L-8: The ‘Ghost Blimp’ Whose Crew Disappeared During World War II

Mrs. Horace C. Appleton could hardly believe her eyes. There, just above her house in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City, was a nearly 150-foot-long naval blimp slowly descending over the neighborhood.

Appleton quickly ran inside and yelled to her husband: “Look, a balloon is falling on our house.” She heard the wheels scrape the shingles of their roof. The balloon kept moving, running into power lines and causing a fiery spark before finally coming to rest on the street.

A crowd of roughly 2000 curious locals began to gather. Army and Navy officers, medics, and police rushed to the scene and toward the gondola, which was attached to the gas bag that now resembled a giant deflated football. Officers stepped forward with caution—they knew that two depth charges were onboard the aircraft. Perhaps the two-person crew would be hurt, or even shot.

But there was no one inside. Its occupants had vanished.

There were no signs of a struggle or even of an emergency evacuation. A lifeboat was still present; so was a briefcase of classified documents that was to be kept with the crew at all times. It would soon shape up to be a maritime mystery for the ages, and one with an appropriate designation: the “ghost blimp.”

Submarine Patrol

Like many conflicts, World War II brought with it an urgent need for innovation. The U.S. needed a strategy to deal with the very real threat of Japanese submarines lurking along the coastline; one attack had occurred at Ellwood Oil Field near Santa Barbara in February 1942, with a sub firing off shells inland and causing panic. Subs were known to be in the area. But air surveillance was tricky—planes were needed for combat, and they also needed refueling.

The solution: blimps.

The helium-filled aircraft were quiet, could cruise for up to 50 hours and handle low altitudes, and didn’t require intensive crew training—all of which made them ideal for patrol operations. The Navy assembled 12 blimps requisitioned from private companies. One, the L-8, was a blimp made by tire company Goodyear for promotional purposes. (The brand had been making them since the 1920s, with early models using flammable hydrogen rather than helium.) It became part of a fleet flying out of Treasure Island, a manmade island in the San Francisco Bay.

Early on August 16, 1942, L-8 was readied for patrol. The planned trek would take the blimp out to the Farallon Islands, then down toward Montara and back to Treasure Island, a distance over the Pacific with a 50-mile radius. A total of three crew members—Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody, Ensign Charles Ellis Adams, and James Riley Hill—were scheduled to be on board. But just before take-off, Cody ordered Hill to get off. “It made sense to me,” Hill would tell a newspaper many years later. There was so much dew in the air in the early morning hours that it was typically a two-man crew in the blimps; three may have weighed the craft down. Hill, who had already been in his seat, disembarked.

L-8 took off between 5:30 a.m. and 6 a.m. At 7:50, Cody radioed in some activity while near the Farallon Islands. “Am investigating suspicious oil slick—stand by,” he said. Oil on the water could indicate that a sub was somewhere nearby. Fishermen would later state that the blimp had dropped two smoke flares in what was presumably an attempt to mark the oil slick’s location before continuing on.

The blimp wasn’t seen again until nearly 11 a.m., when a pilot for the commercial airline PanAm reported seeing it near the Golden Gate Bridge. Other reports came in, placing L-8 eight miles off its charted course.

Eyewitnesses watched as the blimp began to ascend higher than normal—2000 feet when it was expected to remain at 1000 feet. It then began to descend, touching down on a beach and alarming beachgoers before briefly becoming airborne, scraping the Appleton household, and finally coming to rest, its limp gasbag draped over a newly-waxed car.

Not all locals were aware of the blimp patrol, and some believed it might have been a Japanese attack. Others seemed to regard it with amusement. The deflating aircraft, fire department employee Elmer Kennedy later said, “looked like a big broken wiener.”

An Empty Cabin

The gondola was empty, but there were a few contextual clues about what might—or might not—have happened. The presence of the lifeboat and parachutes meant that neither Cody nor Adams anticipated any malfunction or reason to abandon the craft. No structural or electrical damage was detected and the blimp was known to be in good working order, having made 1092 trips prior to the one that day. The radio was functioning. The engines were stopped, indicating perhaps the crew wanted to slow down, but were otherwise operational. Yet a weighted briefcase of sensitive documents remained, indicating they had not had the time to toss it into the water, protocol for when the blimp needed to be abandoned.

