How the Bermuda Triangle Works:
You won't find it on any official map and you won't know when you cross the line, but according to some people, the Bermuda Triangle is a very real place where dozen of ships, planes and people have disappeared with no good explanation. Since a magazine first coined the phrase "Bermuda Triangle" in 1964, the mystery has continued to attract attention. When you dig deeper into most cases, though, they're much less mysterious. Either they were never in the area to begin with, they were actually found, or there's a reasonable explanation for their disappearance.
Bermuda Triangle Image Gallery
The Bermuda Triangle covers roughly 500,000 square miles in the Atlantic Ocean. See more Bermuda Triangle pictures
Does this mean there's nothing to the claims of so many who have had odd experiences in the Bermuda Triangle? Not necessarily. Scientists have documented deviations from the norm in the area and have found some interesting formations on the seafloor within the Bermuda Triangle's boundaries. So, for those who like to believe in it, there is plenty fuel for the fire.
In this article, we'll look at the facts surrounding what we do know about the area as well as some of the most commonly-recited stories. We'll also explore the bizarre theories like aliens and space portals as well as the mundane explanations.
Many think of the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, as an "imaginary" area. The U. S. Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle and does not maintain an official file on it. However, within this imaginary area, many real vessels and the people aboard them have seemingly disappeared without explanation.
The Bermuda Triangle is located off the Southeastern coast of the United States in the Atlantic Ocean, with its apexes in the vicinities of Bermuda, Miami, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It covers roughly 500,000 square miles.
The area may have been named after its Bermuda apex since Bermuda was once known as the "Isle of Devils." Treacherous reefs that have ensnared ships sailing too close to its shores surround Bermuda, and there are hundreds of shipwrecks in the waters that surround it.
The Bermuda Triangle Mystery
Over the past 100 years, the Bermuda Triangle has seen what some say is a significant and inordinately high number of unexplained disappearances of planes, ships and people. Some reports say that as many as 100 ships and planes have been reported missing in the area and more than 1,000 lives have been lost. The U.S. Coast Guard, however, maintains that the area does not have an unusual number of incidents.
In 1975, Mary Margaret Fuller, editor of "Fate" magazine, contacted Lloyd's of London for statistics on insurance payoffs for incidents occurring within the Bermuda Triangle's usually accepted boundaries. According to Lloyd's records, 428 vessels were reported missing throughout the world between 1955 and 1975, and there was no greater incidence of events occurring in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else in the world.
Gian J. Quasar, author of "Into the Bermuda Triangle: Pursuing the Truth Behind the World's Greatest Mystery" and curator of Bermuda-triangle.org, argues that this report "is completely false." Quasar reasons that because Lloyd's does not insure small crafts like yachts and often doesn't insure small charter boats or private aircraft, its records can't be the definitive source. He also states that the Coast Guard's records, which it publishes annually, do not include "missing vessels." He requested data on "overdue vessels" and received (after 12 years of asking) records of 300 missing/overdue vessels for the previous two years. Whether those vessels ultimately returned is unknown. His Web site has alist of these vessels.
The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) database indicates (according to Gian J. Quasar) that only a handful of aircraft have disappeared off the New England coast over the past 10 years, while over 30 have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle.
Is insurance higher in the Bermuda Triangle? According to Norman Hooke, who conducted marine casualty studies for Lloyd's Maritime Information Services, based in London, "The Bermuda Triangle does not exist." He instead says that disappearances in the Triangle are typically weather-related. So despite the theories of why ships and planes disappear in the area, insurance premiums are no higher than for any other area of the ocean. |
The mystery of the Triangle probably took hold with the first well-publicized disappearance in 1945, when five Navy Avengers disappeared in the area. The cause of the disappearance was originally "pilot error," but family members of the pilot leading the mission couldn't accept that he had made such a mistake. Eventually they convinced the Navy to change it to "causes or reasons unknown."
The myth gained momentum after reporter E.V.W. Jones compiled a list of "mysterious disappearances" of ships and planes between the Florida coast and Bermuda. Two years later, George X. Sand wrote an article for "Fate" magazine, titled "Sea Mystery at our Back Door." The article was about a "series of strange marine disappearances, each leaving no trace whatever, that have taken place in the past few years" in a "watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico."
