Bermuda Triangle: Fiction or a Really Mysterious Place?

On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers took off from Fort Lord Del Florida at 2:10 p.m. as part of a series of naval exercises designated as Flight 19.

In this 320-mile journey, they were to travel east to Florida, then through the north coast, over the island of Grand Bahama, to the southwest, and then back toward their home base.

Five days later, when no trace of any of the five planes was found, the search was called off. .

The training exercise was led by veteran pilot Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor, who was accompanied by another experienced exercise pilot who led 12 other trainees, including airmen, gunners and radio operators, in a straightforward exercise.

But two hours into the flight, Taylor radioed the base to report that he had completely lost track of directions. “Both of my navigation devices have responded, I’m on the ground but it’s broken, I believe I’m in the Keys (Florida) but I don’t know how far down and I’m on the ground,” he said. Don’t know how to get back to Fort Lord Dale.’ If Flight 19 had stayed on its intended course, it should not have been anywhere near the Florida Keys at that time, but rather over the Great Seal, 200 miles away.

During the next two hours, Taylor radioed again to say he believed they were over the Gulf of Mexico and heading back to Florida. His last message revealed that the five planes of Flight 19 were running low on fuel and that they had to take decisive action.

‘All the ships are quite badly tied up, we have to get off as soon as the sea comes in, when the first man gets in to ten gallons we’ll all go into the water together.’

Two flying boats were sent to scout the area. One had to return with its antenna frozen in ice while the other crashed into the sea. The five-day search that began for Flight 19 scoured 250,000 square miles of open ocean but found no trace of them.

The five planes apparently did indeed disappear from Earth, with one journalist claiming that a member of the Naval Board of Inquiry set up to investigate the disappearances told him that Flight 19 had ‘flew to Mars’.

Thus began the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle that gripped the public imagination for the next three decades. The Bermuda Triangle is roughly the area between some locations in Miami, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda, although the boundaries are often blurred, allowing for anecdotal evidence.

Planes and boats are said to crash and disappear with alarming regularity in the area known as the Devil’s Triangle. Theories abound, from the Bermuda Triangle being the epicenter of UFO sightings to the swampy city of Atlantis, where disappearances of planes and boats have been attributed to paranormal or supernatural entities. The head is slapped.

The Bermuda Triangle was absorbed into the popular mainstream culture of the 1970s and 1980s and received considerable media attention. The 1977 TV series The Fantastic Journey chronicled a family’s scientific research trip that gets hit by green clouds in the Bermuda Triangle and their ship crashes on a mysterious land where time streams collide and They get together.

Vincent Price made a documentary called The Devil’s Triangle in 1974, in which the producers poured in whatever crazy events were available, and TV celebrities from Scooby-Doo to Wonder Woman all visited the Bermuda Triangle. Faced with the mystery of

There was a board game and an Atari video game. Even pop music could not escape the Bermuda Triangle’s charms, with Barry Manilow in 1981 and Fleetwood Mac in 1974 releasing tracks with the former’s lyrics beginning with the words: ‘I think You’ve heard of the Bermuda Triangle, there’s something going on all the time, nobody seems to know what it is, and the Air Force won’t reveal it.’

Flight 19 was being investigated by the Navy, not the Air Force, and its 400-page report did not reveal what happened to the five planes it knew. Lawrence David Kosche’s 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Salute! Not exactly referring to its title, it sheds light on unusual theories about Flight 19, saying that the planes had run out of fuel and that the crews were unable to board safety boats before their malfunctioning planes sank.

But it did not solve the fundamental mysteries of Flight 19: why their navigation instruments stopped working, how they drifted so far, and why cryptic radio messages were sent that said ‘even Even the sea does not look as it should be’ and then more sensational that ‘it seems that . . . Don’t follow me.’

Charles Berlitz’s best-selling book The Bermuda Triangle, published in 1974, added to its mystique, selling 20 million copies to a sensation-seeking public.

In fact, it’s probably Berlitz’s book (yes, he’s part of the family that built the language learning empire) that cemented the idea of ​​the Bermuda Triangle as a mysterious and unusual place in people’s minds.

