The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is very large area of the Atlantic which has its apex in the Bermuda Islands to the south and which extends from the southern tip of Florida to the Lesser Antilles. For these boundaries, although very imprecise, the area also takes the name of "Cursed Triangle" due to a long list of unexplained incidents that have occurred there.
The facts are many and begin long time ago, but continue with an impressive crescendo up to the present day. If we can attribute inaccuracies and distortions to the first reports, the same cannot be said for the latest and most recent accidents which, according to a rough estimate, even caused more than a thousand victims in the years between 1945 and 1975 alone, a number which, it must be specified, it also takes into account the planes that had crashed in this area with impressive frequency since the Second World War.
It should also be kept in mind that it was not an area on the edge of the world but rather an area that included a very popular sub-tropical region due to the mild climate and the beauty of the landscape.
Florida Bahamas and Caribbean are in fact fabulous names that evoke golden beaches and pleasant holidays, which have absolutely nothing gloomy and bleak about them. But this data, apparently contrasting, seems to confirm in some way that there must be some truth; moreover, another detail that makes the misfortunes that occurred in this area different from those that occur in other parts of the world is the fact that no traces of all the accidents remain, no wreck, no survivors. Planes, ships and people are literally gone. Of them we knew exactly the place of departure and the expected destination; details of the journey were even known and transmitted by radio during navigation. Then nothing more. After the connections were cut off more or less abruptly, systematic searches began in the presumable area of the accident, but always without result. Men and equipment had thus disappeared, evaporated into thin air.
Legends and scary tales have existed since ancient times on all unknown seas, but most have crumbled over the years, while the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle still lingers. The most significant episodes will now be reported below.
The Bermuda Triangle - incidents
In 1840 the Rosalie, a French merchant ship that left Europe and headed for the Caribbean was found completely deserted. All the men who should have been on board were missing. There was only one canary alive in her cage. On the Rosalie everything appeared in perfect order, both on decks and below decks, as well as the passenger quarters and all the cargo in the hold had not been tampered with. Piracies were certainly not infrequent, but it seemed strange that whoever had attacked the ship had kidnapped people without taking possession of the ship itself and the cargo. Even the lifeboats were in place. It was therefore not clear how people could have left the hull. Nor why would she have jumped into the sea, as for a collective raptus.
The Mary Blue is perhaps the best known case of a ship found without persons in the ocean. In the 1872 she was sighted by an English vessel which boarded her while she was drifting and took her as booty, without asking many questions about the strangeness of that meeting. Here too everything was in order, nothing was missing; provisions, water, personal effects of the crew. Only the captain's cabin appeared to be enclosed by beams, as if he had wanted to barricade himself inside. Where he had then come from was still difficult to imagine. The Mary Blue carried a load of alcohol stowed in barrels, and so the possibility of a fire on board was thought of, then immediately returned due to the alcohol's characteristic of extinguishing itself after a brief flame. Perhaps everyone had thrown themselves into the sea in panic at the sight of the fire and had never been able to reach the ship that had sailed away with the wind in the wind. It remains an unconvincing hypothesis incapable of giving a convincing explanation of the tragedy that occurred.
Also in the series of ships found abandoned inexplicably, there is the 1881 story of the captain of the American ship Ellen Austin. Traveling in the middle of the North Atlantic, in a region which should correspond to the eastern edge of the triangle, the Ellen Austin encountered a clearly unmanned two-masted vessel. Again everything was in order, the sails were furled but perfectly ready for maneuvers. Some men from Ellen Austin were then transferred aboard to take possession and tow her. The tandem voyage had just begun when the sea conditions worsened, so much so that the tow lines broke and the two hulls lost sight of each other. Only a few days later the Ellen Austin found the vessel, which however turned out to be deserted again as the men had all disappeared. No signs were found to shed light on what might have happened. For a second time some volunteers went aboard the schooner, evidently under pressure from the captain who wanted at all costs to seize it, attracted by the large profit. But again the two ships did not get very far. A second storm divided them and since then neither the second crew nor the booty have been found.
The battleship Atlanta disappeared instead along with all 300 men who were on board, just in that same period. The vessel was returning to Europe after a long training cruise. The British Admiralty organized a systematic search for a long time, but to no avail. Perhaps that was the first time in history that organized searches were conducted with several ships that scoured the ocean according to a preordained plan without however obtaining any results. The ship Cyclops also disappeared mysteriously in March of 1918 while in the triangle. There were more than 300 men on board, all from the United States Navy. She was a warship and since she was in full world conflict, among the hypotheses of her disappearance, various took into consideration a possible attack by German submarines. Accurate investigations carried out after the end of the war, however, led to the exclusion of this eventuality. The US Navy also organized extensive searches that lasted a few months, but every attempt was useless.
