The tragic thing about the modern world is that it believes it has explained everything. How does gravity keep us tought against the earth? Ask quantum physics. How do light bulbs turn on? Max Planck and Einstein found photons a century ago.

It can appear that the modern world has few unexplained phenomena left — a tragic fact since that approach to our planet robs it of its mystery and marks an end to man’s insatiable curiosity. (READ MORE: Dutch Citizens Reject Anti-Racist Saint Nicholas Celebrations)

Until you dig a little deeper.

Somewhere suspended between quarks, gluons, and tornados even Einstein admits defeat. It turns out there are still things to discover and phenomena to explain — one of those unexplained, mysterious phenomena is the Bermuda Triangle.

It was Dec. 5, 1945, at 14:10 when Flight 19 — the designation of a group of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers — took off from Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station, Florida.

There was nothing abnormal about it. The 14 naval aviators had plenty of experience under their belt — each pilot had 300 hours of flying, and 60 hours in the Avenger aircraft he was piloting. The flight leader, Lt. Charles Taylor, had already served in the Pacific Theater and was now serving as a flight instructor.

It was a standard training mission. The flight group was supposed to fly 56 nautical miles east, drop bombs on Chicken Rocks on the edge of the Bahamas, continue for another 67 nautical miles, and turn north to fly another 73 nautical miles, before turning back to Fort Lauderdale.

At 15:00 the last student pilot requested and received permission to drop his last bomb. Some 40 minutes later a crew member asked one of the pilots for his compass reading, but the pilot had no idea where he was. (READ MORE: National Cathedral Slammed for Charging Fees for Christmas Liturgies)

Concerned, the base contacted Taylor and confirmed that the flight group was, in fact, quite lost — but it was difficult to triangulate their position. By 18:04, land-based radios had determined that the group was north of the Bahamas and well off the coast of Florida, and Taylor thought the group hadn’t made it far enough east. Shortly after, the commander issued his last message: “All planes close up tight … we’ll have to ditch unless landfall … when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together.”

At 18:00 search parties were sent out and another U.S. Navy training squadron — in a PBM-5 Mariner — took off at 19:27 from what is now Patrick Space Force Base, called in at 19:30, and promptly disappeared. A tanker later reported that it had exploded.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the idea of a mysterious triangle of sea that conspired with the supernatural to mess with the navigational equipment emerged. In 1952, George Sand reported Flight 19’s disappearance (along with others that had occurred in the Bermuda Triangle) and concluded that there must be something mysterious going on off the tip of the coast of Florida. (READ MORE: May the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post Never Die)

Plenty of people discount the Bermuda Triangle as a sailors’ myth but — as with most things of this nature — perhaps that’s simply because they don’t understand it.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Dec. 4, 2023.