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Prologue

  Five aircraft simply do not disappear while in routine formation and leave no trace whatsoever. There has to be an explanation somewhere for something like this. Such an event simply cannot be dismissed after routine investigation and filed away. And yet for the last 65 years this has been just the case for those 5 Avenger torpedo bombers designated Flight 19.  James P. O’Donnell once wrote: “The gap between the generations, unless it is to become a chasm and make history meaningless, must somehow be bridged. Each generation owes an after-action report to the generation that follows.”  Yet for this very unusual mystery there has been no accountability. Perhaps it is not an earth-shaking historical event. But it is nonetheless a world famous incident that continues to elicit questions that have not been answered. It has, in truth, been bridged for the last 65 years by the fabulous and, more often than not, the ludicrous.

   According to one popular theory UFOs may have sucked it up and spirited it away; in another, time warps may have sent it through a “tear in the curtain of time.” But the truth of Flight 19 is only hidden by the funhouse. It stands alone and reluctantly aloof from sober theorizing for 3 vital reasons; the first two: witnesses and evidence. Flight 19 had neither. Men partook in the drama;

         THEY FLEW INTO OBLIVON                                            ○

but they were not witnesses. At best, a few heard sporadic, faint and interrupted dialog from the flight. That was the sum of it. Their observations and the events were summed up in a report over 500 pages in length wherein the Board of Inquiry merely tried to place in order contradictory testimony. The third vital reason is secrecy. Of this it had too much. The report on Flight 19 was unnecessarily kept restricted; it was not generally released until 30 years later under the Freedom of Information Act.

   That gulf is vast and densely populated and given its depth only with popular ideas; some good, some sensational; some bad and some banal. The report helps in some places. In others it expands rather than takes away from the final enigma of the flight. For example, a study of its loosely compiled logs and dispatches prove that the carrier Solomons was in a position at the time the flight ran out of fuel to have detected them at sea with its radar. Yet it did not.

   More than disproving 60 plus years of banal Navy dismissal that the flight merely went down at sea, the example of the Solomons mutely testifies to the paucity of the Board’s analysis of the evidence at the time.  The fact such a relevant clue as the Solomons’ radar report could be overlooked also reveals the ennui of the Board’s own investigative curiosity. For perhaps what is the greatest mystery of aviation we are thus left with only imperfectly known circumstances, without witnesses, without

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