Flight 19 was the designation of a group of five General Motors TBF Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle on December 5, 1945, after losing contact during a United States Navy overwater navigation training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[2] Taylor had completed a combat tour in the Pacific theater as a torpedo bomber pilot on the aircraft carrier USS Hancock and had recently arrived from NAS Miami where he had also been a VTB (torpedo-bombing plane) instructor.

Navigation of the route was intended to teach dead reckoning principles, which involved calculating, among other things, elapsed time.

[2] The exercise involved three legs, with the flight having flown four, the fourth being returning to NAS Ft. Lauderdale after reaching the Florida coast.

[2] Forty minutes later, another flight instructor, Lieutenant Robert F. Cox in FT-74, who was forming up with his group of students for the same mission, received an unidentified transmission.

"[2] FT-74 informed the NAS that aircraft were lost, then advised Taylor to put the sun on his port wing and fly north up the coast to Fort Lauderdale.

[4] As the weather deteriorated, radio contact became intermittent, and it was believed that the five aircraft by this point were more than 200 nmi (230 mi; 370 km) out to sea, east of the Florida peninsula.

After dark, two Martin PBM Mariner flying boats originally scheduled for their own training flights were diverted to perform square pattern searches in the area west of 29°N 79°W / 29°N 79°W / 29; -79.

49[7] PBM-5 BuNo 59225 took off at 19:27 from Naval Air Station Banana River (now Patrick Space Force Base), called in a routine radio message at 19:30 and was never heard from again.

[2] At 21:15, the tanker SS Gaines Mills reported it had observed flames from an apparent explosion leaping 100 ft (30 m) high and burning for 10 minutes, at position 28°35′N 80°15′W / 28.59°N 80.25°W / 28.59; -80.25.

Captain Shonna Stanley reported unsuccessfully searching for survivors through a pool of oil and aviation gasoline.

The escort carrier USS Solomons also reported losing radar contact with an aircraft at the same position and time.

The board of investigation found that because of his belief that he was on a base course toward Florida, Taylor actually guided the flight farther northeast and out to sea.

Further, it was general knowledge at NAS Fort Lauderdale that, if a pilot ever became lost in the area, to fly a heading of 270° (due west).

Likewise, a rule of thumb was that any pilot who got lost going south would simply turn his plane around with the sun on his port side [left] and then follow the Florida coast heading north.

This factor, combined with bad weather and the ditching characteristics of the Avenger, meant that there was little hope of rescue, even if they had managed to stay afloat.

Believing that this landmass to his right was Grand Bahama Island and his compass was malfunctioning, he set a course to what he thought was southwest to head straight back to Fort Lauderdale.

Finally, his flight ran out of fuel and may have crashed into the ocean somewhere north of Abaco Island and east of Florida.

[14] In 1991, a treasure-hunting expedition led by Graham Hawkes announced that the wreckage of five Avengers had been discovered off the coast of Florida, but their tail numbers revealed they were not Flight 19.

[15][16] In 2004, a BBC documentary showed Hawkes returning with a new submersible 12 years later and identifying one of the planes by its bureau number (a clearly readable 23990[17]) as a flight lost at sea on October 9, 1943, over two years before Flight 19 (its crew all survived[18]), but he was unable to definitively identify the other planes; the documentary concluded that "Despite the odds, they are just a random collection of accidents that came to rest in the same place 12 miles [19 km] from home.

"[19][17] In March 2012, Hawkes was reported as saying it had suited both him (and indirectly his investors) and the Pentagon to make the story go away because it was an expensive and time-consuming distraction, and that, while admitting he had found no conclusive evidence, a statistician he consulted said it was Flight 19.

[16] Records showed that training accidents between 1942 and 1945 accounted for the loss of 95 aviation personnel from NAS Fort Lauderdale.

expanded their search area farther east, into the Atlantic Ocean, but the remains of Flight 19 have still not been confirmed found.

In the film's opening, the aircraft are discovered in the Sonoran Desert, in pristine condition with full fuel tanks, one of several mysterious events that imply extraterrestrial activity.

In the film's ending scene, the crew returns to Earth from the alien mothership, seemingly the same age as at their disappearance.