Coming to more recent times we have the episode of the San Paolo, an old Brazilian warship that traveled in tow of two large tugboats with a small crew assigned to the indispensable towing manoeuvres. The episode takes place in early October 1951. Here too the weather conditions advised one of the tugs to unhook the hawsers to be freer in facing the sea. The next morning, the men of the second tug realized that their cables were also unhooked and that the San Paolo was missing. Warned by radio, American and British ships aided by numerous aircraft began searches, without finding any wreckage. The disappearance of the San Paolo had been preceded in 1926 by the similar loss of the cargo ship Cottopaxy and in 1931 by merchantman Stavenger last transmitting her position while east of the Grand Bank of the Bahamas. Everything seemed to go smoothly. Reports of similar incidents punctually continued in the 1960s and 1970s as well. Something mysterious and in any case inexplicable happened in 1963 to the Marine Sulfur Queen, a large American freighter with forty men aboard. The ship was traveling off the Gulf of Mexico when a message from her was last received. Considering that it was to reach a port in Virginia, it can be argued that it would have subsequently traveled the Strait of Florida, following the Gulf Stream as it is an obligatory passage for all vessels heading north, moreover just about fifty miles wide. Difficult to vanish in this area, always full of traffic. However Marine was never seen again, nor did she ever reach Virginia. For two weeks many American coast guard vehicles scoured the sea north of Cuba and this time at least one life jacket was recovered. She belonged to the missing ship and this started a second phase of research, which, however, did not lead to other results.
In the 1966 was the turn of a large tugboat, the Southern Cities, towing a sixty-five-metre barge loaded with chemicals and fertilizers. A few days after the tugboat stopped reporting, Coast Guard aircraft managed to locate the barge, which showed no signs of damage. The Witchcraft incident is a very remarkable example of the sudden disappearance of a small boat not only within sight of its port, but also alongside a buoy in the port itself. Dan Burack, the owner of the Witchcraft, which, incidentally, was reputed to be unsinkable, had invited a priest, Father Pat Hogan, to view the Christmas lights in Miami from offshore on Christmas Eve 1967. They sailed through calm seas to within a mile or so of shore, then stopped to admire the illumination near buoy number 7. At this point Burack sent a single, unexpected distress signal to the Coast Guard, giving its exact location. A warned Coast Guard boat took only twenty minutes to reach buoy number 7, but when she arrived she saw no sign of the Witchcraft.The search operations for the wreck started the following morning. The water in that stretch of sea is only 13 meters deep, and a yacht would be easily visible from the surface. The searches continued until January 10, without having found any wreckage, any corpse or anything else that could suggest a shipwreck. At the end of the search, a Coast Guard spokesman stated, somewhat paradoxically, "We assume they are missing, but not lost at sea". No trace instead of the Southern Cities and his men.
Anita, a German collier returning to Europe also vanished in 1973 with 34 men aboard. A striking case was that of the Scorpion, one of the American atomic submarines, which disappeared in 1968 while traveling from the Azores bound for base in virginia. The thought of ninety-nine men imprisoned in the trapped hull held the world's attention for many days. This time, however, the loss was too important, at least for the United States Navy, which employed an impressive series of means to track down the submarine. Military and prestige reasons pushed to do so. It was necessary to know at all costs what had happened. Only after many months did the news spread that a specially equipped ship had identified the wreck a thousand kilometers southwest of the Azores. This was also confirmed by various photos taken on the seabed of over three thousand meters on which what could have been the Scorpion lay. In this case, therefore, there could be no question of disappearance, but the causes of the disaster as well as the result of subsequent research always remained closed in a jealous reserve. However, from what has emerged, it seems that the loss of the submarine did not take place exactly within the limits of the so-called triangle, in which instead no trace of wreckage was found, nor of those of the planes which in the meantime disappeared with worrying regularity.
