The 80-year mystery of the L-8, the US Navy’s ‘ghost blimp’ | History (2024)

It began as a routine surveillance mission in the opening months of World War II and ended in a mystery that remains unsolved after eight decades.

At approximately 6 a.m. on August 16, 1942, the United States Navy airship L-8 it took off from a small airfield on Treasure Island, an artificial island built in San Francisco Bay for a recent world’s fair. On board were two men: Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams.

Five hours later, the L-8 crashed on a suburban street in nearby Daly City, California, scraping roofs and dislodging power lines along the way. Local fire crews left a fire in the nearby hills to rush to the site, douse the flames and try to rescue the airship’s crew. But they soon discovered that there was no one to save. Both pilots had somehow disappeared from their ship.

The remains of L-8 It had barely been packed and shipped when the newspapers gave the plane the nickname it carries to this day: Ghost Blimp.

At the time, the United States had been at war for just over eight months. The Americans were nervous about possible Japanese attacks on the West Coast, so to watch for Japanese submarines, the Navy assembled a fleet of aircraft there, just as it had on the East Coast to patrol for German submarines.

Most of the aircraft the Navy relied on for these purposes were airships. Unlike rigid airships with a metal frame inside, such as Germany’s zeppelins, blimps consisted of little more than a gas-filled balloon, called an envelope, with a control car, or gondola, attached below. . Due to their simplicity, airships can be easily operated by small crews. They could even stay in the air and float unmanned (like the L-8 shown) unless its casing was punctured and the gas leaked out.

“The airships had the perfect operational capabilities for coastal patrols,” says aviation historian Dan Grossman. “They could stay aloft for long periods of time, fly slowly and fly at very low altitudes, hover over targets, and operate in conditions of low visibility and low cloud ceilings, all of which were things that the fixed-wing aircraft of the time could not do.”

the L-8 it was an old Goodyear blimp that the tire company had built for promotional purposes. In early 1942, the Navy took it along with four other L-series blimps and stationed them at Moffett Field in Santa Clara County, California, which already housed several massive aircraft hangars. Other L-series airships went to Lakehurst, New Jersey, site of the 1937 hindenburg disaster.

Cody and Adams were both experienced blimp pilots. Cody, 27, had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1938. Adams, 34, had been in the Navy for more than a decade and was recently commissioned as an officer. He had already survived a famous airship disaster: the crash and sinking of the USS. macon off the California coast in 1935.

A third man, fellow engineer James Riley Hill, was briefly on board, but was ordered by Cody to leave just before he arrived. L-8 left treasure island. Hill believed that Cody was worried about the extra weight.

The first hour and a half of the flight appears to have passed without incident. Then, at 7:50 a.m., the men radioed that they had seen an oil slick in the water, a possible indication of a submarine, and that they were investigating it. That was the last time the outside world heard from them.

worried when he L-8 unable to report, the Navy sent search planes to search for him. Fears subsided when a nearby military base reported that the blimp had landed there and two pilots had gotten off, news that soon turned out to be false.

Instead, the blimp had landed on a beach a mile away. Bystanders said no one was on board. Several of them tried to hold him back, but he rose again and began to drift toward Daly City.

Rescuers from the police and fire department in Daly City found the blimp’s control car door open, but with no signs of fire or other damage. The ship’s radio was working properly and both men’s parachutes had not been touched. The airship was missing one of the anti-submarine depth charges he normally carried, but he soon turned up at a nearby golf course. Besides the two men, the only thing missing was their life jackets, known colloquially as “Mae Wests” after the buxom actress and comedian. That in itself was not surprising, as it was standard practice for pilots to wear their life jackets in flight.

The mystery only deepened as researchers investigated further. The waters off San Francisco that day were busy with fishing boats, as well as Navy and Coast Guard vessels, so numerous people watched the blimp’s movements. According to accounts investigators gathered, the airship released two smoke flares over the oil slick to mark its location, then rose to a higher altitude. A passing Pan Am Clipper seaplane observed him in flight. A search plane spotted it at 600 meters, twice its normal height, before falling back below the clouds.

Meanwhile, on the ground, hundreds of bystanders followed the deflated and increasingly misshapen craft as it soared through the skies. One later described it as a “big broken sausage”. Some observers took photos, which the police did their best to confiscate.

As is often the case, witnesses gave conflicting accounts. Some claimed that they did not see anyone aboard the airship. A woman horseback riding in the area said she had used binoculars to see not two, but three men on board. Others reported seeing men parachuting.

The Navy continued to search the waters off San Francisco for days. One optimistic theory was that Cody and Adams had been picked up by a ship that had not yet been able to report their rescue because it was maintaining radio silence. But no trace of either or their life jackets was ever found.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster and over the following decades, numerous theories emerged. The men had been captured by the Japanese. they had deserted. They had been killed by a stowaway. They had been killed in a fight over a woman. They had been abducted by aliens.

Many experts today subscribe to the more mundane theory that they simply fell, possibly when one went to repair something outside the ship and lost his balance, followed by the other man who was trying to rescue him and also fell. The Navy also favored that explanation, but admitted it was just “a matter of conjecture.”

Others have suggested that one man fell from the airship and the other jumped into the sea to help him. Grossman, for his part, rejects that idea. “It is certainly possible that both officers accidentally fell into the ocean,” he says. “But if one officer had accidentally fallen off, the other would have remained in the airship to radio for help (the radio was working) and … mark the location of his comrade. There is a deep-seated instinct in any Navy man not to abandon his ship unless absolutely necessary.”

“In fact,” he adds, “‘Don’t Give Up the Ship’ is the unofficial motto of the US Navy.”

After being repaired, the L-8 returned to service with the Navy. After the war he returned to Goodyear, where his control car eventually became part of Goodyear Blimp America. With the retirement of that airship in 1982, the control car went to the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida, where it remains on display. (Currently, the museum is open only to Department of Defense ID card holders.) a similar control car of a luckier airship, the L-5resides in the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.