The Miami News from Miami, Florida • 28

Colonel Bert Krueger and his co-pilot lived through the "white haze" which he says may have caused the disappearance of five Navy clones. By JOE CRANKSHAW i Issidhf lid th 1 I ij. "it" ft Tie disappearance of a formation of five Navy torpedo bombers off the coast of south Florida in 1945 remains a mystery. A search and rescue plane which went to look for them was also lost. But a veteran aviator believes, after studying the available records, that the" solution to the mystery may have been recorded on the radar scopes of the Army's Camp Murphy Signal Corps School nearly a year before the aerial tragedy.

On December 5, 1945, the five Navy TBMs left Fort Lauderdale at 2:10 p.m. to fly a triangular flight pattern to the Bahamas to Melbourne and back. At 4 p.m., an intercepted radio message indicated that light 19 was lost and that the compasses of the planes were not functioning properly. All radio contact was lost before the nature of the trouble and the location of the flight could be determined. In March of this year, 17 years after the strange disappearance of the planes, the Navy closed an intensive investigation of the matter.

The findings of the board were inconclusive. Freak weather conditions may have been a factor, the board noted. Two British civilian passenger craft and an Air Force tanker have also been lost under similarly mysterious circumstances. Colonel A. P.

"Bert" Krueger of Stuart, a longtime military and airline pilot, says that he and internationally known racer Briggs Cunningham, Palm Beach, survived the same type of atmospheric freak which Krueger believes claimed the Navy aircraft. Krueger and Cunningham were pilot and copilot of a "target" plane for the Army's radar school at Camp Murphy, north of Jupiter, during the summer of 1944. Camp Murphy was the largest radar training school in the South during World War II and was the site of the first experiments in anti-aircraft radar. It was on one of these "target" missions that.