NavList:

Five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a training flight were lost off the coast of Florida on December 5, 1945. If you haven't heard of that story, then I must ask if you are a space alien! 

Flight 19 gained prominence mostly because of its connection to weird tall tales about the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs. This story was such common knowledge and folklore forty-five years ago that the aircraft are shown in the opening scene in the 1977 Spielberg opus "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" -- apparently the Avengers were dropped by aliens in a desert in Mexico. There's barely a hint of that history in the Wikipedia article which has been bleached clean after many edit wars (*). The article, despite the corruption by edit wars, is, however, a good source for the basic facts of the story: wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_19. It's an amazing example of basic visual navigation gone wrong.

Frank Reed

*Evidence of the edit wars can be found in the History and Talk pages behind the article, of course, and in this case it's also obvious in the references section at the foot of the article. Try searching the main article page for the word "triangle". I think we have a subtext here!