August 16: When there is no one left at the controls

On August 16, 1942, the US Navy blimp L-8 crashed empty in Daly City, its two-man crew never found. Tonight's film: The Hidden (1987).

There is a date that always stops me in the almanac. August 16. Three threads meet on this day, and all three are about something that vanished, or something that is not what it looks like. Tonight’s main thread is an airship that came back whole, but its crew did not.

On August 16, 1942, a Sunday morning, the Navy’s L-class blimp L-8 took off from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay on a routine anti-submarine patrol. The crew was two men: Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody, 27, a 1938 Naval Academy graduate, and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams, 38, who had received his commission only the day before. L-8 had been a Goodyear advertising blimp that the Navy requisitioned for coastal defense after Japanese submarines showed up off the West Coast. The plan was simple: out to the Farallon Islands, down to Montara, then back.

At 7:38 a.m., an hour and a half into the flight, Cody radioed the position: four miles east of the Farallones. Four minutes later came the last message: am investigating a suspicious oil slick, stand by. An oil slick could mean a submerged submarine. The crew of the nearby trawler Daisy Gray and the cargo ship Albert Gallatin watched the blimp drop two smoke flares and circle the area, with two figures visible in the gondola. That was the last sign of Cody and Adams.