In 1945 the most inexplicable of accidents occurred, involving an entire squadron of US Air Force aircraft. The episode happened exactly on December 5 during a training mission. Five Grumman fighter jets took off from the Fort Lauderdale base, about twenty kilometers north of Miami. These were to go and target a pontoon located on the shallow coral seabed surrounding the Grand Bank of the Bahamas. They would then take a northerly course, before returning to their base. A simple mission without risk, absolutely routine, like many others that were done every day. This time, however, things took an unexpected and dramatic turn. Just over an hour after takeoff, when the firing practice had already been completed and the five planes were on their way back, an alarming message arrived in Fort Lauderdale. The commander reported to the base that he was unable to determine his position. The on-board instruments of all the aircraft seemed to have gone mad. The Florida coast, presumably nearby, was also out of sight. The radio link was maintained and on the ground it was soon clear that something very strange was happening to the fighters in flight. The squadron leader was unable to give any indication of his position and the same happened to the other four planes which traveled blind, fatally running out of fuel. At some point the radio contact ended. From the last messages it could be assumed that the squadron had ended up over the Gulf of Mexico, but in this case it was not possible to understand how the pilots had not seen the land below, as they flew over Florida from east to west, given that the conditions of the weather was good and visibility was perfect. That same afternoon various rescue planes took off, including a large Martin Mariner seaplane, which began to search the area without knowing where exactly to direct their searches. The five Grummans could have ended up anywhere and certainly badly, because they ran out of fuel and ran out. A serious misfortune now seemed certain, unless one of the pilots managed to ditch and get to safety with a special type of liferaft with which every aircraft was equipped. If all this weren't enough, shortly after the departure of the first aid, another message arrived on the ground in which the seaplane commander Martin Mariner announced that he was in difficulty due to the very strong winds encountered at high altitude. No other communication came from the Martin Mariner who also disappeared like the others. In the evening there were six planes lost. Ten men of the squadron were missing plus thirteen other members who made up the crew of the twin-engine rescue. At dawn the following day, an unprecedented search operation began, involving hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and coast guard lookouts. But while continuing for several weeks, this gigantic aeronaval operation did not give the slightest result and so the mystery grew, along with the number of conjectures that were attempted to somehow explain what happened. There was nothing rational, logical, verifiable. And then we inevitably entered into the mystery. There was talk of spaceships and extraterrestrials that would have had unspecified interests in interfering in the activity of ships and planes, literally taking them from our planet to take them who knows where. Einstein was quoted and other dimensions were mentioned to suggest the credibility of these hypotheses which undoubtedly exerted a strong influence on the public.
A year and a half later, in July 1947, a similar accident hit another military aircraft. It was a C-54 that disappeared with six men on board while en route to a base in Florida. Six months later it was the turn of a four-engine passenger aircraft that went missing near Bermuda. The last radio communications reported nothing abnormal, but later the contacts ceased and the aircraft never reached its destination. A four-engine identical to this one was lost in 1949 while traveling from Bermuda to Jamaica. Like the previous one, it belonged to a British airline which insinuated the idea of organized sabotage. However, there was no proof of this and they weren't the only planes to disappear in that period. Shortly before, a DC-3 rented from a travel agency in Miami and carrying about forty people on board had been lost. This accident was all the more sensational, because it was known that in the last radio contact the pilot had communicated that he was now close to the finish line, indeed that he could already glimpse the lights of the city. Naturally, all the searches carried out, also in this case were useless.
A transport plane went missing with thirty-five people in 1952 while en route to Kingston and in October 1954 it was again the turn of a United States Navy aircraft. It was a Super Constellation that left the Patuxent River in Maryland en route to the Azores.
In 1956 crashes, or so it is assumed a four-engine tanker of the US Air Force during a mission from its base located in Virginia, the Azores.
The following year, two tankers were lost at the same time. They were bound for Florida and the latest radio signals from aboard gave their position a hundred miles northeast of the Grand Bank of the Bahamas. The long searches that followed led to the discovery of some wreckage that could have belonged to the two planes: but even this was not certain. Things got complicated when, continuing the patrols of the sea, other wrecks were found more than two hundred kilometers away from the first ones. Apart from the uncertainty of identification, it was clear that the wreckage could not be in two places so far away at the same time. And the mystery became even more dense.
June 5th1965 A C-119 expected at the air base located on Great Turk Island, one of the southernmost islands of the Bahamas, was lost en route. Shortly before the accident, the plane was in normal radio contact with the airport control tower which it had predicted would arrive in just over an hour. Military witnesses reported that suddenly the radio links worsened, becoming increasingly weak and indecipherable, until they disappeared completely. Also in this case very extensive searches were made, starting from the place of the last reported position. The result, as usual, was negative. A Chase YC-122, carrying four people, and bound for Grand Bahama from Palm Beach, Florida, vanished somewhere northwest of Bimini.
Another loss, on the relatively short stretch between Fort Lauderdale and Freeport, occurred on June 11, 1973, when Reno Rigoni disappeared with his second pilot, Bob Corner, in a Cessna 180. No wreckage was found, despite a search that included the Everglades. No distress signals had come from his radio. An unusual disappearance occurred 1450 kilometers southwest of the Azores, the point where it was last sighted (February 17, 1974).
