Thinking Sideways: The Ghost Blimp

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, and bye bye, thinking sideways. I don't think you never know stories of things. We simply

don't know the answer too. Hello, and welcome to the show, Steve im And we're going to tell you a strange story. Do you have a strange story for us? I do have a strange story for all right. This is the story of the ghost Ship. The ghost ship, the only GHO ship ship ship. Okay, it's called doug o ship. But it's a ghost ship. I gotta say, I love ghost ship stories. I know they are your favorite. You've told them around the campfire a lot. They're they're pretty

freaking awesome. Yeah, right, Well, this story begins in so the United States was still in the middle of, or near the end of, they didn't know it, World War two. The country was worried about attacks on the western coast from the Japanese. So what they decide to do is the country decides, or the air force decides that would be a great idea, is let's get blimps because they can hover in one spot for long periods of time without using a lot of fuel, and they can patrol

the coast, watch out for ships and sobs. And there's actually talking about bringing the blimp back. I didn't know that there is there. There actually has talk about that. Very cool, has many uses, and they're cheap to keep up in the air and very safe historically, except for like you know, the hydrogen, the hydrogen filled ones. Well there's that, and what we're going to talk about. So in nineteen forty, the U. S. Navy I think I said air Force before, but it was the Navy purchased

from the Goodyear Company. They're blimp and named the Ranger. It worked, so they decide we're going to get a couple of more of these in March. On March five two, the L eight was purchased from but good Year and that was the blimp in question. Uh. Now, so it's a blimp story. It's not a ghost ship. It's a ghost blimp. Yes, yes it is. It is a blimp, but they call it the ghost ship. Okay, isn't it

is an airship after all? Exactly? But better ghos. Uh. Not only did these blimps do routine patrols up and down the coast, they also were involved in some clandestine operations. The L A was actually involved in an operation where it left the San Francisco Bay on the eleventh of April and it was hauling a secret three pound cargo which it took out to see and it met the

aircraft carrier the USS Hornet. Today we know that the cargo actually was parts for the B five bombers, and that the Hornet initiated the first attack on the islands of Japan, So our first air raids actually on Japan. Those were known as the Do Little raids, so they played a pretty important part at the time. But we're gonna move forward in time from there to August six. The L eight is scheduled to go on a routine patrol to look for submarines. Supposed to leave Treasure Island,

which is in the San Francisco Bay. It's gonna head on about a thirty mile trip out to sea, circle around, look around, and come back. The l ad always normally would have a crew of three. In this instance, there was Lieutenant Ernest Cody and Sign Charles Adams and machine just made third Class James Hill, so we've got three men. They meet the cargo load of this particular blimp that's

the Mexican Carrier around its weight limb. Unfortunately, that day it was very foggy, and as we know, when it's foggy, condensation forms on everything. A blimp of that size gets so much water a condensation on it that it changed the weight dynamics of the blimp and they realized that it had too much weight, so it couldn't take the entire crew. The Navy decides, well, we're gonna go ahead and just send it out with two of you, and

we're gonna leave someone behind. So it turns out that James Hill is the one who's a let who's chosen to stay behind him. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, he goes on board, he sets up all the controls, make sure everything's in line, and then he walks away from the blimp. Now keep in mind, this crew had been on this blimp many many times, so it wasn't as if it was their first run out. Uh So, at six o three am on the sixteenth of August two, the L

eight takes off from Treasure Island. About an hour and a half into the patrol, which would be seven forty two in the morning or am, Cody radios back that he has spotted a potential oils and they're gonna go investigate. That's the last time anybody ever heard from the crew. Now keep in mind, I'm I'm specifying here. It's the crew about eleven fifteen were in day or in merse

said at the beach, California, it's a lovely day. We're all hanging out on the beach, and all of a sudden, the crowds watch a blimp drifting in from the ocean and descending. It descends enough that it hits the cliffs out on the beach and snags snags there. The breeze hits it, I'm not exactly sure, it damages an engine, and somehow the blimp breaks free. Crowds are walking towards it. They want to know what's going on right up until

a depth charge falls off, at which point everybody runs away. Okay, well the depth charge, luckily enough, didn't go off, but the blimp, now lightened load continue news on inland. It eventually comes to rest in the four hundred block in Daily City on Bellevue Avenue. The yeah, because in the process it was a terrible fender bender. In the process of coming down, it hits a house and a couple of cars. Of course. Uh yeah, not something I would

want to have running into my house. A pictures, No, unfortunately they didn't have them on the iPhone wasn't around yet. Uh So we do have a quote from that time, and the quote reads is such it was Mrs Appleton. She said that all of a sudden, this huge beheemoth had settled and scraped across the top of a roof. She said it sounded like change dragging, but the entire house was blacked out because of the size of this thing.