Berlitz explained the theories of Atlantis and UFOs and was a proponent of the idea that alien aliens had visited Earth in ancient times.

Kosche derided Berlitz’s theories, but by the 1970s the Bermuda Triangle had gained a deep hold on public psychology, even though the term had only been introduced a decade earlier.

“The legend of the Bermuda Triangle began in 1964 when Vincent Geddes wrote an article for Argosy magazine and in 1974 Charles Berlitz and Richard Winner (the (Devil’s Triangle) books truly took him to heaven. Leonard Namoy in 1977 TV series ‘In search of.’ I also had a good discussion on the Bermuda Triangle. Why the same area?

Are there really more accidents there than in other areas of the ocean? As far as I know the area is completely arbitrary and there are not many reported cases of air or sea disappearances in what is known as the Bermuda Triangle.’

Its influence on popular general culture is a testament to how widely known the Bermuda Triangle was, and yet we hardly ever talk about it today. “In some ways it was definitely a sign of the times,” says Satterley, “think of the sixties and seventies when we were going to the moon and in 1977 Spielberg’s Big Close Encounters came out.”

‘Til everyone was looking up. I don’t think there has ever been a passenger plane crash in this area and to blow the air out of this myth you can look up the planes that have passed through the area yourself on an online map. But I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten more mixed up in general, it’s just that the themes of our stories and myths have changed.’

Joe Rogan frequently discusses flying unidentifiable objects based on information released by the US government on his podcast in America. What is important to keep in mind is that obscure phenomena do not require far-fetched explanations to be true; the entire history of science suggests that it is a mistake to believe things because of unreliable or insufficient evidence. Because the hypothetical explanation is always around.

Adding to his point, Satterley says that sometimes it is a terrible mistake ‘when something seems strange and there is no scientific or natural explanation for what we have just seen, people immediately attribute an explanation to it. and sometimes conflate it with the supernatural, people prefer a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

“As a species it’s in our instincts to look for impressions that are necessary for survival, but they often lead us in a false positive direction because it’s safer than a false negative. See rustling in the grass.” It is understandable to think of a lion instead of a crow. People often turn to the supernatural or the supernatural when an event has yet to be explained, but when a satisfactory natural explanation is found, people tend to dismiss the supernatural or supernatural claim as obsolete.

‘Running horses may seem like a harmless hobby. But remember that the above mentioned books were published in the same year that the UFO Christian Cult Heaven Gate was founded. In 1997, the group believed they could trace the unexplained flying elements behind the comet Helbop. To do this, the group committed suicide.

When you leave the door of critical consciousness half open, you risk people taking things in strange directions and drawing extreme conclusions.’

The disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle predate Flight 19, but this is a matter of point of view or jumping to conclusions.

In 1884, the sailing training ship HMS Atlanta (originally HMS Juno) disappeared with its entire crew after sailing from Bermuda to Falmouth, Cornwall.

The USS Cyclops disappeared in 1918 after leaving Barbados with manganese and coal. In 1921, the US Coast Guard found the ship Carroll A. Deering abandoned off the coast of North Carolina.

As far as the air is concerned, passenger planes operated by British South American Airways disappeared without a trace in 1948 and 1949, the Star Tiger from the Azores to Bermuda and the Star Ariel from Bermuda to Jamaica.

In 1948, the Douglas DC disappeared between San Juan, Puerto Rico and Miami, and no wreckage or trace of the 32 people on board was found.

As Satterley says, believing that there is something strange and unknown in the Bermuda Triangle is a tempting but romantic notion. Yet we no longer hear of it. Now either aliens or Atlanteans have stopped stealing our planes and ships, ripping them from time or space or pushing them to the bottom of the ocean or something else has happened.

That something else is probably the advancement of technology. When Bermuda Triangle fever was at its peak, methods of tracking shipping and human traffic routes were still in their infancy, whereas today we have GPS technology. Your cell phone can point you in the right direction within a few meters, but it’s very difficult to miss a tanker or a passenger plane.

Even if it happened today, we wouldn’t immediately think aliens or ghosts were responsible unless you live in a world on the fringes of the Internet. Take Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which went missing somewhere between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing in 2014.