Thomas Gatch, who aspired to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. US Navy airplanes searched an area of 577,215 square kilometers of ocean, but were unsuccessful. There are many who believe that the forces populating the Bermuda Triangle are subject to variations in intensity and that they periodically peak in activity, more or less regularly. Just as in the 1970s the disappearances were concentrated in the two-year period 1978-79, in the 1980s there was a maximum of activity in the autumn of 1982 (four disappearances were concentrated in three months). Immediately after the disappearances fell below the average of one per year, and then resumed strongly between 1985 and 1986. The aircraft that carried the Triangle curse in the 1980s was an ordinary Beechcraft Bonanza, a light aircraft, which at the time was carrying its owner, accompanied by his wife. The two departed from Gran Abaco Island (in the Bahamas) in the late morning, bound for Fort Piece, Florida. This is a short, well-traveled route, and most of its length runs on or near Grand Bahama, then follows the Gulf Stream to the Florida coast. Just passed the last strip of the island of Grand Bahama, the Beechcraft vanished after just over an hour of flight. There was high humidity in the air that day, but no thunderstorms were recorded. The search continued for a week, but no clue was found that would allow us to say that the aircraft had really crashed into the ocean waves.
A week later another disappearance took place, for which an attempt has been made to give an explanation. The missing aircraft was a Piper Navajo and was carrying seven passengers plus the pilot, who had over 8,000 flight hours under his belt. The aircraft, which had departed from the island of St. Maarten and was bound for Anguilla, suddenly vanished, without any request for help being received by the control tower. After fruitless searches, the experts charged with investigating gave this explanation: the Piper Navajo has a very particular design, in fact it has a hollow nose, where the luggage rack is located and where the plane's center of gravity is located. So if there was a sudden engine problem, the Piper would plummet headfirst into the waves, without giving the pilot time to send a MAY-DAY. This hypothesis can actually explain the reason for the lack of requests for help from the pilot, but why no wreckage has been found remains an unknown.
In November, a twin-engine Queen Air 65 disappeared, in perhaps even more mysterious circumstances, as the pilot, in contact with the Nassau airport, said "Everything is normal, the landing is expected in ..." At that moment the conversation came truncated and a few seconds later the aircraft disappeared from radar. The searches began a few hours later, but were wearily dragged on for a few days due to bad weather, and finally suspended after ten days without results.
Between 1985 and 1986 six aircraft disappeared, in identical circumstances: no MAY-DAY, good visibility, no wreckage. The most interesting disappearance occurred on August 4th1986. It was also one of the few disappearances that really attracted the attention of the media, as aboard that Twin Otter there were some politicians from the island of St. Vincent, including the Foreign Minister of the small Caribbean island. The journey between St. Lucia and St. Vincent is incredibly short, basically the two islands are only visible from each other. At the time of landing the weather was very bad, there was a large bank of fog that completely covered St.Vincent, visibility was minimal. The pilot, because of this, tried several times to land, without ever succeeding. He signaled that he would make a large circle around the island to try again. The biplane vanished right in that maneuver away, while it was only 2 kilometers from the islet of destination. There were great searches, but where the Twin Otter ended up with its passengers we may never know.
It is not true, as malicious people claim, that the mysterious disappearances inside the Bermuda Triangle have ceased with the advent of new GPS systems and new aeronautical technologies. These incidents are proof that the Cursed Triangle has not yet ceased its activity.
The most recent accident happened in the winter 2000. On January 5, at 9:40am, a Cessna 172 was expected on the landing strip of the St. Augustine airport. The aircraft came from Gran Bahama, and had shown itself to be slightly late. At 9:41 and 51 seconds it was identified at an elevation of 2500 feet. At 9:45 and 24 seconds the radar reported it at an altitude of 2000 feet, at 9:45 and 51 seconds at 1200 feet, 4 miles west of St. Augustine. It was therefore in the middle of the landing phase, everything proceeded without problems, the weather was clear. Nine seconds later the pilot said, "Control tower, I can't see anything". A second later he disappeared from the radar. The next day, however, the plane was found, with the pilot's body inside. But there is still no explanation as to how the tragedy could have happened. How can a pilot suddenly no longer see the coastline?
On the night of June 25 of the same year, numerous witnesses claimed to have seen off the islet of Andros (located in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle) "spheres of light" performing complex evolutions. New reports of UFOs inside the Triangle?
Another incident is difficult to explain. May 12th1999 a twin-engine Aero Commander 500 was in the process of landing at Nassau airport. While in communication with the control tower, it slowly descended in altitude. Suddenly, at 8:27am the radar signaled that the aircraft had disappeared. For thirty minutes there was no news of the twin engine, when suddenly, at 8:57am it reappeared at an altitude of 100 feet. A message from the control tower directed the pilot to runway number 9, but there was no response. Shortly after he disappeared again, and this time also permanently. No anomaly was revealed in the course and landing procedure undertaken by the pilot.
The Bermuda Triangle - the assumptions
What about these chronicles? A preliminary consideration concerns the statistical percentage of accidents with respect to the presumed or calculated traffic in the area. Books and articles state that this percentage is absolutely disproportionate according to the estimates that have been made. But let us now examine the range of hypotheses made to arrive at the possible causes of the disasters.