She raced to the front window, wondering what in the world was going on, and she saw the rest of it. The gondola hit the cross arm, broke off part of the mechanism, and then gradually settled to the ground. So this thing scraped across the roof. It was big enough and made quite a lot of noise. The ship comes to rest in the middle of the street, and what happens, of course, the envelope but it holds all the gas, collapses and just swamps everything. Can you imagine, It's like

that thing just lands in your house. You wake up and it's collapsed over your house. You're looking at that the windows. You can't see anything. You know, you're looking at the clock. It's eleven o'clock in the morning, but it's blackout. This is weird. Can't see two feet in

front of me exactly. That would be a little Did anybody get trapped underneath this thing when it collapsed, Well, no, no bystanders were trapped, but there were a lot of people who were kind of following it as it was coming down, So as soon as it hit people were on the scene. Everybody presumed that the crew must be stuck in the gondola, the part that hangs on the bottom that the crew hangs out in or works in.

And so they rushed to their aid. They hack and they caught, and they saw their way through the envelope, desperately trying to get to the gondola. Gentleman who lived across the street by the name of William Morris. He was a volunteer firefighter, and he went out there and did his everything he could, and he was one of the first people who got through the envelope and got

to the gondola. When he got there, he said, and he said, it was very strange because, as the quote goes, the doors were open and nobody was in the cabin. The crew was completely gone nowhere near. Nobody knows where they are. They're never found. The Navy launches a land and sea search. They go everywhere looking for him, but they can't find them. A year later, the Navy declared Cody and Adams officially deceived east and the search officially ended.

So did they I assume that they examined this the envelope or whatever you call it, for both holes. Well, the problem was that the bystanders who were attempting to help destroyed it. It was to the to the point that it was not salvageable. Did they find any clues in the gondola, Well, they did find some things in the gondola. Uh, and and some of this is weird, some of it's odd, and we will We'll just go

ahead and we'll start with the gondola itself. When the navy arrived, they inspected it, and they found that all the parachutes were accounted for. The life belts, which is the equivalent of a life vest, were gone, the life raft was still in place, and the radio was working normally, so everything seemed in order. Most of the fuel was still left in the ship. Uh. The engines were switched on, but weren't actually working at the time, obviously because of

the crash with the cliff. And Mers said, uh. And there was a briefcase in the gondola that still contained the classified files that were kept on on the ship. There were rumors at one point for many years that there was a half eaten sandwich and a warm cup of coffee still on the console. That's been debunked that that actually never happened. But you do come across that when you find this story there. Now, there are a couple of other things that we know that we found

through some research that's been done. I had talked about earlier. There was a dish or a big dent in the middle of the envelope. What that was from is that at some point the blimp began to rise just essentially straight up to the point that it got high enough in the atmosphere that the pressure was too great and it caused a automatic pressure release valve to go off, vented a bunch of the gas, therefore reducing its lifting power.

So as it came back down into the pressure atmospheric pressures meant to work under the bag wasn't as full, so it sank, and that's why there was that giant dip, which explains why as it was coming inland it continued to drop and eventually crash into the ground. The only other account that we have of the L eight during its mission is from two fishing boats that were out that day, and they said they did observe the blimp descending from whatever's normal operation elevation was down to about

three feet above the sea. Presumably that's when they were investigating the oil slick that they had radioed back and said they were checking out, didn't know if it was a submarine or something. Well, as any smart captain would do, both captains pulled up their nets and turned around and tuck tail. The last thing they wanted to do was be in the area. If it dropped a depth charge, it would be kind of a bad thing, right. So that's as far as it goes. That's as far as

we know. All of the facts that are associated with the l A and there's nothing else weird that they discovered. Nope, nothing else. It crew is gone. Everything that should be in place is pretty much in place. Nothing that they can tell is missing, Nothing out of the ordinary that they can tell has happened. Well, of course, begin and there's a lot of some crazy, some not so crazy theories out there as to what could have happened. I think it's actually quite obvious what happened. It was a

gay suicide pact. Okay, Jenny, Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. That's why all this time, looking at the story, you've you've figured it out. It was obvious all along. Yeah, what was any thinking? All right, here's what the theories are. We know that the L eight was out looking for Japanese submarines. That was their primary mission was to find submarines to protect the coastline so that the Japanese didn't attack us on our own soil, or at least in

