The event that started the legend of the Bermuda Triangle

It was the morning of December 6, 1945.

As the sun rose over Fort Lauderdale Air Force Base in Florida, a sea and air search began for the crew of Training Flight 19.

"We searched all the islands for a week but we found nothing left," Lieutenant David White, who was a flight instructor at the base at the time, told the BBC.

More than six decades later, Lieutenant White still remembers the moment he heard the news: "I was playing bridge with my wife. They came to tell me what had happened and what we were going to do. We couldn't believe it, five planes lost in one simple training flight... No, no, no!"

The weather conditions were normal, there was no reason to justify what happened. It was a regular exercise. "They were to fly 60 miles to the east, fly low and bomb the wreckage of a sunken ship," he recalls.

That first part of the exercise seems to have gone according to plan. Then they had to do a navigation practice.

They were to fly further east, about 75 miles, then north, and finally back home to Fort Lauderdale. It was then that the problems apparently began.

"After the bombardment was over, the instructor called saying, 'My compasses don't work,'" White recounts. "He spotted an island and claimed to already know where they were. He thought it was in the Keys, but later we determined that it was actually the northern Bahamas," he explains.

The Keys are the southern tip of the Florida coast. The radio operator then advised the instructor to head north toward the Gulf of Mexico, then east again toward Florida, and back again.

In charge of the flight was Charles Carroll Taylor. He was an experienced pilot, but he didn't work in Fort Lauderdale often, and he didn't know the area well. Because of that initial mistake, instead of leading the patrol back, he led them toward the Atlantic Ocean. One of the students was heard to say: "Let's go west, until we reach the coast," recalls White.

But, they changed direction and went northeast. For a moment there was no radio contact. When there was, to the operator's surprise, the flight leader handed over command to one of the other pilots. And when he got back in touch with the tower 20 minutes later, he sounded confused.

"We don't know where we are... it's all... we can't make out anything. We think we're about 225 miles northeast of the base," he was heard saying that morning.

Minutes later he said: "The water is very rough. We are completely lost." David White believes Flight 19 ended up in the water around 7 p.m. about 150 miles from where it was supposed to be. By this time it was dark and a storm was brewing.

"If you land in the water with waves of 8 or 10 feet, the plane is destroyed, like against a brick wall," he says. "What I think happened is that it landed, it broke up and probably no one was able to get out, if anyone did it must not have lasted very long in the storm."

And there was more to come. Minutes after it became known that Flight 19 was in serious trouble, two rescue planes were sent to its aid. That same night one of the rescue planes was also lost.

“It was a PBM Mariner seaplane, and from a boat off the coast, it was seen to explode and fall into the water,” recalls White. "It was a second disaster."

Days later, hundreds of planes and ships scoured the seas for the PBM plane as well, but as with Flight 19, nothing was found.

The mystery continued. In 1964, almost 20 years after the first disappearance, a magazine coined the phrase Bermuda Triangle for that large area of ​​sea located between the coast of Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Those who believe in the legend claim that many more ships and planes have mysteriously disappeared.