Flight through Time

Eleven years ago, Bruce Gernon and I (Rob) wrote THE FOG, a book about the Bermuda Triangle, based on Bruce’s experiences as a pilot. Since his major, life-changing experience in 1971, Bruce has appeared on 36 Bermuda Triangle documentaries that have appeared on cable, network and BBC channels. Over time, Bruce has realized that there is no Bermuda Triangle, per se, but anomalous phenomena related to fog and usually storm conditions that exists anywhere these condition appear. So we are writing a second book, Beyond the Bermuda Triangle: Ture Encounters with Electronic Fog, Missing Aircraft, and Time Warps.

Here’s a brief excerpt, a story about an officer with the British Royal Air Force in England who encountered the fog in 1935 on a flight in Scotland, and would never forgot what happened. The story was originally told in a chapter of Flight Toward Reality, by Sir Victor Goddard.

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One weekend, four years before England entered World War II, Wing Commander Victor Goddard flew a Hawker Hart biplane to Edinburgh from his home base in Andover, England. On Sunday, the day before his return flight, Goddard flew over an abandoned airfield in Drem, near Edinburgh. Foliage had overtaken most of the field and cattle roamed about. The tarmac and four hangars were in disrepair. The property was a farm, no longer an airfield.

The next day, in spite of stormy weather, Goddard took off on his return flight. He followed the same route that would lead him over Drem again. But with the low clouds and heavy rain, he didn’t expect to see the abandoned airfield. To make matters worse, Goddard was flying in an open cockpit over rugged terrain with no radio navigation support or modern instruments to guide him.

Torrential rain stung his forehead and dripped over his goggles. He climbed to 8,000 feet in the hope of flying above the storm, but couldn’t find any break in the dense cloud cover. With no horizon visible, the nose of the biplane dipped too low and the plane slipped into a death spiral, falling from the sky. He struggled with the controls, but couldn’t pull out of the spin.

The sky darkened, the rain pounded, and the clouds turned yellowish. Goddard was dropping rapidly at 150 miles per hour. His altimeter revealed he was just a thousand feet above the ground, then when he was at two hundred feet, he glimpsed daylight. He emerged from the clouds and was plunging toward water that he recognized as the Firth of Forth.

Somehow, he managed to pull out of the spin at the last moment. He was flying at twenty feet when he saw a young girl with a baby carriage running through the pouring rain. She ducked to avoid his wing and he barely cleared a stonewall. He flew along the beach, his view obscured by the fog. He turned away from the water and glimpsed the black silhouettes of the Drem Airfield hangars ahead of him.

The sky remained dark, the downpour heavy, and his plane began to shake. Flying several feet above the ground, the hangars loomed in front of him. Suddenly, the rain stopped and the was shining. The hangars and airstrip now appeared in new condition, and the cattle were gone. He could see mechanics by four yellow planes near the end of the runway. One of the crafts was a monoplane unlike anything in the Royal Air Force. The airplane mechanics wore blue overalls. But RAF mechanics only wore brown overalls.

He passed over the airport just high enough to clear the hangars, but none of the mechanics reacted, as if they didn’t see or hear him. As he left the airfield behind, he was swallowed by the storm again. This time he flew up to 17,000 feet, and briefly up to 21,000 feet to avoid the storm, and made his way safely back to the base.

When he told several officers about his eerie flight, they reacted as if he’d lost him mind. So he didn’t say anything more, fearing that he would be grounded or discharged from the RAF.

In 1939, Goddard’s vision began to materialize as he saw RAF training planes painted yellow, mechanics switching to blue overalls, and a new monoplane—the Magister—just like the one he witnessed four years earlier. He also found out that, with the threat of war that was about to be declared, the airfield at Drem had been refurbished.

What particularly fascinated me about Goddard was that in the aftermath, he did the same thing I did. He replayed the experience over and over again in his mind for the next twenty-seven years. Finally, in 1966, he wrote about the experience. He had become convinced that there was no way he could possibly have known four years in advance that the color of the trainer planes and the overalls of the mechanics would change. He concluded that he had briefly glimpsed the future or traveled into it just as I concluded years ago that I had instantly leaped ahead 100 miles after flying through the tunnel vortex of the storm.