the water on our own soil. Well, some people believe that what must have happened is that when the blimp descended, it did indeed find a Japanese sub, and that the crew of the sub overpowered them and pulled them out of the Essentially, I'm guessing this means the gondolas a couple feet off the water, right against the water, essentially, and that they overpowered them and they would have gotten that low though, right, that's that's the hard part, and

then stuffed them in the hold and took off. Now there's some cread Now there's some creed ins to this show, because if you think about, well, let's say that it's just floating there and there's no crew on the top up, one of them might have climbed down the ladder to check it out, got captured, and then you know, with a gun to his head, the Japanese said get down here, or we kill your friend. Except for that, wouldn't they

want that classified information? That was on the blimp. If they went into the blimp, you would think they would understand they would look for that. Maybe they didn't go into the blimp. But the other problem with that theory is that the radio was working. Don't you think that the first thing that you would do when you found a sub floating is to call back and say, I found a sub. Yeah, I believe what I just found. Nothing like that, so we don't. Isn't some navy code

for Japanese sub? Nothing I have ever heard. No, So let's see. There is theory number two. Theory number two says that it was a love triangle, that these men were involved in a love triangle with a woman that they were both seeing on show are Now here's the hard part about this, or what what doesn't hold water for me on that is that Cody was twenty seven and Adams was thirty eight, so I would guess that they probably wouldn't likely be chasing the same woman. Maybe

they were, it's hard to say. It is possible. But the two friends, by the way, uh, there's no records to say what their relationship to each other was other than they were co workers that they served on this ship and that's all we know that that I can find is. I did go to some navy sides, looked up to a lot of stuff, but that kind of information never seems to have been reported, none of it was recorded. Anyway. Here's what we have. We have a we have a love trying. These two men are on

on the l a and a fight breaks out. They're fighting for her love. They get into a fist fight. One thing leads to another, or they accidentally fall into the door of the gondola and they both fall out to their deaths at sea. Surely there's some safety mechanism there, though, uh well, you know it's it's funny, but the gondola, the walls of the gondola are the metal is six millimeters thick, extremely thin, so I'm guessing it had to

be thin to be light. Also, when I was doing my research on this, came across reports from air or navy men who had been in that or similar gondolas who had mentioned that they were extremely flimsy. So it did have a bar to lock the door. But presumably if the whole thing is made to be as light as possible, it's conceivable that somebody slamming into it could

just pop the whole thing open. That's true, so there is some possibility, but it was you know, maybe maybe the Biastanders who opened it up don't remember us the door already open when they finally got to the gondola or was it. Holding to Morris, who was the first one to get through to the gondola, he said the door was wide open. We don't know. Did it get popped open when it ran into the cliff, was it open ahead of time? There's there's not a lot to

support it. Again, the details on this one are one of those weird military items where things have been held back, not necessarily reported, so it's it's hard to get all those details. I think that they could ask some of the witnesses on the front, the beach and etcetera. But then again, you know as well as I do, that witness statements tend to be fraught with errors and they conflict constantly. So it does. It's hard to say. But

unfortunately this was seventy plus years ago. Not likely to find many of those folks around anymore than I tell you. But there is one final theory, and this is a theory that personally I hold it. I think is is probably the good one, and it's the burn to triangle. No. The last one is that it may have been a

complete freak accident that claimed both of their lives. When the gondala was found, like I said, the door latch was open and the door was open, which obviously enough is not the way that it should happen when it's in flight. There they do say there's a safety bar, but again I have a feeling that that safety bar is probably pretty minimal and flimsy, especially considering a nWo we were really worried about safety as much as we

are now. It's not some double latch system. It's probably just a door bolt door handle with a bolt in it. But still, these guys have been working at this thing for a long time. They probably no better than it go smashing into the door. It's very true. But here's where what I think has probably happened starts to gain some some footing. There was a microphone plugged in inside the cockpit, and that microphone, uh, it goes to a loudspeaker.

