1 . “Calling tower,” the pilot’s voice crackled. “This is an emergency!” The radio operator in the control tower looked at his watch. It was 3:15 p.m. Lieutenant Charles Taylor and five Navy bombers (轰炸机) were in trouble. “We are off course. We cannot see land … repeat … we cannot see land.”

The control tower grew silent. The operator garbed (戴上) his microphone. “What is your position?” “We are not sure of our position,” Lieutenant Taylor replied. “We seem to be lost.” Taylor had over 2,500 hours of flight time. What was happening?

The tower called back: “Assume bearing (方位) due west.” “We don't know which way is west,” Taylor replied. “Everything is wrong…strange… We cannot be sure of any direction…Even the ocean looks odd…” The radio operator told Taylor to fly north “with the sun on the left” until he reached a Naval Air Station. Anyone could find the sun, especially a good pilot like Taylor. Soon the radio crackled again. “We have just passed over a small island,” said the pilot. “No other land in sight.” That was the last message Flight 19 sent to the radio tower. Five Navy bombers were lost. They had left the Naval Air Station for a routine training flight at 2:00 p.m., December 5, 1945. Each plane had enough fuel to fly more than a thousand miles. The weather was sunny and mild. Pilots from other flights had not seen anything strange there. So what happened? How could five Navy bombers and their crews just disappear?

The search for the five bombers covered 380,000 square miles of land and sea.

Hundreds of boats and planes searched large areas of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the mainland of Florida, and many neighboring islands. Some of the boats were aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines. They searched the area for weeks. Nothing was ever found. No life rafts. No wreckage (残骸). Not even an oil slick (油层). Oil from the engines should float on the surface, even if everything else had sunk.