In an unusual move, the House of Representatives has honored the 27 Navy airmen who disappeared on December 5, 1945 during a routine mission off Florida. The “Bermuda Triangle” event has been one of the most enduring mysteries of our day, issuing from the coining of the name by a cryptozoologist and a fortean.

In a widely reported Associated Press story, the specific details of the event are detailed:

The disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy mission that began the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, is still unexplained but not forgotten 60 years later.
The 27 Navy airmen who disappeared somewhere off Florida’s coast on Dec. 5, 1945, were honored in a House resolution Thursday [November 17, 2005]. Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) said he hoped the gesture would help bring closure for surviving families.

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Five U.S. Navy Avenger airplanes left the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine training mission over the Bahamas. The five pilots and nine crewmen, led by instructor Lt. Charles Taylor, were to practice bombing and low-level strafing on small coral shoals 60 miles east of the naval station. They were then to turn north to practice mapping and then southwest, back home. The flight, which Navy pilots took three or four times a day, should have lasted three hours.

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The SCI-FI cable channel will broadcast a new documentary Nov. 27.

One of the most successful authors on the Bermuda Triangle was Charles Berlitz, who died December 18, 2003. His obituary can be found here, which includes more on the Bermuda Triangle, in general. The actual naming of the “Bermuda Triangle,” can be traced to the creative fortean collaboration of writer Vincent Gaddis and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson.