The Empire of Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on the Hawaiian lagoon of Pearl Harbor catapulted America into World War II.  Ten weeks later, on February 23, 1942, Japanese submarines bombarding of the Ellwood Oil Field near coastal Santa Barbara, California, ninety-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, marked the first time the American mainland was struck since the British ambush of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Another shelling occurred at Fort Stevens in Oregon on June 21; by August, Japanese subs had sunk at least six Allied ships in the Pacific Ocean.

As Japanese watercraft continued patrolling America’s western shores, the Navy, fearing similar Pearl Harbor-like attacks on the mainland, constructed twenty-two airships and dispatched a dozen of them to monitor activity along the Pacific coast. The fleet of the one-hundred-forty-seven-foot-long blimps were given the title L-class and dubbed Airship Squadron 32. Each dirigible was equipped with three-hundred rounds of ammunition, a .30-caliber machine gun, and two Mark 17 depth bombs that were among the United States’ first mass-produced hydrogen bombs.

In the early morning of August 16, the L-8 Blimp of Airship Squadron 32, designated “Flight 101,” took off from the San Francisco Bay area to fly a routine maneuver. Three hours later the blimp was reported down in Daly City, eight miles south of San Francisco. Officials found several oddities upon inspection but were most puzzled by what they did not find.

The airship’s two pilots were not on board, and aerial, ground, and water searches failed to find any trace of them.

The United States Navy’s L-8 Blimp of Airship Squadron 32

The newly-created L-8’s were too small for extensive operational use; they were constructed for training missions and to perform functions that most airplanes of the time could not do well. Among the airship’s attributes were the ability to fly slowly at low altitude, operate in conditions of low cloud ceilings and low visibility, and hover in the air over targets for extended periods.

The blimps were housed at Moffett Field in rural Santa Clara County, near the south end of San Francisco Bay and northwest of San Jose. At 6:03 a.m. on August 16, 1942, Flight 101 departed from Treasure Island, forty miles to the northwest and ten miles west of Oakland, for what was supposed to be a routine patrol. The weather was slightly overcast, but visibility was good at three-to-five miles.

The airship had made 1,092 previous trips without incident. Nothing suggested this maneuver would be any different as the dirigible had been inspected four days earlier and deemed fit to fly.

The L-8 Blimp Shortly Before Departure

At the controls of Flight 101 was twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Ernest Cody, an experienced airship pilot. Four months earlier, he had flown the L-8 to deliver cargo to the USS Hornet before the ship departed for the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo.

Aiding Cody aboard the L-8 was thirty-four-year-old Ensign Charles Adams, in his first flight as a commissioned officer. In addition to having survived the 1935 wreck of the USS Macon during a storm off California’s Big Sur, he had been decorated by the German government for rescuing Hindenburg passengers after the zeppelin caught fire and crashed in New Jersey in 1937. Adams was also at Pearl Harbor when it was

                                         Lieutenant                Ensign

                                        Ernest Cody       Charles Adams

Aviation machinist mate Riley Hill was assigned to accompany Cody and Adams on the flight, but he was ordered off the ship without explanation shortly before departure. He  believed heavy moisture was weighing the blimp down, making it unsafe for him, the third man, to be aboard while the blimp was airborne.

Riley Hill

Navy Aviation Machinist Mate

The F-8 was to first fly toward the Farallon Islands, twenty miles off the coast, then north towards Point Reyes, before heading south along the bay coastline. The patrol was expected to take approximately four hours, with Lieutenant Cody and Ensign Adams slated to return to base sometime between 10:00 and 10:30 that morning.

The first leg of the L-8’s flight proceeded normally. At 7:38 a.m., just over an hour-and-a-half after takeoff, Cody radioed squadron headquarters at Moffett Field, reporting he was between three and four miles east of the Farallon Islands.

The L-8’s Projected Flight Path

Four minutes later, Cody radioed he was investigating an oil slick, a possible indicator of an enemy submarine lurking beneath the waters. After several minutes passed with no further contact, Navy officials believed he and Adams had not found anything more of significance. Even after losing contact with the L-8 at 8:50 a.m., they were not worried because communications with a blimp’s crew were frequently lost during patrol.

The worry began setting in at 10:00, however, after Cody did not report the L-8’s hourly position. Two more hours passed with still no word, and repeated attempts to reach the blimp via radio went unanswered.

Last Contact From Lieutenant Cody

A Liberty ship and a fishing boat in the area both witnessed the L-8 descending to within an estimated thirty feet of the ocean surface and circling the reported oil slick. Shortly after 9:00, just under one-and-a-half hours after Cody’s last contact with base, the Liberty ship reported seeing the L-8 release two smoke-producing flares shaped like aerial bombs; no actual explosives were dropped.

The airship then appeared to be heading back toward base, in the opposite direction of its next designated target, Point Reyes. Several additional ships and planes saw the L-8 over the following one-and-a-half hours.

At 10:49, the craft was seen over the Golden Gate Bridge. At 11:00 a floatplane observed the L-8 rising to approximately 2,000 feet before descending near Salada Beach and Half Moon Bay, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean approximately twenty miles south of San Francisco. Multiple people soon saw the aircraft nearer to the city; some were close enough to see the pilots inside the blimp and said everything appeared normal.

