On the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five United States Navy aircraft lifted off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida on what should have been a routine training exercise. The aircraft were General Motors TBM Avengers, powerful military planes widely used during the Second World War. The mission was known as Flight 19, and on board were fourteen experienced naval aviators undertaking a standard overwater navigation training flight.

Traditional thinking among many scientists follows a familiar line of reasoning. Our universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, and our own civilisation has only possessed meaningful technology for a few thousand years, with advanced industrial and scientific capability emerging within the last few centuries. From this, it is often argued that an alien civilisation capable of interstellar travel would need to be vastly older than ours.