A first hypothesis is that of commercial sabotage, which however does not find its logic as the planes and ships that disappeared belonged to various companies of different nations. Furthermore, as far as we know, the men and goods transported did not have a particular importance from a strategic or propaganda point of view. No ship opened new trade routes capable of harming financial or other interests. In the case of the tug Southern Cities, the cargo carried by the large barge was found intact and the same happened with other abandoned vessels. The crashed planes are almost always old line aircraft or even war remnants then transformed for commercial use. There was no sensational prototype among them. Another guess, the most spontaneous and evident one concerns human error. Some misfortunes can be attributed to such a factor, especially with regard to aircraft. The pilot's error in reading the instruments or the concurrence of bad weather conditions, fog and atmospheric turbulence. Even a sudden illness could in some cases be fatal. However, it must be kept in mind that the large airliners such as the military four-engines, provided on board a commander and a second pilot able to intervene if necessary, as well as a whole series of auxiliary control instruments which facilitated and automated all the operations driving. No plane had crashed into non-existent mountains due to a bad altimeter reading. The hypothesis of human error then fails completely if applied to the case of the Grumman fighter squadron. An aircraft could have broken out of formation and suddenly found themselves in trouble, but the disappearance of all five remained completely inexplicable in this light. It was impossible to think that all the pilots had made a mistake or felt ill at the same time, just as it is impossible to hypothesize that a mistake by the squadron leader would have dragged his companions into a fatal disaster, making them dive to the surface of the ocean. In fact, the disaster had not been sudden as the dynamics of the accident present a long series of radio contacts before the final silence.
In the accident that had involved the two American tanker planes in 1963, it could perhaps be supposed that the pilots' error had caused a collision in the sky, at great and height which had then literally pulverized the planes making it impossible to find them. This however was instead one of the few cases in which various wrecks, although not well identified, were found, but over two hundred kilometers away, and this impacts the hypothesis of a collision.
With regard to the missing ships, the human factor acquired a less decisive importance. One could certainly think of maneuvering errors. During a storm, an unexpected rudder strike could cause a hull to cross, take on water and then sink, but for ships of ten and twenty thousand tons, this was practically untenable. An error of course would eventually lead a vessel to run aground on a shallow water or break up against a reef, but here it would later be easily spotted.
A second probability concerns mechanical failures, which certainly were possible. They range from blocking aircraft engines to snatching the boilers of some ships. But attributing all the disappearances to this is not sustainable and in any case it would not explain the total lack of wrecks. For the two plane crashes mentioned, the same considerations already made apply. The failure should have affected all the engines of the squadron. All the books and articles that have dealt with the subject agree in reporting that the pilots of the Grumman could not recognize their position, it seemed that the compasses had gone crazy. This fact left open the possibility of an external factor influencing the instruments (Magnetic anomalies). Various articles by authoritative experts actually confirm the existence of these anomalies. But what are they due to? Only after the last world war did studies on terrestrial magnetism make real progress, above all thanks to American and English scientists who found themselves available with instruments perfected under the pressure of war needs. But then little was known in this field.
In the 1950s, scholars from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered that on many seabeds there were variations in the magnetic intensity, the nature and structure of which, however, were not well known. It was known that magnetizable materials lose all traces of their magnetism when heated to high temperatures. However, once it cools down permanently assume the characteristics of the magnetic field in which they are located. Many of the rocks in this area exhibited unexplained magnetic behavior.
Subsequent studies by Professor Vine of the University of Cambridge had led to sensational conclusions. Magnetometric research in large stretches of the ocean had then revealed positive and negative differences with respect to the normally detectable earth's magnetic field. It soon became apparent that this had reversed its polarity several times over the geological eras. Other studies of the magnetic field on the sea were conducted by scientists at the Lamont Geological Observatory. The results obtained made it possible to clarify the history and dynamics of the ocean floors from a geophysical point of view, as well as correlate this evidence with the theory of continental drift. But these results, important for the knowledge of geophysics, the study of earthquakes and volcanoes, seemed to have no connection with the accidents of the Cursed Triangle.
The extent of these anomalies was barely detectable with sophisticated instruments. Investigations in this regard made progress only after the war, when the technique had made it possible to refine the investigation methods and thus those who wanted to hypothesize the presence of bodies extraneous to the normal terrestrial morphology, capable of enormously altering the measurement of the magnetic field with consequent effects harmful to things and people had to surrender in the face of evidence. These abnormal sources would have been immediately localized by an impressive network of scientific controls which are carried out every day for various reasons but with precise programmes. Then there was to consider that every day hundreds of ships and planes passed through the area without experiencing consequences on compasses and instruments. It was soon discovered that magnetic anomalies of the same type and intensity were present in all the seas of the world, along the Atlantic and Pacific oceanic ridges and this leaves very little room for imagination. So all this fairly elementary information is already sufficient to resize the mystery that would be hidden in the cursed triangle, in the form of magnetic phenomena capable of causing such sensational interference.
