From the best-selling author of Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, They Laughed at Galileo, Mysterious World, New World Order, and many more....

Try to see it from my angle: the Bermuda Triangle. What is it about this infamous stretch of ocean (and sky) that causes ships and planes to vanish without a trace?

At 10 past two in the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the naval air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The commander of Flight 19, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, had been assigned a routine two-hour training flight of 15 men on a course that would take them out to sea 66 miles due east of the airbase, to the Hen and Chicken Shoals.

There, the squadron would carry out practice bombing runs, then fly due north for 70 miles before turning for a second time and heading back to base, 120 miles away.

Their plotted flight plan formed a simple triangle, straightforward to execute, and Lieutenant Taylor and his four trainee pilots headed out into the clear blue sky over a calm Sargasso Sea.

Even though everything seemed set fair, some of the crew were showing signs of anxiety. This was not unusual during a training flight over open water.

Less usual was the fact that one of the 15 crewmen had failed to show up for duty, claiming he had had a premonition that something strange would happen on that day and that he was too scared to fly.

Listen on....