The Legacy and the Fog
The sailors, old and young, were gathered at the shell of the abandoned Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale. They'd arrived as they do every year, for a ceremony that has become a ritual, that will go on until all the old sailors who still remember have died. Then it might still go on. The ceremony isn't a commemoration of a battle or a victory, but of a loss, an unfortunate loss of five Navy Avenger TBM torpedo bombers that disappeared mysteriously into oblivion on December 5, 1945. The routine training flight turned into a tragedy and sparked a legend when the experienced pilots became disoriented over the Caribbean and never returned. Years later, Flight 19 would be known as the Lost Patrol-even though it wasn't a patrol-and it would mark the cornerstone of the Bermuda Triangle mystery.
A high-school band played a marching song, the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the breeze, and a general was about to address the gathering. At the edge of the crowd, Bruce Gernon, a civilian pilot, watched the proceedings with a special interest.
Gernon felt a strong connection with the pilots of Flight 19. Like them, he encountered mysterious, disorienting conditions over the Caribbean and barely escaped the clutches of a baffling force, an "electronic fog." He believes Flight 19 flew into the same conditions. Like the elusive Loch Ness monster, the force haunting the Bermuda Triangle apparently appears and disappears leaving no trace of its existence in its wake, other than the puzzle of lost vessels and crafts and the stories of those, like Gernon, who survived.
But if Gernon or anyone else in the crowd was hoping that Brigadier General Jerry McAbee would address the lingering question of what happened to the airmen and their planes, he would be disappointed. McAbee wasn't here to talk of the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, of strange clouds and odd banks of fog, hovering UFOs, time travel, or electromagnetic anomalies that send compasses into wild spins. Rather, he was here to honor the lost pilots, to carry on the tradition. Even so, there was something surreal about the marching band and the general honoring the flight that set off the Bermuda Triangle saga and the airmen who were last seen stepping from the gigantic spacecraft at the end of Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It almost seemed as if the ceremony were a scene from a movie in the making, and somewhere nearby a director, his storyboard in hand, would yell, "Cut!" And then they'd do it all over again.
When the ceremony was over, Gernon wandered out from the hangar and across the tarmac to the lone Avenger torpedo bomber that had flown in from Jacksonville for the ceremony. It was one of the few remaining in existence and soon attracted a crowd.
A few Navy veterans, who were here in 1945, stood by one wing discussing the disappearance of Flight 19. They seemed to possess an uncanny recollection of every detail, as if it occurred yesterday. Nearby, a crew from The Learning Channel, who had arrived from England to film the event as part of a documentary film on the Bermuda Triangle, turned their camera toward the bulky-looking craft. Gian Quasar, the creator of a lively Bermuda Triangle website, took a photo of Gernon by the plane and later added it to his site.
Most of the stories about the Bermuda Triangle are about the loss of lives, and aircraft that vanished without a trace. Gernon, though, is a human survivor of the Bermuda Triangle and has appeared in many of the documentaries about the mystery that have been produced in recent years. Where others have disappeared, Gernon returned with a story of a close encounter with mysterious forces.
At the time of this encounter, he'd never heard of the Bermuda Triangle, but he knew that something significant had happened to him. He thought about it every day and went over every detail. He wanted to make sure that he would remember it just as it happened. Then, more than a year later, he saw an interview on television with two men who were talking about strange events in the Caribbean. They used the term "Bermuda Triangle."
"Suddenly, I realized what happened to me wasn't an isolated event. It was part of something much bigger, and I'd survived it. I'd experienced the Bermuda Triangle first-hand."
A Strange Cloud
Hardly a day goes by when Bruce Gernon doesn't reflect in one way or another on what happened to him one afternoon on a flight more than thirty years ago. He might recall some aspect of the experience, or mention something about it to a friend or acquaintance. Or he might reflect on the entire scene, which long ago he vowed never to forget.
On the hour drive from the Flight 19 ceremony in Fort Lauderdale to his home in Wellington, Florida, in Palm Beach County, Gernon described his experience in detail. "My dad was a developer and I was a builder, and in 1970 we were searching the Bahamas for an island to build a resort," Ger-non began. "We decided on Andros Island, and had made a dozen flights, when on December 4 we encountered something we would never forget."