As more incidents occurred, the reputation grew and past events were reanalyzed and added to the legend. In 1964, "Argosy Magazine" gave the triangle its name in an article titled "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" by Vincent Gaddis. Argosy magazine's tagline a "magazine of master fiction," but that did nothing to halt the spread of the myth. More articles, books, and movies have appeared, suggesting theories ranging from alien abductionsto a giant octopus.
Next, we'll look at some early well-known incidents that have been attributed to the area.
Well-known Disappearances
Image courtesy New York Navy Yard/Navy Historical Center
The USS Cyclops anchored in the Hudson River on October 3, 1911.Many Bermuda Triangle Web sites include long lists of missing ships and planes. But many of those were nowhere near the Triangle when they disappeared or they turned up later with rational explanations for their disappearances. For example, the Mary Celeste, found floating in 1872 with not a person on board and everything exactly as they had left it, is on nearly every list of losses blamed on the Bermuda Triangle. But in reality, it was many hundreds of miles from the Triangle at the time.
Here is a sampling of the some of the most notable incidents. As you'll see, some of these have reasonable explanations although they're still attributed to the strange and unknown powers of the Bermuda Triangle.
The U.S.S. Cyclops, 1918
During World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops served along the eastern coast of the United States until January 9, 1918. At that time, she was assigned to the Naval Overseas Transportation Service. The Cyclops was scheduled to sail to Brazil to refuel British ships in the south Atlantic. She set out from Rio de Janeiro on February 16, and, after a brief stop in Barbados from March 3 to 4, was never seen or heard from again. All 306 passengers and crew were gone without a trace.
Image courtesy U.S. Naval Historical Center
A U.S. Navy Grumman TBF Avenger
The most famous Bermuda Triangle story is the mystery surrounding five missing Navy Avengers in 1945. The story of Flight 19 is usually summarized this way: a routine patrol set out on a sunny day with five highly experienced student pilots. Suddenly, the tower began receiving transmissions from the flight leader that they were lost, compasses were not working, and "everything looked wrong." They were never seen again, and extensive Navy investigations turned up no clues to explain the disappearance.
Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor led the mission, which included several planned course changes. They departed at 1:15 p.m. on December 5, 1945. At 3:00 p.m., Lieutenant Robert F. Cox was flying over Fort Lauderdale, Florida when he heard a signal that he thought was from a boat or plane in distress. He called Operations at the Naval Air Station to report what he had heard. Cox told Taylor to fly with the sun at his left wing and up the coast until he hit Miami. Taylor then said that they were over a small island with no other land in sight. If he was over the Keys as he had said, however, he should have seen several islands as well as the Florida peninsula.
With less than two hours' flying time until they ran out of fuel, Taylor described a large island to Operations. Assuming this was Andros Island, the largest in the Bahamas, Operations sent Taylor a heading that would take him to Fort Lauderdale. Apparently this heading was correct, because once Flight 19 assumed the new course, Taylor's voice began coming in stronger over the radio. Taylor, however, didn't believe this course was right and after a few minutes said that they "didn't go far enough east. Turn around again and go east. We should have a better chance of being picked up closer to shore." With this move, transmissions began to weaken as they flew out of radio range in the wrong direction. For unknown reasons, Taylor ignored the standard flying procedure of flying west if over water and east if over land.
Two PBM-5 Mariner seaplanes went out to search the area, but one exploded soon after takeoff. The other never located Flight 19.
Farfetched Theories
The "Bimini Road," or the "Atlantis Stones," a rock formation off the coast of Bimini Island in the Bahamas.
As an area with one of the highest incidences of UFO sightings, it's no wonder that alien abductions have been a popular explanation for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. But abductions aren't the only theory; some also have theorized that the Bermuda Triangle area is a portal to other planets. But why this area?
Many believe that the Bermuda Triangle area is home to the lost city of Atlantis and remnants of its advanced technologies. Famous psychic Edgar Cayce said that Atlantis had many modern-day technologies, including a death ray weapon, which he claims ultimately destroyed the city. Some even say that the people who lived there were an alien race from the Pleiades star cluster.
Cayce had predicted that researchers would discover the western edge of Atlantis near the coast of Bimini, in the Bahamas, and they did find a "road" of stones there in 1968. The initial researchers and archeologists who studied the site, known as the "Bimini Road," immediately regarded it as naturally occurring. Recent investigations, however, have found evidence that appears to support the idea that the stones were shaped and placed there as a wall. The additional finding of a possible underwater city near Cuba adds fuel to the fire for those supporting the Atlantis idea.
