They Flew into Oblivion: The Disappearance of Flight 19 Review

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(More customer reviews)Anyone with even a passing interest in the so-called 'Bermuda Triangle' will have heard of Flight 19 - five US Navy aircraft that disappeard on a routine training exercise in December 1945. Over the years since then, a great deal of hype and outright fabrication has been written and said about this tragic event. Here, for the first time, author Gian Quasar sets the record straight by exposing the exaggeration and fantasy peddled by others.
If you're looking for tales of aliens, sea-monsters, or intervention by the inhabitants of Atlantis, then this is not the book for you. Instead, Quasar presents a sober, detailed investigation of the known facts (the fruits of his 10-year+ research),... More >using the original Board of Inquiry findings, personal interviews with surviving relatives of Flight 19, plus others who were involved at the time. The picture that emerges is one of initial skepticism on the part of shore-based Naval personnel that Flight 19 could have gotten lost on such a simple exercise, leading to shocking instances of incompetence in the efforts to bring the Flight home.
To use the well-worn cliche, at times the book reads like a novel. Quasar puts the reader right there in the cockpit with the doomed airmen, helped greatly by the biographical details he provides along the way. In this, he succeeds in putting a very human face on what was hitherto a largely anonymous tragedy. Even the most detached of readers will not fail to be moved as they contemplate the fear and anxiety that must have flown with those men, watching their slowly dwindling fuel supplies run out.
Where did Flight 19 fall to earth that fateful night? The popular notion is that they ditched in the sea, somewhere in the Bahamas. As another reviewer has stated, however, Quasar theorizes that they came to rest in the Okefenokee swamp in southern Georgia. However implausable that may seem to anyone reading these words now, my advice is simple - read the book! There you will find, not idle speculation, but reasoned, documented evidence to show exactly how this scenario is not just possible, but highly probable. You may have read several books on this mystery. How many mentioned the radar reports of an unidentified flight of five aircraft in northern Florida/southern Georgia? These came from an aircraft carrier, the USS Solomons, and from both Jacksonville, Florida and Brunswick, Georgia. Does it seem so implausable now?
Actively pursuing evidence of his theory, Quasar travels to the Okefenokee in search of help and information. I wonder how many readers will be as disgusted as I was, at the attitude of the Federal officers who 'protect' this area. The airmen of Flight 19 were Navy fliers - most of them veterans of the war, who had served their nation bravely on land or at sea. Their final resting place deserves to be verified and recognized, but it seems, to paraphrase the author, "no one must disturb the alligators."
Unless a ground-swell of public opinion changes this attitude, that bland statement may well prove the final irony of this tragic case. Read the book, and decide for yourself if you should add your voice to the outrage.

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In 2005 a national spotlight was placed upon a mystery of aviation becauseof They Flew into Oblivion. Having an early and still-unfinished copy ofthe manuscript, Larry Landsman, SCI-FI Channel's determined SpecialProjects Director, pushed for a special documentary to be produced by NBC NewsProductions and then lobbied Congress through Podesta-Matoon, the nation'sthird largest and influential lobbyist, for formal recognition of the subjectof this book in Congress. This culminated in a Resolution in Congress sponsoredby Republican E. Clay Shaw of Florida,which passed overwhelmingly on November 17 at 420-2 votes. This recognition was unique in that it honored 14 US Navyairmen who had vanished 60 years before. They were not war heroes. Norwere they on some crucial mission. The war had been over for months, and theflight was merely on a routine training run off the east coast of Florida. The totaldisappearance of the "Lost Squadron," "Lost Patrol" or, as it is mostfrequently called, Flight 19, was a bizarre case if for nothing more than thevery number of aircraft that vanished. Paradoxically, however, little is known of the actual incidentand the 14 aviators who vanished. Rather than being subjected to seriousjournalism as in the case of Amelia Earhart or Glenn Miller's disappearance orthe destruction of the Hindenberg, Flight 19 became buried in thepopular enigma of the "Bermuda Triangle." Any recounting of it was but avignette designed to link it with the many others that had vanished. Author Gian J. Quasar, the man considered the leading expert inthe world on the Bermuda Triangle, however, pulls the flight from theTriangle's clutches to reveal it as a military blunder, a tragedy and anirony. Like an absorbing detective read, They Flew into Oblivionleads the reader through the case and its aftermath and then follows the authoron his solution of its mystery and his search for its final resting place. Theresult is to lay bare the incident once and for all. The trail stops at afederal refuge that will allow no examination of its contents for fear it mightdisturb the alligators . . . and for fear Flight 19 is indeed inside.

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