Co-authored by Bruce Gernon
The sailors, the old ones and the young ones, 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 unexplained 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 was 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 web site, 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 crafts that vanished without a trace. Gernon, though, is a human artifact of the Bermuda Triangle and has appeared in many of the documentaries on the mystery that have been produced in recent years. Where others disappeared, Gernon returned with a story of a close encounter with mysterious forces.
At the time, 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, and 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."
--Excerpted from Chapter 1