Recent Cases: In this day of GPS navigation, it's hard to imagine a ship or plane could actually disappear. However, there have been some recent disappearances attributed to the Bermuda Triangle:
- DC-3 N407D, lost on September 21, 1978
- Fighting Tiger 524, lost on February 22, 1978
- Beechcraft N9027Q, lost on February 11, 1980
- Ercoupe N3808H, lost on June 28, 1980
- Beech Bonanza, lost on January 6, 1981
- Piper Cherokee N3527E, lost on March 26, 1986
- Grumman Cougar Jet, lost on October 31, 1991
- Jamanic K motor vessel, lost en route from Cape Haitian to Miami on March 20, 1995
- Genesis motor vessel, disappeared en route from Port of Spain, Trinidad to St. Vincent on April 21, 1999
- Cessna 210, drops off radar from Freeport to Nassau on June 14, 1999
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According to legend and speculation, the city of Atlantis relied on the power of special energy crystals that were extremely powerful. Cayce supported this idea, and the discovery of a great underwater pyramid and crystal by Dr. Ray Brown in 1970 reinforced it. Brown was scuba diving in the Bahamas when he claims to have found a large pyramid made of mirror-like stone. He entered the pyramid and saw a brassy metallic rod with a multi-faceted red gem hanging from the apex of the room. Directly below this rod was a stand with bronze hands holding a crystal sphere four inches in diameter. Brown removed the crystal and kept it secret until 1975, when he exhibited it at a psychic seminar in Phoenix, Arizona. He reported that when gazing into the crystal form, you can see three pyramidal images, one in front of the other with each decreasing in size. Some people have seen a fourth pyramid in front of the other three after entering into deep meditative states.
Brown believes that the fractured lines seen when looking at the crystal sphere from the side may be electrical in nature, similar to a form of microscopic circuitry. The speculation is that these energy crystals are in an altered state of some kind and send out rays of energy that either confuse navigational instruments or disintegrate vehicles all together.
Magnetic Abnormalities
Image courtesy Amazon"The Fog: A Never Before Published Theory of the Bermuda Triangle Phenomenon," by Rob MacGregor and Bruce Gernon include reports of an "electronic fog" that both men experienced while flying in the Bermuda Triangle. On December 4, 1970, Gernon and his father were flying to Bimini in clear skies when they saw a strange cloud with almost perfectly round edges hovering over the Miami shore. As they flew over it, the cloud began spreading out, matching or exceeding their speed. At 11,500 feet, they thought that they had escaped the "cloud," only to discover that it had formed a tunnel. It appeared the only way they could escape the cloud was to go through the tunnel. Once inside, they saw lines on the walls that spun in a counterclockwise direction. Gernon's navigational instruments went haywire and the compass spun counterclockwise.
Gernon reported that he "realized that something very bizarre had happened. Instead of the clear blue sky that we expected at the end of the tunnel, everything appeared a dull, grayish white. Visibility appeared to be about two miles, but there was absolutely nothing to see - no ocean, no horizon, no sky, only a gray haze."
When Gernon contacted Miami Air Traffic Control to get radar identification, the controller said that there were no planes on radar between Miami, Bimini and Andros. After several minutes, Gernon heard the air traffic controller report that a plane had been spotted directly over Miami. Gernon didn't think he could possibly be over Miami Beach, because it usually took 75 minutes to get to Miami and only 47 minutes had passed. At this same time, the cloud tunnel began to peel away in what he described as ribbons of fog. The instruments began operating normally and Miami Beach was directly below them. This loss of time, confirmed by their watches and the plane's clock, made Gernon believe that the electronic fog had time travel qualities.
Bruce Gernon, Don Pelz and other pilots have described emerging from a strange cloud tunnel while flying over the Bermuda Triangle.Gernon experienced the fog one more time in flight with his wife. Many other pilots have had similar experiences in the area. Gernon believes that powerful electromagnetic storms from within the
Earth break through the surface and come into the atmosphere where they soon disappear, leaving electronic fog. According to Gernon, a Swedish scientist has found that magnetism is weaker in the triangle than anywhere else on Earth, which may be why the fog happens more there than anywhere else.
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