Perhaps the most unusual discovery was that the gondola’s speaker switch was set on standby rather than turned completely off, as though Cody was preparing to use it to speak to someone outside of the blimp. Whom he would have been addressing was never determined.

A search of the area gave no indication the men had evacuated or tumbled out over land, which left them bailing out over water. It was naval policy for blimp crews to wear lifejackets or lifebelts at all times, and both were almost certainly wearing them: The lifejackets weren’t found in the gondola. If Cody and Adams had hit the water, they should have been easy enough to spot.

But after days of searching, the Navy could find no trace whatsoever of either man. It was baffling.

Hoping to uncover more about the blimp’s errant journey, the Navy quizzed onlookers and, in the case of photographers, confiscated photographs. Some reported seeing men in the gondola as the blimp grew closer to the ground; one eyewitness insisted someone had parachuted out. Another claimed she had been able to observe not two but three men in the gondola using her binoculars.

While the stories were inconsistent, many reported seeing figures in the cabin during the three hours the blimp was traveling but radio silent. Why the men never followed up with any further communication after spotting the oil slick was perplexing. It was mandatory: Cody had a check-in scheduled for 8 a.m.

Theories emerged. Perhaps the flares weren’t supposed to mark the location of the oil slick but to indicate where one of the crew members had fallen out of the gondola, whose door was open when it landed in Daly City. Or maybe one of the men fell out, leading the other to jump after him with the lifebelts in hand to remain afloat in the water. Because the door was locked into the open position, it was also possible one had climbed out to perform a repair, which turned into a rescue operation when he fell.

It’s also possible the men detected some kind of malfunction and jumped out on impulse, though Cody was an experienced crew member; Adams, however, was a first-time blimp flyer, and he may have been more prone to reacting prematurely. If so, Cody could have found himself in a position where he needed to aid Adams as he dangled from the gondola. If the men did indeed fall from a height of 300 feet over water, it’s likely they would have been seriously injured. Even so, some trace of them should have been found.

But naval experts pointed out a flaw: The officers were trained to remain on board the blimp and to radio for assistance if rescue was needed. Following the 7:50 a.m. transmission about the oil slick, no further communication was heard. And there was also the fact that the blimp had many eyes on it—from fishermen, pilots, and locals—throughout its wayward flight. Surely someone would have seen two men fall from the aircraft.

The Naval Board of Investigation conducted a thorough review and concluded that voluntary abandonment of the blimp was likely, even though there was no clear reason why Cody and Adams would have done so. “No other adequate explanation offers itself for the abandonment of an airworthy airship in the absence of fire or other casualty,” they wrote. “Nor is any satisfactory reason found for failure to use the radio. Nor is any satisfactory reason found for the failure of surface vessels to sight the two men in the water, or their ability to make their way to some nearby ship assisted by their life jackets, unless the latter failed, or some further accident occurred after they fell. ... While there is a strong presumption that both Lt. Cody and Ensign Adams fell out of the gondola and were drowned, there is no definite evidence to that effect.”

As time went on without answers, other, more sinister ideas emerged. If the oil slick was indeed indicative of an enemy submarine, it’s possible the men were captured after falling out. But both depth charges were intact—one was on board, and one had fallen off over a golf course during the blimp’s descent. (As the charges only detonate in water, no one was injured.) Defection was also possible, though not particularly plausible. Another theory—which no one gave much credence to—was that the men had an argument and a struggle ensued, though there was no indication of any violence onboard.

More recently, a researcher named Otto Gross claimed to have obtained documents from the Department of Defense demonstrating that the Navy was testing new radar equipment aboard the L-8 and that the microwaves caused the men to become disoriented or overwhelmed. The Navy has never confirmed the theory, and Gross’s website about the blimp is no longer live.

The “ghost blimp” has never been explained. L-8 was repaired and returned to service before being sent back to Goodyear, which kept it in operation until 1982. The gondola now resides in the National Naval Aviation Museum, still keeping the ultimate fate of its crew a secret.

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