You can’t go to a party and say the phrase “missing airplanes” without somebody bringing up that ol’ vortex of doom known as the Bermuda Triangle. In reality, the legends are blown out of proportion, but the infamous disappearance of Flight 19 was admittedly quite bizarre.

Here are the facts, according to History. On December 5, 1945, a group of experienced Marine and Navy pilots took off from Florida in five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers. These planes, collectively called Flight 19, behaved normally … until suddenly, the flight leader started making wacko decisions, due to his belief that the compass had malfunctioned. After a few too many wrong turns, with the leader at one point claiming he had deviated hundreds of miles off course, Flight 19 got lost in heavy fog, winds, and rain. Finally, the planes drifted out over the ocean, and all communications halted with a scary buzzing sound.

Just like that, Flight 19 was gone. Weird? Sure, but here’s the weirder part. The Navy immediately mounted a search and rescue mission, sending two PBM Mariner flying boats to find the missing airmen. In a horrifying twist, one of those Mariners went off the radar in less than 20 minutes, taking 13 men with it. Believe what you will, but to this day, the remains of Flight 19 and the Mariner have never been found.

If the mystery of this lost 727 were turned into a movie, it would begin at sunset. “May 25, 2003: Luanda, Angola” would unroll across the bottom of the screen, and the shadowy outline of flight engineer Ben Charles Padilla would rise from the bottom, accompanied by his helper John Mikel Mutantu. The two men would mysteriously board a Boeing 727, tail number 844AA, and then — without clearance — taxi erratically down the runaway and take off over the Pacific Ocean. The plane would disappear into the clouds, never to return, and the rest of the film would depict Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, and Ben’s sister, Benita Padilla-Kirkland, desperately hunting for answers.

Of course, this happened in real life, and according to Air & Space Magazine, to this day no one knows why 844AA was stolen.

Before the theft, Padilla and Mutantu had been fixing up the plane, but neither men had the skills or experience to fly it. The bizarreness of it all and the fact that it happened just a few years after 9/11 sent U.S. intelligence scrambling for answers, terrified it might be another terrorist attack. What did they find? If they found anything, they haven’t revealed details, but Padilla’s sister said in 2010 that she hoped Ben might still be hiding away somewhere.

The disappearance of Flight 19 was the match that ignited all those roaring Bermuda Triangle theories you know today. However, the three-pointed flames were fanned by the equally bizarre 1948 vanishing of the Star Tiger, according to Forbes. The fearsomely named aircraft was an Avro York Tudor IV going from London to Havana, and it vanished without a trace only 340 nautical miles from Bermuda, taking the lives of 26 passengers and six crewmen. What happened? Bermuda Triangle black magic aside, it’s been hypothesized that the Star Tiger was flying at low altitudes to avoid strong winds. This maneuver would have burned fuel at an accelerated rate, and didn’t give much room to avoid danger if any problems came up. See, there’s usually a logical explanation.

This being the Bermuda Triangle, though, another Tudor IV plane vanished in the same location the very next year, according to HowStuffWorks. This aircraft, the Star Ariel, was en route to Jamaica when it blinked out of existence. No debris was ever found. After the losses of the Star Tiger and Star Ariel, British South American Airways decided to quit building Tudor IV planes.

On August 2, 1947, the BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust went missing in the Andes Mountains, according to Vintage News. Nothing was found. No wreckage. No bodies. You know the drill. However, for the next half-century, rumors and mythology spilled from the story like a grab bag of conspiracy theories.

Part of this probably had to do with the flight’s crew being former World War II bomber pilots, combined with the veritable who’s who of interesting passengers, including a British diplomat, a German woman allegedly carrying the ashes of her dead husband, and a Palestinian businessman with a diamond stitched into his coat. Sounds like a game of Clue, right? Some of the legends swirling around this flight were that it may have been hijacked by Nazis, abducted by aliens, or that a passenger had been smuggling stolen gold. To make things even more mysterious, the flight’s final transmission — given in Morse code — was the word “STENDEC.” What does it mean? Nobody knows, but it’s been hypothesized to either be an anagram for “DESCENT,” or a World War II acronym meaning “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing.”

In the end, none of the crazy theories were true. In 2000, the Guardian reported that Argentinian soldiers had finally uncovered wreckage and frozen human remains from the flight. Further investigations proved that the plane crash was caused not by Nazis, gold, or aliens but the mundane tragedy of bad weather.

The Chilean phrase “more lost than Lieutenant Bello” refers to a real person, and as you can probably guess, his story did not end well.

According to Historic Wings, Alejandro Bello Silva was one of Chile’s first military pilots, and on the fateful day of March 9, 1914, he took off on the last flight he needed to complete in order to earn his military aviator wings. It should have been a victorious day, and while the 111-mile cross-country trip before him would’ve been difficult for any pilot of his time, he was more than up for the challenge. Unfortunately, a thick fog came up, and once he disappeared inside it, he was never heard from again. In the century since, many have hypothesized that he may have either dropped into the ocean or crashed into the mountains, but no wreckage has ever been discovered. To this day, Lieutenant Bello’s remains are just really, really lost. He will most likely never be found.