Even with the latest tracking technology, no one could explain why or where the plane had gone down before two years ago when some wreckage began to be found.

But it shows how difficult it was to trace missing ships 35 years ago. “This incident shows how quickly we can lose an aircraft at sea, and consider that the first few aircraft lost were small single-engine planes that disappeared within seconds of hitting the water,” Satterley says.

Although the long stories of the Bermuda Triangle quenched people’s thirst for supernatural mysteries, the area was indeed very dangerous for professional reasons for those who lived in the sea.

Bill Lauber was born in Ohio and traveled on Lake Erie from an early age, taking the next step to sailing ocean-going vessels and mastering his craft in South Carolina.

He then moved to St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, where he obtained his captain’s license in 1984, sailing a party boat called Kon Tiki. Near his boat in St. Thomas was a beautiful three-sail ship called Da Marcos, so beautiful that it was used in movies and TV shows such as One Dun Line, Poldark, Dracula and Voyage of Charles Darwin. used to go

Bill and his wife befriend Stuart Finlay, a British citizen of the Da Marcos captain, and his Antiguan-born wife Aloma and their 16-month-old son, Christopher. In June 1984, the family left with their crew to compete in the Tall Sheep Race.

She disappeared in a northerly direction about seventy nautical miles from Bermuda. Stuart and his family were among the 19 dead and missing. Bill, 67, who now lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, recalls the rumors that became popular on St Thomas, well before social media and instant news systems, and the shock of the seafaring community.

The most common explanation given was that the Marcos was hit by a raging wave, and subsequent investigations revealed that two major mistakes had been made: a small door on the deck was left open and the ship’s galley was at that time. He was driving alone. As the cook was not a seasoned sailor, he was unable to cope with the difficult situation and the small door being left open, the boat quickly filled with water and sank into the sea.

Bill has traveled extensively in the Bermuda Triangle and has taken many boats to the islands in his time. They have never been hit by a typhoon but know how deadly it can be.

He says, ‘Storm waves or ocean currents are among the fastest things on the planet. It’s hard to believe, but they suddenly come at 700 miles per hour from any direction. If that had been the case and da Marcos had been hit by such a wave, it would have pushed her back with such force that her board would have automatically filled with water.’

The tragic incident of da Marcos forms the immediate focus of the stories of the Bermuda Triangle. People on board had lost their lives, including a young child, and talking to Bill, who knew the family, told stories that yielded conspiracy and paranormal theories.

Bill says that the Bermuda Triangle is a dangerous place, but not because of aliens or evil forces. It is the raging waves, hidden rocks and hurricanes that have claimed so many lives.

“Many times I have been in dangerous situations but that is part of seafaring,” he says. You have to respect the ocean. There are many dangers and many things that can cause a boat to go missing or a plane to crash.

When documentaries about the Bermuda Triangle came out, we in the sailing community laughed at them.

Everywhere there were stories that were actually old wives tales. It was a part of daily life that day. But I don’t know anyone who considers the Bermuda Triangle a paranormal or supernatural place simply because so many boats have been lost here. It just means it’s a place where you have to pay more attention.’

Bill had no trouble sailing in the Bermuda Triangle during his career. How about Shane Satterley? Despite the logical approach to these myths, will they challenge them?

‘That’s an interesting question,’ he says. When I heard it, I asked myself if I would be afraid to step on a tarot on the sidewalk while traveling to the third floor of a building. When you realize that no reliable evidence of anything supernatural or paranormal has ever been produced, your mind and everyday life are freed from these confusions.

Carl Sagan said, ‘Science is a candle in the dark, but a scientific way of thinking also makes you a less fearful person.’

As a postscript, Manilow was contacted to get his opinion on why the Bermuda Triangle had become so popular in the public consciousness that they had to co-create a song about it.

No response from them, so let’s turn to this 1981 song that was number fifteen in the UK chart that year, which we might consider one of the enduring mysteries of this expanse of secret ocean. As a pleasant reminder, although we know that Mother Nature has nothing to fear except an overdose,

‘Bermuda Triangle, it swallows people, Bermuda Triangle, don’t get too close to it.’