Human are always attracted to mystery & when there’s mystery combined with horror, no better combination can ever be made to satisfy the thirst of mind. For decades, the Atlantic Ocean’s fabled Bermuda Triangle has captured the human imagination with unexplained disappearances of ships, planes & people.
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle or Hurricane alley, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean roughly between Bahamas, Bermuda and the east coast of the U.S.,
covering about 5,00,000 square miles of ocean of the southeastern tip of Florida, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances due to which for decades it has been the subject of numerous books, TV programmes, newspaper and magazine articles and websites, and inspired plenty of dread and fascination.
covering about 5,00,000 square miles of ocean of the southeastern tip of Florida, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances due to which for decades it has been the subject of numerous books, TV programmes, newspaper and magazine articles and websites, and inspired plenty of dread and fascination.
Legends of the Bermuda Triangle
In 1492 on the night of October 11, When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World; he reported that great flame of fire crashed into the sea one night and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later. He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.
Centuries before anyone had ever heard of the Triangle, the island of Bermuda developed a reputation as a mysterious, dangerous place where mariners faced peril. A 1609 pamphlet described the island as "a most prodigious and enchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, storms and foul weather," and even compared it to the Scylla and Charybdis, the Aegean Sea monsters mentioned in Homer's "The Odyssey."
Some have pointed to Bermuda as a possible model for the site of the shipwreck depicted in William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest” that may have enhanced the area’s aura o mystery.
After gaining widespread fame as the first a person to sail solo around the globe, Joshua Slocum disappeared on a 1909 voyage to South America. Though it’s unclear exactly what happened, many sources later attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle.
But it wasn't until 1964 that the idea of the Bermuda Triangle being a mysteriously perilous place emerged. That's when Argosy magazine published an article titled "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle," which cited a string of shipwrecks and aircraft disappearances in the area, and offered atmospheric aberrations or magnetic disturbances as possible explanations.
Term:
In February 1964, Vincent Gaddis wrote an article called "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" in the pulp magazine Argosy saying Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region. The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book, Invisible Horizons. However he was the person who coined the term “Bermuda Triangle”.
Books & Movies on Bermuda Triangle:
Interest in the Bermuda Triangle continued to grow after publication of "The Bermuda Triangle," a book by Charles Berlitz and J. Manson Valentine, which sold millions of copies. Producers of a 1974 documentary, "The Devil's Triangle," narrated by horror movie star Vincent Price, offered a $10,000 reward to any viewer who could solve the mystery. TV series such as "Wonder Woman" and "Scooby Doo" used the Bermuda Triangle as a setting for episodes, and Milton Bradley marketed a Bermuda Triangle game. The Triangle featured in the 1977 Stephen Spielberg movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The band Fleetwood Mac even did a 1974 song, "Bermuda Triangle," which warned that "it might be a hole in the ocean, or a fog that won't let go" that was causing the disappearances.
Other than these a number of movies like 1975’s “Satan’s Triangle” & “Beyond the Bermuda Triangle”, “The Triangle”(2005), “Gulliver’s Travels”(2010), “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”(2013) all used the Bermuda Triangle’s mystery to enchant people.
Notable incidents
Mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in any other part of Atlantic Ocean, which explains why the area has become infamous. Unexplained circumstances surround some of these accidents, including one in which the pilots of a squadron of U.S. Navy bombers became disoriented while lying over the area; the planes were never found. Others boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages. But although myriad fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well travelled sections of the world.
USS Cyclops, 1918
In the spring of 1918, the U.S.S. Cyclops — a 540-foot long naval vessel outfitted with 50-caliber guns — took on a load of 10,000 tons of manganese ore in Brazil, and then sailed north to Barbados, where it was resupplied for its nine-day voyage to Baltimore harbor. But after leaving Barbados, the ship and its 309 men were never seen nor heard from again. Navy cruisers searched the ocean, but saw no sign of the ship, not even an oil slick, and the Navy eventually declared the crew lost at sea. It was the greatest loss of life in a non-combat situation in U.S. Naval history. While the ship's fate has never been officially resolved, Marvin Barrash, a researcher who is a descendant of one of the lost crew members told the Washington Post that he believes a combination of events: a ship unbalanced by a very heavy load, engine breakdowns, and a big wave that struck the vessel, sent it to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench. This trench is the deepest part of the Atlantic, which would explain why the ship never has been found.
