were reported lost off the coast of Florida, no other group of five ever vanished together.

The discovery of the planes was made public Thursday when attorneys for the New York-based Scientific Search Project filed suit in federal court in Miami seeking title to the five aircraft. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp granted the company temporary possession.

But the treasure hunters’ attorney, Barbara Locke, said that negotiations with the Navy have begun. “We recognize that the Navy has an interest, and that the chief value of the find is historical,” Locke said.

The legend of Flight 19 was popularized by the 1974 book “The Bermuda Triangle,” in which author Charles Berlitz cited the disappearance as proof that the area roughly bounded by Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico was ruled by inexplicable forces that routinely swallowed ships and planes. In his 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Steven Spielberg first shows the missing planes down in the desert, and, at the conclusion, depicts the airmen delivered to Earth by spaceship.

What is known about Flight 19 is only slightly less fantastic. Led by squadron commander Charles C. Taylor, the five planes took off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station--now an international airport--on a routine three-hour training flight on which they were to fly over Hens and Chickens shoals in the Bahamas, 56 miles offshore.

But during the flight, the airport tower received a frantic call from Taylor, who in a panicky voice reported: “We cannot see land . . . everything is wrong . . . the ocean doesn’t look as it should.”

Disoriented by bad weather and a failed compass, Taylor at one point apparently thought the squadron had passed the Florida Keys and was over the Gulf of Mexico. He then ordered the group to fly east, thinking that was the direction to Miami.

Eventually, desperate and low on fuel, Taylor ordered the other four pilots to “ditch” into the sea as soon as any one of the five was down to his last 10 gallons of gas.

Hawkes said that while he and the Deep See crew often joked about the Bermuda Triangle, “especially one morning in the early hours during a lightning storm,” none of them believe that the area holds any mysterious powers.

“We’ve seen the seabed, and what we’ve learned is that all that is sunk is still there,” he said. “No mystery. Things go down and they’re there to be seen.”

Although there has been speculation that the five planes could be worth millions to museums if brought to the surface, Hawkes says that the discovery may prove to be a financial burden.

“We feel responsible for it,” said Hawkes, who hopes by next week to send remote vehicles with cameras down for a closer look at serial numbers to confirm the planes’ identity. “But we’d definitely be better off if we’d found gold,” he added.

The planes could be brought to the surface with a barge, cranes and special chemicals to preserve the aircraft. Robert Cervoni, managing partner of Scientific Search Project in New York, told the Miami Herald: “I know one thing: I would like the planes to end up in the Smithsonian Institution or the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola.”

Scientific Search Project, in partnership with Deep Ocean Engineering Inc., a San Leandro firm that makes sophisticated sonar equipment and robotic cameras, represents the newest wave of ocean exploration as it sweeps over the historic New World trade routes at depths of 300 to 2,000 feet, according to Hawkes.

“Technology is giving us access to the ocean that has been denied to us forever,” he said. “If Atlantis is 10 miles up the coast, we’ll find it.”