Gernon was piloting their new Bonanza A36, a stable and smooth-flying aircraft. Even today, more than three decades later, the Bonanza airframe remains relatively unchanged and is one of general aviation's finest performing airplanes. If he had been flying a slower and less stable aircraft that day, Gernon believes that he may not have survived the flight. Although he had planned to take off in the morning, ever the cautious pilot, Gernon delayed the flight until the weather improved. "We waited all morning while it rained and it was close to 3:00 PM when my dad and I, along with Chuck Layfayette, a business associate, took off from Andros Town Airport."
He remembered that the sky was overcast and a light mist was falling. "Weather information wasn't available, so I decided to get airborne, then call Miami Flight Service for atmospheric conditions." As they made a turn after departing the runway, Gernon looked over to the terminal where he saw his friend, John Woolbright, waving to him. Woolbright was a mathematician at the Atlantic Undersea Test Evaluation Cen(AUTEC), a navy facility based on the island, which, ironically, would play a role in the Bermuda Triangle mystery.
They climbed to 1,000 feet and assumed a heading of 315 degrees. They couldn't go any higher because of a cloud ceiling at 1,500 feet. "My father was also a pilot and an expert navigator, so we flew the plane together on a direct route to Bimini. We tuned into the Bimini radio beacon on our automatic direction finder, and also used a magnetic compass."
They were cruising at 180 miles an hour and had been flying for about ten minutes when the drizzle ended and the skies cleared. By then, they had reached the northwest end of Andros Island and were flying over the ocean shallows of the Great Bahama Bank. The visibility had improved from about three miles to ten miles and the weather ahead appeared non threatening.
As they started to gain altitude, Gernon noticed an almond-shaped lenticular cloud directly in front of them, about a mile away. While other clouds move across the sky with the air currents, lenticular clouds tend to remain stationary. The cloud appeared to be about a mile-and-a-half long and a thousand feet thick, with the top of it reaching an altitude of 1,500 feet. It was white, with smooth edges and appeared inoffensive. However, he found one thing odd about the cloud.
"I'd seen quite a few lenticular-shaped clouds, but never at such a low altitude. They are usually up at 20,000 feet."
But Gernon couldn't spend much time looking at the cloud because he was busy filing his flight plan with the Miami Flight Service. They would fly to Bimini, then directly to West Palm Beach. Miami Radio, the call sign for the flight service, offered a promising forecast. The weather would be clear between Andros and the Florida coast, with a few scattered, isolated thunderstorms of moderate intensity in South Florida. Winds were light and variable, and the temperature was 75 degrees.
By this time, at about ten miles offshore and climbing toward their intended altitude of 10,500 feet, Gernon noticed that the lenticular cloud had changed into a huge, billowy, white, cumulus-shaped cloud. "We were climbing at a thousand feet per minute, and the cloud seemed to be building up underneath us at the same rate that we were ascending."
It rose so quickly that it occurred to him that they were flying over a cumulonimbus cloud, one of the most dangerous to fly through, and that it was about to form a monstrous thunderhead. "Chuck started to get nervous. He had never come this close to a cloud while flying in a small airplane. I assured him that we would break free of it at any moment, and leave it behind."
But after ascending for several minutes, they were nearly one mile high and the cloud was still ascending with them. Then, unexpectedly, the cloud caught up and engulfed the Bonanza. They felt a slight updraft, and visibility was reduced to less than a hundred feet. After about thirty seconds, they broke free of the clouds and continued their ascent.
"But the cloud was still right below us, rising at the same rate," Gernon recalled. "I couldn't even get ten yards above the cloud, and after another half-minute, it closed around us again."
Suddenly, another updraft provided an unexpected burst of acceleration, that pushed them up above the cloud. But then their vertical speed diminished and the cloud caught up to them again. The scenario was repeated at least five more times. "Dad and Chuck were getting worried," Gernon remembered. And Dad suggested we go back to Andros."
Making a 180-degree turn would be risky, but Gernon was considering it when suddenly the airplane broke free again at 11,500 feet and the ...