In the course of the following fifteen minutes, something unknown happened to the L-8.

All Seems Fine

At 11:15 a.m., Moffett headquarters received a radio message from the San Francisco Shore Patrol reporting a blimp was descending over the Olympic Club golf course eight miles south of San Francisco near Fort Funston, a harbor defense installation.

Hundreds of on-lookers were now following the dirigible’s descent.

Aerially Floating Over San Francisco

Moments earlier, the blimp had plunged down on Ocean Beach, on San Francisco’s west coach. Two surf fishermen momentarily held it down by its tie lines before its force propelled it back into the air.

Ocean Beach, Where The Blimp Initially Lands

The airship then ran into a sloping cliff, causing damage to its starboard propeller and dislodging one depth charge, relieving it of enough weight to gain altitude. An automatic valve inside was opened and began releasing helium gas, causing the airship to deflate and take a sagging, V-shaped appearance.

Staggering over San Francisco’s Crocker-Amazon neighborhood, the L-8’s elevation dropped and it began scraping telephone poles and residential houses before landing on a street in front of a house in Daly City, on San Francisco’s southern boundary, at 11:20. No one was injured.

The Blimp Shortly Before Crashing

Quickly arriving on the location, naval investigators found a number of oddities in searching the airship:

• The engines, instruments, and flight controls were functioning, but the blimp’s helium bag was leaking and the batteries were drained
  • The door was latched open, unusual during mid-flight
  • The safety bar was out of place
  • A microphone hooked to an external loudspeaker was dangling outside the gondola
  • The ignition switches and radio were still on, but no distress signals or transmissions had been made
  • Two of the three life jackets were missing, indicating the crew had followed regulations by dawning them before takeoff.
  • The fuel valves were undisturbed, sufficient for another six hours.
  • Lieutenant Cody’s hat and a briefcase containing top-secret documents were still in place on the pilot’s seat. He had been instructed to throw the satchel overboard in the event of an emergency.

The jackets and two flares seen being dropped from the aircraft by the Liberty ship were the only pieces of equipment missing. The machine gun, three other flares, and an expandable life raft were found intact. Perhaps most oddly, all three of the L-8’s parachutes were also found aboard; one person who had seen the blimp over the Olympic Golf Course reported seeing a parachute descend from the aircraft while it was over the water.

However, it was what, or rather, who, was not found on the aircraft, that was most alarming.

The Crashed Blimp

Sometime between 11:00-11:20, pilots Ernest Cody and Charles Adams had abandoned the airship somewhere over Salada Beach and Daly City. Multiple theories abounded to what had happened to the missing pilots:

• They were captured by a Japanese sub
• They were spying for Japan and rendezvoused with an I-boat to escape
• Their disappearance was an AWOL scheme gone awry
• A rogue wave swept both men away
• The L-8 had temporarily dipped into the ocean, washing away both men
• The crewman were involved in a love triangle with one murdering the
other then dumping his body before falling overboard himself
• Perhaps predictably, some even theorized the pilots had been abducted by aliens

Because intruders had been discovered trying to get into buildings on Treasure Island in the weeks before the F-8 incident, it was also speculated that a stowaway aboard the airship had murdered Cody and Adams. The Navy, however, concluded the F-8 had no place for such a person to hide without being seen.

A new purely speculative theory that has emerged in recent years suggests the blimp was used for secretly testing radar, and that the crew members were overpowered by inadequately shielded microwaves and fell out of the gondola. No proof has ever been found that L-8 was testing experimental equipment.

No Trace Of The Men

A Naval Board of Investigation could only determine the L-8 had not been burned or shot down, nor had it made contact with the ocean. The Navy concluded the most likely explanation for the disappearances of the two-man crew is that one of them encountered trouble when he exited the dirigible to fix a minor mechanical problem, and that the second pilot came to his aid. The abrupt weight loss would have caused the derelict airship to rapidly gain altitude causing both men to fall overboard.

On August 17, 1943, one year after seemingly evaporating into the air, Lieutenant Ernest Cody and Ensign Charles Adams were officially declared dead. They are the only two World War II casualties of Airship Squadron 32.

A Dubious Distinction

Following its two-man crew vanishing without explanation, the L-8 became known as the “Ghost Blimp.”

“The Ghost Blimp”

The L class aircrafts purchased by the Navy during World War II were originally part of Goodyear’s fleet of advertising blimps. The L-8 was repaired after the war and sold back to Goodyear. It was renamed America and was the Goodyear Blimp, hovering high in the air at sporting events across the country such as the Super Bowl and World Series until it was retired in 1982.

Few knew that the Goodyear Blimp was, for a time, the infamous Ghost Blimp of World War II.

The Ghost Blimp Becomes The Goodyear Blimp

The gondola of the Ghost Blimp turned Goodyear Blimp was repainted back to its original markings and given to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, where it is displayed.

The Displayed Aircraft

Sources:

• Atlas Obscura
• Aviation News
• History. Net
• National Naval Aviation Museum
• SF Gate (San Francisco Area News)
• Smithsonian Magazine
• Unsolved Mysteries