Typhoons for example, certainly frequent in these parts, may have played their part in the misfortunes. These natural disasters which devastate the sea and hit the coasts with enormous violence have a meteorological origin which locates them more frequently in that region than elsewhere. Their destructive action is frightening. Many planes and ships may have gotten lost because of this. However, the chronicles of the accidents that have occurred often agree in specifying that at the time of the various disasters the weather conditions were normal, if not even good.
Quite close is the hypothesis of shipwrecks that occurred due to sudden seismic waves of colossal dimensions that would have overwhelmed and swept the boats encountered on their way. Sessa waves are caused by underwater landslides due to small aftershocks. In fact, in the depths of the oceans we find valleys, corrugations, plateaus, real mountains, isolated or united in chains. Morphologically their instability is much higher than that found on the mainland. Often the currents, volcanic eruptions, and large landslides of other kinds, move large masses of material which, moving suddenly, cause abnormal and very dangerous wave motions, precisely called seismic waves. These can thus also occur in calm seas and in the absence of other atmospheric perturbations. They are therefore quite unpredictable. Once formed, the waves can reach heights much greater than those of the worst stormy sea. They are real mountains of water that advance overwhelming everything they encounter, before slowly shutting down according to the laws of inertia. This pitfall certainly exists and could have caused some of the unexplained misfortunes. In this hypothesis, however, it seems strange that the shipwrecks occurred in the roughly reported points such as the Strait of Florida (route of the Marine Sulfur Queen) or in the area of the archipelago of the Bahamas. In this case, the effects of any seismic waves should have been felt even near the coasts involved, but this never happened. We are therefore still faced with contradictory elements which limit the possibility of a cause of this type. The same reasoning applies to tsunamis. The settling movements that cause them have a wider range and would not escape the nib of the seismographs, in addition to the evident fact that their consequences would involve many coastal populations.
Various journalists and writers who have dealt with the disasters that occurred in the triangle have pointed out how they have become particularly frequent since 1945, ie immediately after the war. It was then thought of the possibility of sabotage or terrorism by some combat units that had not accepted the outcome of the conflict, and had continued to lead a personal struggle however crazy and hopeless. But here one should then hypothesize the presence of submarines and combat ships in the area, and this is sincerely unthinkable.
In conclusion, none of the hypotheses examined is capable of explaining, in some way, a sufficient number of misfortunes. Even thinking each time of a set of various contributing causes, which would widen the number of naturally possible accidents, there would still be many without a logical explanation.
The Bermuda Triangle - the survivors
DICK STERN - In his book Invisible Horizons, Vincent Gaddis reports that he received a letter from a former aviator, one Dick Stern, with pertinent and astounding information. Stern wrote that towards the end of 1944 he had been part of a squadron destined for Italy. The squadron consisted of a group of seven bombers. Approximately 300 miles beyond Bermuda, his plane was overwhelmed by an unexpected and violent storm, which forced him to return to the United States. The weather was clear and the stars were visible when the phenomenon occurred, but the whirlwind had overturned the plane and caused it to rear up so violently that the crew had been thrown against the ceiling. Due to the whirlwind, the plane had lost altitude so much that it was about to crash into the sea. When his aircraft returned to base, Stern learned that out of another squadron of seven aircraft, only one had returned; that there had been no radio contact with the missing aircraft, nor later found wrecks or survivors. This incident, which occurred a year before the disaster of Squadron 19, also in December, was not considered a strange loss, because it occurred in wartime, and received no publicity. A few years after the end of the conflict, Stern and his wife were flying from Bermuda to Nassau by day in a Bristol Britannia when an incident quite similar to the first occurred. No warning, and the food the passengers were eating was hurled to the ceiling. This phenomenon can be explained as an example of clear air turbulence (CAT), which if intense and prolonged, can destroy an aircraft and scatter it at sea. In any case, Dick Stern had the adventure of encountering the same mysterious force twice, at almost the same point in the Triangle, and lived to tell of his experiences.
