On August 16, 1942, the Navy blimp L-8 lifted off from Treasure Island, San Francisco, on a routine antisubmarine patrol with Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody, 27, and Ensign Charles Adams, 35 — Adams's first flight as a commissioned officer. At 7:38 a.m., the crew radioed that they'd spotted an oil slick four miles off the Farallon Islands. A Liberty ship and a fishing boat watched L-8 descend to 30 feet above the ocean and circle the slick. That was the last anyone saw of the crew.
Three hours later, the blimp reappeared over Ocean Beach, drifting east with no one at the controls. Two surf fishermen grabbed the mooring ropes and looked inside the gondola — empty. They couldn't hold it. L-8 scraped a cliff, dropped a depth charge, drifted over the Olympic Club golf course and Mission Street, and finally crashed in front of a house at 419 Bellevue Avenue, Daly City, where a crowd had been following it on foot.
The radio and engines were still on. All three parachutes were aboard. So was the rubber life raft. No distress signal had been sent. The Navy determined that L-8 "had not been shot down, burned or made contact with the ocean, and that Cody and Adams had not engaged in misconduct." Both men were declared legally dead in 1943. The blimp was repaired and, after the war, sold back to Goodyear, where it flew as an advertising blimp named America until 1982.
