Ten Ships and Planes That Vanished Without a Trace

USS Cyclops was one of the largest ships in the U.S. Navy, a collier about 540 feet long built to haul coal for the fleet. In early 1918, during World War I, she sailed from Brazil carrying roughly 10,000 to 11,000 tons of manganese ore, a metal crucial to steelmaking. She stopped at Barbados, partly because she was overloaded, and left on March 4 bound for Baltimore with 306 people aboard.

She never arrived. No distress call was ever received, and no wreckage, lifeboat or body was ever found. The Navy has called it one of the most baffling mysteries in its history, and it remains the largest loss of life in U.S. naval history not directly involving combat.

There were problems before she sailed. One of her engines was reported to be damaged, her commanding officer, George Worley, had clashed with his crew, and there were rumors of unrest aboard. A German submarine or raider was suspected at first, but wartime records later made that look unlikely. Many now suspect structural failure, perhaps worsened by corrosion or a heavy sea pounding a ship riding low under dense ore. One descendant of a crewman who has studied the case points to the deep Puerto Rico Trench. Without a wreck, none of it can be confirmed.

Waratah was a brand-new passenger and cargo liner of Britain's Blue Anchor Line, later nicknamed "the other Titanic." On only her second voyage, she left Durban, South Africa, on the evening of July 26, 1909, bound for Cape Town with 211 passengers and crew. She was due on July 29.

Early on July 27, the steamer Clan MacIntyre exchanged signals with her. By about 9:30 a.m., the faster Waratah had pulled ahead and dropped over the horizon. A ferocious storm followed, which the Clan MacIntyre's captain called the worst of his years at sea. That evening, the crew of another ship, the Harlow, saw a steamer's lights astern and then two bright flashes, but could not tell what they meant.

Navy cruisers and a chartered ship searched the southern seas for weeks and found nothing. At Durban, one passenger, the engineer Claude Sawyer, had disembarked because he was uneasy about how the ship rolled. A British inquiry in 1910 heard conflicting testimony about her stability and concluded she was most likely lost in a storm. A South African explorer, Emlyn Brown, searched for decades. A wreck he located in 1999 later proved to be a different ship.

Early on January 31, 1921, a Coast Guard lookout at Cape Hatteras spotted a five-masted schooner hard aground on Diamond Shoals, the treacherous sandbanks off the Outer Banks. Her sails were set. When the Coast Guard boarded the Carroll A. Deering, there was no one aboard. The lifeboats were gone, as were the ship's log and navigation equipment, and food appeared to have been prepared but not eaten.

The Deering had delivered cargo to Rio de Janeiro and was heading home from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia, under Captain Willis Wormell, with a crew of about a dozen (accounts differ by one). In late January, as she passed the Cape Lookout lightship, a man on deck shouted that the ship had lost her anchors. That was the last contact with anyone aboard.

Five federal departments investigated, and the story drew in theories of pirates, rum-runners, a Communist plot and mutiny. A message in a bottle claiming the ship had been captured turned out to be a hoax by a local man. The investigations closed without an official finding. A Coast Guard captain who was among the first to see the wreck thought the crew had abandoned ship in heavy seas and drowned trying to reach shore. The hull was dynamited as a navigation hazard in March 1921.

On the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation training flight over the Bahamas. Fourteen men were aboard. The group, called Flight 19, was led by Lt. Charles Taylor, who had recently transferred from Naval Air Station Miami.

Radio traffic suggested Taylor's compasses had failed and that he became disoriented, at one point apparently believing the planes were over the Florida Keys. As the light faded and a storm front moved in, the flight wandered, and the planes most likely ran out of fuel and ditched in rough seas. That evening a PBM Mariner flying boat, call sign Training 49, took off with 13 men to search for them. It vanished too. A passing tanker, the SS Gaines Mills, reported seeing flames and a burning plane falling into the sea in that area, and the Navy concluded the Mariner probably suffered an in-flight fire.

One of the largest air and sea searches of its era found no confirmed wreckage or remains from any of the six aircraft. A Navy board first blamed Taylor; after his mother pushed for a review, the official cause was changed to unknown. Federal oceanographers note there is no evidence the so-called Bermuda Triangle is any more dangerous than other busy waters.

Star Tiger was an Avro Tudor airliner flown by British South American Airways, a postwar carrier that linked London with the Caribbean and South America. In late January 1948 it was working its way west, and after a weather delay in the Azores it took off from Santa Maria on the long overwater leg to Bermuda with 31 people aboard: six crew and 25 passengers. Among them was Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, a celebrated Allied air commander of World War II.

The flight plan called for cruising at just 2,000 feet, and the plane left with full tanks, slightly over its maximum takeoff weight. Another of the airline's planes, flying ahead on the same route, was pushed 68 miles off course by stronger headwinds than forecast and landed in Bermuda about an hour late. Star Tiger's last radio contact came around 3 a.m. on January 30. After that, nothing.