JOE TALLEY - Joe Talley, captain of a fishing boat, the WildGoose, instead experienced a different way (although not fatal, at least in his case) of disappearing in the ark of the Triangle. This accident does not concern an airplane, but his own fishing vessel, towed by another vessel. The case happened to him on the Tongue of the Ocean, a very deep point included in the Bahama group, which however is not part of the Bahama Banks (Banks of the Bahamas), as its relatively narrow area has a depth of thousands of meters; a very steep drop off east of Andros Island, and a spot where many disappearances have occurred. Captain Talley's eighty-foot shark fishing boat was to be towed south on the Tongue of the Ocean by a 100-foot tug, the Caicos Trader. The weather was good, and a brisk trade wind was blowing from the southwest. The two boats were approaching the southern part of the area, where this underwater canyon rises forming a large crater-shaped hole in the southern sector, with a diameter of 64 kilometers. The cliffs and, to the east, the Exuma range, protect the Tongue of the Ocean at this point from the fury of the sea, which could be unleashed by the trade winds from the southeast. It was night, and Captain Talley was asleep in his bunk below decks. Suddenly he was awakened by a gush of water pouring over him. After automatically grabbing a life jacket, he tried to reach an open hatch. As he struggled to get out, he found himself under water; but, having met a cable, he followed it to the surface, calculating a distance varying from fifteen to twenty-five meters. Evidently, when he had managed to escape from his cabin, he had been submerged in ten or fifteen meters of water. Once he reached the surface, he realized that the Caicos Trader had continued without him. Here is what had happened: the sudden force which was pulling the Wild Goose under the water, towards the bottom, with Captain Talley aboard, threatened to capsize the Caicos Trader, due to attached tow line. Then the tug's crew had cut the cable, leaving the immediate vicinity; then the tug had turned back, to see if by some miracle Talley had managed to get out of the cabin of his boat which was being dragged under the water. The men on the tug had seen theWild Goose sink, as if she were caught in a whirlpool. After about half an hour Talley, now on the verge of drowning, was amazed to hear his name shouted over the water through a megaphone by the Caicos Trader, who had returned. He managed to yell out an answer, and thus he was saved. Since most captains in the area know that many unexplained ship disappearances are often accompanied by compass and radio malfunctions, an investigation was made into the functioning of the compass during the incident. It was found, however, that the helmsman had set his course and left the wheel, so there was no way of knowing whether there had been a mechanical aberration at the time.
DON HENRY - The experience of Captain Don Henry, in 1966, offers us a clear description of a tug of war between the tug and an unidentified force which was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to take possession of the barge. Captain Henry was the owner of a Miami marine salvage company called the Sea Phantom Exploration Company, he had extensive experience as a captain and navigator. Leave it to Captain Henry to report the incident in his own words, which were transcribed during a conversation with Dr. Manson Valentine (student of the phenomena of the Bermuda Triangle) concerning the missing barge.
"We were on our way back, between Puerto Rico and Lauderdale. We had been at sea for three days, towing an empty barge, which had carried petroleum nitrate. I was aboard the Good News, a two thousand horsepower tug, forty-nine long meters. The barge which we were towing weighed two thousand five hundred tons, and was connected by a cable more than 300 meters long. We were on the Tongue of the Ocean, having passed the Exumas, at a depth of about 600 fathoms. In the afternoon, the weather it was good and the sky clear. I had gone for a few minutes to the cabin behind the bridge, when I heard a great shouting.
I got out of the cabin and ran onto the deck, yelling, 'What the hell is going on?' The first thing I looked at was the compass, which was spinning clockwise. There was no reason for such a thing to happen. I didn't know what had happened, but it was certainly something big. It seemed that the water was coming from all directions. The horizon had disappeared, we could not see it, the water, the sky and the horizon blended together. We couldn't figure out where we were. Whatever it was, it snatched, stole, or borrowed everything from our generators. All sources of electricity stopped producing energy. The generators kept running, but we couldn't get any power. The engineer tried to start an emergency generator, I was worried about the barge. It was solid, but I couldn't see it. It seemed to be covered by a cloud, and meanwhile the waves seemed more agitated than elsewhere. I pushed the valves all the way. I didn't know where we were going, but I wanted to get away from there in a hurry. It seemed that something wanted to pull us back, but could not do it. Moving away from that point was like stepping out of a fog bank. When we got out, the tow line was taut, as in the Indian rope trick, but at the end of the line, nothing was visible, everything was wrapped in a fog concentrated at that point. I leapt onto the jetty and started shooting. The cursed barge came out of the fog; but there was no fog anywhere else. Indeed, the visibility was ten miles. In the foggy area, where the trailer should have been, the water was rough, although the waves were not high. Have two people ever pulled you by the arms in opposite directions? I had the feeling that we were in a place or point that someone or something wanted, and that someone or something wanted us to be somewhere other than where we were going." "Was there some kind of greenish light on the horizon?" "No, it was milky. That's all I can say. I wasn't minding the colors at the time. After we left that place, we had to charge the batteries. I had to throw away fifty flashlight cells. " mind the Bermuda Triangle ?" "Yes. It was the only thing I could think about at the time." 'Have you ever had other experiences like this? ' only experience that fell to me. And one was enough for me! "
