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#disappearance
3 articles
The Flannan Isles: The Lighthouse Keepers Who Vanished
On a tiny, uninhabited island in the Atlantic off the northwest coast of Scotland, a lighthouse stood watch in the winter of 1900, manned by three experienced keepers. The Flannan Isles — a scatter of rocky islets the Hebridean fishermen called the Seven Hunters, long reputed to be uncanny — lay some thirty kilometers out into the open ocean, and the lighthouse on the largest of them, Eilean Mòr, was one of the loneliest postings in the British Isles. In mid-December, a passing steamer noticed that the light was not burning, but the report went unheeded, and bad weather delayed the relief vessel. When it finally reached the island the day after Christmas, the relief keeper climbed up to the lighthouse and found it empty. The three men — James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur — were gone. The lamp was clean and ready but unlit; the entrance gate and the doors were shut; the clock had stopped; the last entry in the log was days old. There was no sign of the keepers anywhere on the island, and there never would be: their bodies were never found. At the island's west landing, far above the normal reach of the sea, the investigators found startling damage — equipment torn from a crevice high on the cliff, iron railings bent, a great rock shifted — the marks of a wave of extraordinary size. The official conclusion was that the three men had been swept into the sea by such a wave while trying to secure their gear in a storm. It is the most likely explanation, and it is probably true. But because no one saw it happen and nothing was ever recovered, the disappearance became one of the most haunting mysteries of the sea, and the facts were soon overgrown with legend. This is the story of the keepers who vanished from the Flannan Isles.
Flight 19: The Lost Squadron and the Birth of the Bermuda Triangle
On the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five United States Navy torpedo bombers took off from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a routine training exercise over the Atlantic. The mission, designated Flight 19, was a navigation problem: fly east to a practice bombing range, then on a triangular course out over the ocean and back to base. Fourteen airmen were aboard the five planes, led by an experienced combat pilot named Lieutenant Charles Taylor. The flight never returned. As the afternoon wore into evening, radio operators on shore picked up Taylor's increasingly troubled transmissions: he believed his compasses had failed, he was unsure where he was, he thought he was somewhere he was not, and he led the flight one way and then another in a worsening confusion as the weather deteriorated and darkness fell. The last messages suggested the planes were running low on fuel far out over a rough sea. Then there was silence. A large flying boat dispatched to search for them disappeared as well, apparently exploding in the air, taking its crew of thirteen with it. Twenty-seven men were lost that night, and despite an enormous search, no wreckage of the five bombers was ever definitively found. The Navy concluded the flight had been lost to navigational error and the unforgiving ocean. But the strange, sad disappearance of Flight 19 would become the founding legend of the Bermuda Triangle, transformed over the following decades into a tale of supernatural mystery that the facts never supported. This is the story of the lost squadron, and of how a tragedy became a myth.
Amelia Earhart and the Speck in the Pacific
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart — the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, the most celebrated aviator on earth — took off from Lae, in New Guinea, with her navigator Fred Noonan, bound for a flat coral speck in the central Pacific called Howland Island. It was the most dangerous leg of an attempt to circle the globe near the equator: more than 2,500 miles of open ocean to a target a mile and a half long and twenty feet high, which they had to find by dead reckoning and the stars after a night and a morning over featureless water. A United States Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited off Howland to guide them in by radio and to lay a column of smoke. It was never needed. Through the morning the Itasca's crew heard Earhart's voice growing tense as she searched for an island she could not see — 'We must be on you but cannot see you… gas is running low' — and then, in her last understood transmission, a line of position and the words that she was running north and south along it. After that there was silence. The largest air and sea search in American history to that date found nothing: no plane, no wreckage, no bodies. Earhart and Noonan were declared lost, and in the decades since, their disappearance has hardened into the most enduring mystery in the history of flight, fought over by three incompatible theories — that they ran out of fuel and sank near Howland; that they came down as castaways on a different island and died there; and that they fell into Japanese hands and never came home. This article sets out what is actually known about the flight and its final hours, and weighs the rival explanations — the plausible, the contested, and the long-debunked — against the evidence.
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