House Honors Triangle’s MIAs
Posted by: Loren Coleman on November 18th, 2005
In an unusual move, the House of Representatives has honored the 27 Navy airmen who disappeared on December 5, 1945 during a routine mission off Florida. The “Bermuda Triangle” event has been one of the most enduring mysteries of our day, issuing from the coining of the name by a cryptozoologist and a fortean.
In a widely reported Associated Press story, the specific details of the event are detailed:
The disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy mission that began the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, is still unexplained but not forgotten 60 years later.
The 27 Navy airmen who disappeared somewhere off Florida’s coast on Dec. 5, 1945, were honored in a House resolution Thursday [November 17, 2005]. Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) said he hoped the gesture would help bring closure for surviving families.
* * *
Five U.S. Navy Avenger airplanes left the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine training mission over the Bahamas. The five pilots and nine crewmen, led by instructor Lt. Charles Taylor, were to practice bombing and low-level strafing on small coral shoals 60 miles east of the naval station. They were then to turn north to practice mapping and then southwest, back home. The flight, which Navy pilots took three or four times a day, should have lasted three hours.
* * *
The SCI-FI cable channel will broadcast a new documentary Nov. 27.
One of the most successful authors on the Bermuda Triangle was Charles Berlitz, who died December 18, 2003. His obituary can be found here, which includes more on the Bermuda Triangle, in general. The actual naming of the “Bermuda Triangle,” can be traced to the creative fortean collaboration of writer Vincent Gaddis and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