CHUCH WAKELEY - Chuch Wakeley recounts a conspicuous electronic incident, in which an electronic force or presence seemed to temporarily take possession of his airplane as it flew between Nassau and Ford Lauderdale. Chuck Wakeley was in his thirties, and had been a professional airplane and helicopter pilot for more than ten years. He had considerable experience, having flown most of his flights solo over the jungles of Panama and South America, where a good memory for detail and a cool reaction to danger are often the secrets of survival. He's a trained observer, and he's got what it takes. "In November 1964, I was a pilot with Sunline Aviation in Miami. During that time, I took a group of people on a charter flight to Nassau; then I had to return. I dropped the passengers, and departed the Nassau airport shortly after dark. The air was clear and the stars were bright. I was following course on the Nassau VOR, intercepting the Bimini VOR en route. About 9.30 P.M. I passed over the northern tip of Andros Island, and was able see the lights of some towns. I had leveled off at about eight thousand feet and was setting myself up for a normal flight, but fifty to eighty kilometers past Andros, as I was heading straight for Bimini, I began to notice something unusual: like a very faint glow on the wings. At first I thought it was an effect created by the cabin lights, twinkling through the tinted Plexigia windows, because the wings had a translucent appearance, they looked like a pale blue-green, though they were actually painted bright white. Over the course of five minutes or so this glow grew in intensity, until it became so shimmering that it was difficult for me to read the instruments. The magnetic compass began to turn, slowly but steadily; the fuel gauges, which at takeoff showed half full, now showed full. Suddenly, the autopilot banked the plane to the right, so I had to unplug it and manually operate the machine. I couldn't trust any of the electrically governed instruments, for they were completely out of order or gone berserk. Soon the whole plane was glowing, but it wasn't reflected light—the glow was coming from the plane itself. I remember when I looked at the wings from the windows, I saw that they didn't just glow with a blue-green light. At this point I could no longer rely on my autogyro or horizon and altitude indicators; and, since it was night and I was flying with the artificial horizon, I no longer had a horizon to fly towards. The glitter was so intense that I could no longer see the stars. I did the only thing I could do, which was let go of the controls, and let the plane fly in whatever direction it would go. The glow increased in a blinding crescendo of light, lasted for about five minutes, then gradually diminished. As soon as the glow ceased, all instruments resumed normal operation. I checked all the switches: none had tripped. The fuses hadn't blown. I realized that the unit was working normally when the fuel gauges resumed showing that the tanks were half full. The magnetic compass stabilized, showing me that I was only a few degrees off course. I put the autopilot on: it was normal. Before landing, I checked all the systems: landing gear, fiap, etc. Everything was fine. Incidentally, the airplane had an antistatic circuit that was supposed to eliminate electrostatic charges. Question: "Do you think your case was related to the Bermuda Triangle?" "I knew nothing about the Bermuda Triangle before the accident. I thought it was St. Elmo's Fire, although St. Elmo's Fire doesn't look like that.""When did you first hear about the Bermuda Triangle? " "It's a way to avoid the so-called Triangle, if you're going anywhere like Puerto Rico, short of flying north of Bermuda. Today, you hear a lot more about the Triangle, especially when an airplane vanishes completely illogically". What may have been an eyewitness observation, seen from the air, of a possible destructive force at work in the Bermuda Triangle was reported by Pursuit, a quarterly magazine published by the Society for the Investigation of theUnexplained.Report author Robert Durand recounts an incident observed from the control nacelle of a Boeing 707 flying from San Juan to New York on April 1, 1963. When the phenomenon was noticed, the aircraft's position was (so reported) 190 54' N latitude, and 660 47' W longitude, a point included in the Triangle and above the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the most depths of the ocean, where the sea reaches a depth of almost nine thousand meters. The extraordinary sighting was made by the co-pilot (who wishes to remain anonymous) at 1.30 in the afternoon, twenty minutes after take-off, when the jet was at an altitude of 9450 metres. Suddenly the copilot saw, about 8000 meters to starboard of the course the jet was following, that the ocean rose in a great round mountain, apparently caused by an underwater atomic explosion, it looked like an immense cauliflower in the water. Immediately, he called the attention of the captain and the engineer on board, who observed the phenomenon in detail for about thirty seconds; then they unfastened their seat belts and pushed further to starboard, to be able to see better. According to their assessment, the immense and murky mountain of water reached a diameter of eight to one thousand six hundred meters and a height that was perhaps half its width. Understandably, the commander did not go back to observe the phenomenon more closely, and he kept his flight schedule. As the plane departed from the area, the huge mountain of water was seen to begin to subside. Subsequently, the co-pilot inquired with various agencies, including the FBI and the Coast Guard, and consulted a seismology specialist, but obtained no news that could confirm the phenomenon: nothing unusual had occurred in that area, no earthquakes, no tidal waves, no immense waterspouts.