Searchers found no wreckage and no bodies. A British court of investigation could suggest only possibilities, none of which it considered even probable, and declared that the fate of Star Tiger must remain an unsolved mystery. The next year another of the airline's Tudors, Star Ariel, also vanished without a trace, a loss that likewise remains unsolved.

On June 23, 1950, Northwest Orient Flight 2501, a four-engine Douglas DC-4, left LaGuardia Airport in New York bound for Seattle with stops planned in Minneapolis and Spokane. Fifty-eight people were aboard. Late that night, over Lake Michigan, the plane flew into a powerful line of storms. The pilot asked permission to descend. Moments later the radio fell silent.

The Coast Guard recovered scraps of upholstery, light debris and human remains from the surface, and more washed up along the Michigan shore near South Haven and Benton Harbor. Everyone aboard had died. At the time it was the deadliest airliner crash in U.S. history. But the main wreckage, including the fuselage, engines and much of the airframe, never turned up, and without it investigators could not determine the cause.

Beginning in 2004, Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, initially backed by the adventure novelist Clive Cussler, swept hundreds of square miles of lake bottom with side-scan sonar. They found other shipwrecks, but not Flight 2501. In 2025, 75 years after the crash, the group ended its search, concluding the plane probably broke into small pieces that sank into the soft lakebed.

In March 1962, as the United States quietly deepened its involvement in Vietnam, the Army chartered a Lockheed Super Constellation from the Flying Tiger Line to fly troops across the Pacific. Flight 739 carried 93 U.S. Army soldiers, three South Vietnamese military personnel and a civilian crew of 11, for a total of 107 people. The route ran from Travis Air Force Base in California through Honolulu, Wake Island and Guam toward Clark Air Base in the Philippines, with Saigon as the final stop.

The plane left Guam and climbed to cruising altitude. The crew made a routine position report about 280 nautical miles west of the island. Not long after, Guam could no longer reach the flight. Around the same time, the crew of a Liberian tanker reported seeing a bright flash in the sky followed by two red lights falling toward the sea. They searched for six hours and found nothing.

Military planes and ships then combed about 144,000 square miles of ocean for eight days. They found no wreckage, no oil and no bodies. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded the aircraft was probably destroyed in flight but could not determine why, and no cause has ever been established.

SS Marine Sulphur Queen began life in 1944 as a World War II oil tanker. Around 1960 she was rebuilt to carry a cargo few ships had ever carried: molten sulfur, kept liquid in a heated steel tank, which Texas plants extracted from the ground for use in everything from fertilizer to matches. On February 2, 1963, she left Beaumont, Texas, for Norfolk, Virginia, with more than 15,000 tons of it and a crew of 39.

On February 4, a routine radio message put her in the Gulf of Mexico about 200 miles from Key West. She never reported again. A winter storm was churning the waters off Florida. When she failed to arrive, the Coast Guard and the military searched her route for 19 days. Southwest of Key West, a Navy vessel recovered life jackets and life rings, one of them stenciled with the ship's name. No lifeboats or crew were found.

A Coast Guard Marine Board found the ship had serious problems, including recurring fires beneath the sulfur tank, structural weaknesses and corrosion, and judged her unfit to sail. It could not say what actually happened, listing several possibilities, from an explosion to the hull breaking apart. A federal appeals court later held the owners liable but acknowledged that no one knows how the ship was lost.

On May 21, 1937, Amelia Earhart took off from Oakland, California, on her second attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world, on a route that hugged the equator. With navigator Fred Noonan in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E, she crossed most of the globe in six weeks. By the start of July, only the long Pacific legs remained.

On July 2, Earhart and Noonan were trying to find Howland Island, a tiny, flat island in the central Pacific, for refueling. They never arrived. The U.S. government launched what was then its largest search ever for a lost aircraft, and after about two weeks it ended with no trace of the plane or its crew.

The leading explanation has long been that the Electra ran out of fuel and sank near Howland. A competing theory holds that the pair landed on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in what is now Kiribati, and died there as castaways. In October 2026, an expedition led by the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University, which helped fund the original flight, sailed for Nikumaroro to investigate a lagoon anomaly called the Taraia Object, visible in images as far back as 1938. The team was due to reach the island on October 12, and as of this file's publication no findings had been announced.

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777, took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard, most of them Chinese nationals. Shortly after takeoff, it vanished from controllers' screens. Satellite data later showed something astonishing: the jet had turned off course and kept flying for hours, south over the empty Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.

Since then, pieces of the plane have washed ashore on Indian Ocean islands and the coast of East Africa, confirming that it went down at sea. But the main wreckage, with its flight recorders, has never been found, despite years of official searching and a 2018 private hunt by the Texas-based marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity.

Ocean Infinity returned under a no-find, no-fee deal with Malaysia, searching in March 2025 and again from December 2025 to January 23, 2026. On March 8, 2026, the twelfth anniversary, the company confirmed it had found nothing. No date has been set to resume. What happened in the cockpit, and why, remains unknown.