Carroll A. Deering
A five-masted schooner built in 1919, Carroll A. Deering was found hard aground and abandoned at Diamond Shoals, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on January 31, 1921. Rumors at the time indicated Deering was a victim of piracy, possibly connected with the illegal rum-running trade during Prohibition, and possibly involving another ship, Hewitt, which disappeared at roughly the same time. Just hours later, an unknown steamer sailed near the lightship along the track of Deering, and ignored all signals from the lightship. It is speculated that Hewitt may have been this mystery ship, and possibly involved in Deering's crew disappearance.
Flight 19
The story of Flight 19 is the best-known of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances. Flight 19 was a training flight of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945, while over the Atlantic. The squadron's flight plan was scheduled to take them due east from Fort Lauderdale for 141 mi, north for 73 mi, and then back over a final 140-mile leg to complete the exercise. The flight never returned to base. The disappearance was attributed by Navy investigators to navigational error leading to the aircraft running out of fuel.
One of the search and rescue aircraft deployed to look for them, a PBM Mariner with a 13-man crew, also disappeared. A tanker off the coast of Florida reported seeing an explosion and observing a widespread oil slick when fruitlessly searching for survivors. The weather was becoming stormy by the end of the incident. According to contemporaneous sources the Mariner had a history of explosions due to vapour leaks when heavily loaded with fuel, as it might have been for a potentially long search-and-rescue operation.
Star Tiger and Star Ariel
G-AHNP Star Tiger disappeared on January 30, 1948, on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda; G-AGRE Star Ariel disappeared on January 17, 1949, on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica. Both were Avro Tudor IV passenger aircraft operated by British South American Airways. Both planes were operating at the very limits of their range and the slightest error or fault in the equipment could keep them from reaching the small island.
Douglas DC-3
On December 28, 1948, a Douglas DC-3 aircraft, number NC16002, disappeared while on a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. No trace of the aircraft, or the 32 people on board, was ever found. A Civil Aeronautics Board investigation found there was insufficient information available on which to determine probable cause of the disappearance.
Connemara IV
A pleasure yacht was found adrift in the Atlantic south of Bermuda on September 26, 1955; it is usually stated in the stories (Berlitz, Winer) that the crew vanished while the yacht survived being at sea during three hurricanes. The 1955 Atlantic hurricane season shows Hurricane Ione passing nearby between 14 and 18 September, with Bermuda being affected by winds of almost gale.
The S.S. Marine Sulphur Queen,1963
On Feb. 2, 1963, the S.S. Marine Sulphur Queen, a 19-year-old, 7,200-ton oil tanker was bound for Norfolk, Virginia from Beaumont, Texas carrying 15,000 tons of molten sulfur in heated tanks. But it never reached its destination. Unlike some of the other vanished craft in the Bermuda Triangle, though the ship was never found, debris was recovered, including pieces of a raft, a life vest, and a broken oar. The ship was in poor repair and had suffered reoccurring fires around its sulfur tanks. The cooled sulfur emissions from those blazes had hardened and caked the ship's pumps, corroded electrical equipment, and even shorted out the ship's generator. Time magazine noted that the mystery was not that the ship had disappeared, but "how it had managed to put to sea in the first place."
KC-135 Stratotankers
On August 28, 1963, a pair of US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft collided and crashed into the Atlantic 300 miles west of Bermuda. Some writers say that while the two aircraft did collide there were two distinct crash sites, separated by over 160 miles of water. However, Kusche's research showed that the unclassified version of the Air Force investigation report revealed that the debris field defining the second "crash site" was examined by a search and rescue ship, and found to be a mass of seaweed and driftwood tangled in an old buoy.