That loudspeaker was dangling outside of the gondola, so it was outside. So what people are thinking might have happened is that there was something mechanically that went wrong, how you know, part way through their journey, two hours into the trip, and one of the men decided that he would try and go out and fix it ran into trouble. So the so crewman number one is outside, crewmen number

two is inside using the loudspeakers. Obviously you're moving along and it's windy, it's loud, so you gotta use the loudspeaker to be heard, and that what he was doing was talking to his his his compatriot, at which point he ran into trouble. So crewm number one outside swifts or gets snagged or something happens, and crew and number two decides that the best thing to do is to go out and try and help him, at which point they both lose their grip and they both fall to

the sea. But why wouldn't they have radioed back that there was a problem. That's the hard part. Now have do you either of you have you ever known folks that were in the military. What what is the one thing you never tell your boss in the military, Something went wrong, something's broken. Hey, chief, this is not okay. They don't like to hear that. And the bravado says Male Bravado says, I can fix this, fix it now, which may very well have been the wrong thing to do,

and it may have been what claimed their lives. But we don't know nothing exist. Nobody's were ever found. If they felt to their destincy. You know what it's like when ships go down out of however, you know, a small fraction or ever found. Nobody knows whatever happened. Yeah, that's funny. You wouldn't think they would have found their bodies because if they were wearing their life belts, that would have that would have kept their bodies afloat. They

eventually would have washed up for sure. Yeah, unless the aliens got yeah, or the sharks or the sharks California. That's good point. A lot of big toothfish. Yeah, I'm I'm lying towards the theory that they were actually on board when it landed and they just crawled away into the collapse envelope. And because they probably screwed up in

some major way. Uh, and they knew they were going to be in like, you know, big trouble when they got back, and so they decided, well, you know what, let's just sneak off and go change our names and move to another state. So what you think it happened is that they're both sitting there reading time, not paying attention to play Okay, it would have been Playboy. I was not around yet. I don't think it would have

been some in mag. Yeah, some skin mag. And they're not paying attention and they run into the cliff, at which point go, oh, yeah, I don't know what to do. Let's let's run away to Manabe. They bailed on the cliff. They released the depth charge, and while that was a distraction, they like, bailed out on the cliff. That's that would actually scenario. And if they didn't, if they didn't bail on the cliff, you know, because the depth charge I

would think wouldn't just pop out easily. But they're saying like like, hey, we're snagged on this. We gotta get some lift drop a depth charge drop and yeah that and that'll get us unsnagged from this thing. Yeah, but I thought about it everything, And now I'm glad you bring that up, because I was reading it and thinking that what it meant was the force of the impact broken loose. But but your theory is just as possible. But we need we need we need some lift. Let's

get rid of some weight. Throw everything overboard. It's like that, what is it, the old hot air balloon cartoon? And dude, you throw everything overboard as fast as you can, including the guy you don't like. Yeah, very well. Could have happened, Yeah it couldn't you know, it could be this too. Maybe perhaps one of them murdered the other one out of sea, pushed his body out, and you know, I have to waiting it down a little bit or something like that. And then it comes and and then he's

plotted this out. He's gonna come, he's gonna come back. He's gonna bring it in really low, right over the beach. There'll be lots of witnesses that this thing is just a drift and everything. But he screws up, hooks up the hooks on the clip, has to drop a depth charge to get left, and then continues on, continues on to his landing, and then when the whole thing collapses, he crawls away underneath you on the collapse envelope. Ostensibly

he would have been in an uniform. The only drawback he could have taken his his shirt off, so you know, whereas when you wear a dress shirt or some kind of shirt. You've only got a T shirt of some kind of Yeah, and also slipped away. And also if you if you planned it out in the dance, which he may have done, he could have brought along some extra clothes. Is that I think we've solved it. Yeah. You want another weird, other twisted bit of history with this story. So the l A was purchased, as I

said in the beginning, from the good Year Corporation. When the Navy stopped using blimps, they sold it back to good Year. We'll tell how to patches on it on it, uh, And the this particular blim was the good Year blimp that was used at football games from nineteen two. It was the same gondola, so the same don that was recording all those football games. And we always saw the commercials with if you're old enough to remember watching those commercials,

that was the gondola that is involved in this crash. Today, that gondola, obviously it's got it's stopped being used in eight two. It's now in I believe it's a good Year museum. They still keep it and they still have it, so it is still around. Obviously probably repaired and repainted several times what happened in forty two, but probably, But ladies and gentlemen, don't go don't go breaking in and trying to hop onto it and go looking for clues,

because they're they're long gone. Yeah, okay, and that's it. We've got it all right. Well, if if you want to go ahead and read up on this story and take a look at what we use for the research on this, you can always just go ahead to our website, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com and you can find all research links right there. I feel like letting us know you've got thoughts on it. You could always

go ahead. If you've got another theory or you think we've missed a piece of information, go ahead and send us an email. Email is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. And with that, we're going to take off and we'll talk to you next week with another bit of weirdness. Everybody, unless you know, we crash a blunt. Oh yeah, let's not do that, okay,