5. The public quickly lost interest in the loss of Flight 19
When the US Navy lost five airplanes on a training mission, followed by a search plane looking for them, in a single day it of course made front page news. But as news stories do, it quickly faded to the background, other than for those directly involved. The loss of 27 US sailors and Marines was tragic, but public attention quickly turned to other things. Except for those who exploited the tragedy for personal gain. The 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday for UFOs, both stories citing their “real” appearances and fictional accounts of alien activity on Earth. Sometimes fact and fiction were blended, with no apparent delineation between them. Several stories depicted the lost Navy pilots as having been abducted by aliens. The theory became so popular among ufologists that it was repeated at the end of the 1987 blockbuster film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
At the end of the film the lost naval airmen disembark from an alien spaceship, apparently unharmed, having not aged a day since they vanished. The same film revealed the lost Avengers to be in the Mojave Desert, though the Martin Mariner is not mentioned. Several best selling books of the 1950s focused on an alien abduction of Flight 19, for various reasons, or made references to such an event. 1950s films and television also featured stories of alien abductions, though with oblique references to ships gone missing in the area between Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The popular pulp fiction magazines of the day also referred to missing ships and airplanes, including commercial airliners, as being victims of abductions, though the region in which they went missing still had no name to capture the attention of the general public, until 1964.