The ocean can swallow anything — and that's just one of the potential explanations for the disappearances that have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle . However, there are interesting facts about the Bermuda Triangle that everyone should know .
When it comes to aviation mysteries, none are stranger than Flight 19. On December 5, 1945, a squadron of five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers carrying a total of 14 people took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a training exercise over the North Atlantic. More than an hour after takeoff, the pilots in the unit began calling for help, saying things like, ' I don't know where we are, ' and ' Both my compasses are out .' They seemed strangely disoriented and confused. Although procedure called for the planes to fly west, they kept veering off course. A rescue ship sent to search for the planes also disappeared. Neither the plane nor the crew of Flight 19 were ever found.
Flight 19 may be one of the most remarkable stories to come out of the Bermuda Triangle , a source of curiosity and suspicion of the supernatural. But is there any evidence that the area can cause planes and ships to disappear without a trace, or is this just a case of mass maritime panic? Let's find out!
It is difficult to distinguish between fact and myth about the Bermuda Triangle.
There's a big problem with any discussion of the Bermuda Triangle. As the National Archives puts it, after the bare facts about several planes that disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1945, " that's where the rational consensus ends, and the conspiracy theories begin. "
If you search the internet, you'll learn that the Navy went to great lengths to search for the missing Flight 19, dispatching more than 300 planes and ships to search 300,000 square feet of the Atlantic. But the search turned up nothing—not a single body, not even a single piece of wreckage. In fact, a rescue plane was also missing. The Navy's incident report noted that the fleet " looked as if it had flown to Mars ."
Flight 19 helped create the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. Although no official boundaries have been established, it is commonly thought to be a 500,000-square-mile triangle in the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Miami, Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the island of Bermuda. It is also known by names like The Twilight Zone and Limbo of the Lost. Tales of missing ships and people have haunted the area for decades. But its mysterious reputation actually goes back much further.
Christopher Columbus may have had strange experiences in the Bermuda Triangle
While en route to the New World in 1492, Christopher Columbus passed through what would later become known as the Bermuda Triangle. You may have read stories about seeing a giant fire in the sky and his compass malfunctioning. While these are true, they occurred too early in the voyage to be part of the Bermuda Triangle. More likely, just before he sighted land, Columbus reported seeing a light in the distance. Various explanations have been proposed for this sighting—a campfire, bioluminescent worms, etc.—all leading to the theory that Columbus lied so he could have the credit of making the discovery himself.
Columbus isn't the only historical figure to shed light on the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Some Shakespeare scholars believe that The Tempest was partly based on reports of a shipwreck in Bermuda called the Sea Venture. Shakespeare wrote of " Bermoothes still sorrowing ," which could be interpreted as a reference to a storm-ravaged Bermuda. But Shakespeare didn't attribute any supernatural qualities to the area, or point to any patterns; those ideas only began to emerge in the 20th century.
Several ships, planes and people have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the 20th century.
No one seemed to want to go through the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1900s. In 1918, a US Navy cargo ship called the USS Cyclops sank without sending a distress signal, causing the 300 people on board to vanish in an instant. The wreck was never found. Two sister ships of the Cyclops disappeared in the same area decades later.
In 1921, a schooner named the Carroll A. Deering sailed through the Triangle before landing on the coast of North Carolina. The Coast Guard boarded the ship but found no trace of the 12 crew members, who had prepared food before disappearing. Even more strangely, some of the captain's notes appeared to be written in someone else's handwriting. The lifeboats were missing, but—like the crew—they were never found.
Triangle investigators also pointed to the disappearance of a commercial airliner, a Douglas DC-3, flying from San Juan to Miami in 1948, with 32 passengers and crew missing. A search was launched but no trace was found. A similar story occurred in 1949, when the Star Ariel, a plane en route to Jamaica, also disappeared. Despite clear weather, radio contact was lost after just an hour of flight. The 20 people on board were never seen again.
It is believed that over 70 ships have been "swallowed" by the Bermuda Triangle over time, but it wasn't until the 1950s that people started to take notice.
A writer named the Bermuda Triangle in the 1960s.
Of course, the stories of these disappearances were published in the newspapers of the time. But it took a while for people to connect them together by observing that they all occurred in a specific pizza-shaped area of the Atlantic Ocean. And it wasn't until 1964 that the term Bermuda Triangle was coined. It was Vincent Gaddis, a writer for the men's magazine Argosy, who titled his article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle " and went on to tell of various mysterious disappearances in the area.
Gaddis writes: " The Bermuda Triangle underscores the fact that despite lightning-fast flights and radio chatter, we still have a world large enough for people, their machines, and their ships to disappear without a trace. "
Gaddis offered several explanations for these events, including what he called the ' hole-in-the-sky theory ,' or an atmospheric aberration that could have affected the pilot's vision. He also speculated that the area's unique magnetic interference could have caused compasses to malfunction. Without any direction, ships could easily become lost.
Before Argosy's article, there had been a few articles about the Bermuda Triangle, but then newspapers started running stories about missing planes and ships. And while some of the explanations were plausible, others were. fantastical.
There are many strange theories about the Bermuda Triangle.
You can't really study the Bermuda Triangle in any detail without acknowledging the wealth of bizarre thinking it has inspired over the years. It's not just been theorized that it's environmentally strange - some have even suggested that it might be supernaturally strange.
In 1974, Charles Berlitz, grandson of foreign language educator Maximilian Berlitz, published a book called The Bermuda Triangle. It became a bestseller when it proposed that the Bermuda Triangle was a place of strange things because the lost city of Atlantis was hidden at the bottom of the ocean. He explained that ancient technology was interfering with navigational devices.
On a later expedition, Berlitz claimed to have located a 420-foot-tall pyramid on the ocean floor. He said he was unable to examine it further because the depth was too great. Another time, he recounted, a trip to the Bermuda Triangle resulted in his boat's engine failing. Green lights appeared from underwater and shot up into the sky, then turned orange. He believed that something in the Triangle " changed the molecular composition of whatever was inside and caused it to disappear or go into another dimension ."
None of this has helped Berlitz's popularity with scientists or experts. The famous maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison called the book "almost complete nonsense."
But the lost city of Atlantis isn't the only theory floating around. There's also the wormhole theory, which suggests the Triangle is home to an interdimensional portal that could take ships to another region or even another place in time.