Milwaukee's 440th Airlift Wing, Plane 680, 1965
On a clear night in 1965, a seasoned flying crew from the Air Force Reserve Command's 440th Airlift Wing flew from Milwaukee in a C-119 Flying Boxcar on their way to Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, south of the Bahamas. They landed as scheduled at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida at 5:04 p.m. and spent two hours and 43 minutes on the ground. Then they took off at 7:47 p.m. and headed toward Grand Turk, but never reached their destination. There was no indication of trouble and all radio communication was routine. When they didn't land, radio traffic controllers started calling Plane 680 but didn't receive a response. Only a few scraps of debris were found, and those could have been tossed out of the cargo plane. Among those on board was an expert maintenance crew, so if there was a mechanical problem on the flight, there were plenty of people to take care of it. The investigation report at the time surmised, once again, that the plane had run out of fuel.
Possible Reasons behind the misshapen
The ocean has always been a mysterious place to humans, and when foul weather or poor navigation is involved, it can be a very deadly place. This is true all over the world. There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean.
Some speculate that unknown and mysterious forces account for the unexplained disappearances, such as extraterrestrials capturing humans for study; the influence of the lost continent of Atlantis; vortices that suck objects into other dimensions; and other whimsical ideas. Other writers attribute the events to UFOs. Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.
Some explanations are more grounded in science, if not in evidence. These include oceanic flatulence (methane gas erupting from ocean sediments) and disruptions in geomagnetic lines of flux.
Environmental considerations could explain many, if not most, of the disappearances. The majority of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes pass through the Bermuda Triangle, and in the days prior to improved weather forecasting, these dangerous storms claimed many ships. Also, the Gulf Stream can cause rapid, sometimes violent, changes in weather. Additionally, the large number of islands in the Caribbean Sea creates many areas of shallow water that can be treacherous to ship navigation. And there is some evidence to suggest that the Bermuda Triangle is a place where a “magnetic” compass sometimes points towards “true” north, as opposed to “magnetic” north.
The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard contend that there are no supernatural explanations for disasters at sea. Their experience suggests that the combined forces of nature and human fallibility outdo even the most incredulous science fiction. They add that no official maps exist that delineate the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle. The U. S. Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name and does not maintain an official file on the area.
Criticism of the concept
Larry Kusche, author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved argued that many claims of Gaddis and subsequent writers were exaggerated, dubious or unverifiable. Kusche's research revealed a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies between Berlitz's accounts and statements from eyewitnesses, participants, and others involved in the initial incidents. Kusche noted cases where pertinent information went unreported, such as the disappearance of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, which Berlitz had presented as a mystery, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Other responses
When the UK Channel 4 television program The Bermuda Triangle (1992) was being produced by Simmons of Geofilms for the Equinox series, the marine insurance market Lloyd's of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd's determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there. Lloyd's does not charge higher rates for passing through this area. United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft that pass through on a regular basis.
Skeptical researchers, such as Ernest Taves and Barry Singer, have noted how mysteries and the paranormal are very popular and profitable. This has led to the production of vast amounts of material on topics such as the Bermuda Triangle. They were able to show that some of the pro-paranormal material is often misleading or inaccurate, but its producers continue to market it. Accordingly, they have claimed that the market is biased in favor of books, TV specials, and other media that support the Triangle mystery, and against well-researched material if it espouses a skeptical viewpoint.
Benjamin Radford, an author and scientific paranormal investigator, noted in an interview on the Bermuda Triangle that it could be very difficult locating an aircraft lost at sea due to the vast search area, and although the disappearance might be mysterious, that did not make it paranormal or unexplainable. Radford further noted the importance of double-checking information as the mystery surrounding the Bermuda Triangle had been created by people who had neglected to do so.
By : Primavera
Source:By : Primavera
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/folklore/bermuda-triangle
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