Whenever we hear mention of the term “Bermuda Triangle” we think of ships and planes which vanish into thin air never to be seen again, of a patch of sea that is best avoided, of compasses that spin wildly and of lost radio contact. What is it about the area of sea that lies off the coast of Florida that evokes such vivid imagery and is its reputation justified?
The triangle was first noticed by the reporter E.V.W. Jones who looked at many disappearances of vessels and saw that they all occurred within a relatively small area off the Florida coastline. The term itself was coined by the author of a book on sea mysteries, Vincent Gaddis, who also referred to it as the "Triangle of Death."
It is made up by the area which lies in between the three points of Miami, Puerto Rico and of course Bermuda and, since 1945, over 100 ships and planes are said to have vanished there with over one thousand lives lost. The disturbing thing though, is that the losses are total, with no signs of either wreckage, debris or bodies.
The U.S. Coastguards who patrol the area are familiar with the weather conditions they experience there, and they claim to “know” every stretch of water. Most of the vessels they are called to rescue are stranded due to bad weather, strong currents or just bad judgement on the part of would be sailors, and they say that, contrary to popular belief, they don't have any U.F.O. sightings to report.
They describe these waters as the boating capital of America as they play host to hundreds of boats, especially in the summer months, which is also the time of year when the thunderstorms can appear at very short notice indeed with the seas turning from calm to waves of eight feet high and winds up to hurricane level, all of which are easily capable of capsizing a boat. If you throw into this hostile mix the fact that you have inexperienced sailors taking a boat out for the first time, or worse still, those who dine out locally and then use their place mat with a map of the area to try and navigate their way to the Bahamas, then you have a recipe for disaster. Especially when you consider that the Gulf Stream can carry you north at anything up to four miles an hour, and if you can't see land, you wouldn't even realise.
However, it isn't such mundane mishaps as these which lend the Bermuda Triangle its reputation, it is often the much more amazing tales of military aircraft and large ships which are quoted, such as the tale of the two planes pursuing a U.F.O. which swallowed them up. This is the stuff of mystery, intrigue and romance that serves to increase the notoriety of what is after all just a stretch of water much like any other in the world.
One of the triangle's most famous cases of all occurred on December 5th, 1945 to “Flight 19” when five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers left Fort Lauderdale on a routine training flight. Each plane should have had on board an officer pilot and two crew members, but one of the crew members had had a premonition of disaster and stayed away. The projected flight was around five hundred miles and each plane was carrying enough fuel for one thousand miles of flight, but the five aircraft and the fourteen men were destined never to return, and every year since 1945 a memorial service is held at Fort Lauderdale in commemoration of flight 19.
At the start of the flight there were no expected problems as the weather at the 2pm take off was good and the forecast was clear. The five Avengers were well maintained and in regular use at the time and the pilots were highly trained. They were on a combat training exercise over the Atlantic, and all was apparently going well until about 3:15pm when the commander of the flight, Captain Charles C. Taylor, radioed in to say that they were off course and could not see land. When asked to give his position he said that he could not. It was soon clear to the tower that the pilot's instruments were not working correctly as they could hear the conversation passing between the other aircraft and they were saying that their instruments were "going crazy" and they all had a different reading.
Don Poole who had trained the pilots was present in the tower at the time, and Taylor told him that he thought that he was in the Gulf of Mexico. Poole knew that he was nowhere near it, but still Taylor could not work out where he was. Soon communication became difficult because heavy static began to obscure transmissions and Poole told Taylor to head west, if his compass wasn't working properly he should fly toward the sun and this would bring him back to land somewhere along the Florida coast. Either Taylor didn't hear him or chose to ignore him as he kept altering course, flying west for a while, but then turning east again when he thought that he was in the Gulf. A rescue boat was put on standby and the man on board, Jim Ward, was listening in on the conversations between the tower and the planes and was awaiting instructions. He heard Poole tell Taylor to fly toward the sun, and that way even if he was in the Gulf of Mexico he should still hit the coast of Texas. He asked Taylor how much fuel he had left and Taylor estimated that he had enough for about twenty minutes further flying time. The twenty minutes ticked slowly by with still no sign of the aircraft returning, and those on the ground knew that they must be down, but they had no idea where.
Rescue planes were sent, one of which was a twin engine Martin Mariner with thirteen crew on board, and this plane, like the five it sought, was never seen again. A total rescue operation involving over three hundred planes and many, many boats failed to find any clues as to the fate of the five missing Avengers and their fourteen crew, or the Mariner and its thirteen crew.
Captain Richard Roberts led an official investigation into the incident, but still no aircraft were found, and nor was any explanation for their loss. John Myhre of Florida believes that he can explain the loss of Flight 19 and "update" the official report made by Captain Roberts. His work took him fifteen years and he has calculated the wind speed, ocean currents and weather conditions of the day, and he is confident that he knows both where the planes went down and when.
He says that the wind direction and speed were not the same as they had planned and Taylor was confused. They flew into a bad storm system, which was further complicated by nightfall, and on their final known course they were heading for the Florida coast and would have made it back but for Taylor running out of fuel at 6:04pm. Once Taylor ditched, Myhre believes that the remaining planes flew in different directions in a last desperate attempt to reach dry land, and each aircraft now lies on the ocean floor below the spot where it ran out of fuel.
For a time it looked as though the five planes had been found on the sea bed but the planes found proved not to be those from Flight 19, and others raised aircraft have also been found not to be the five in question. The missing Martin Mariner which has also never been found may have a rational explanation for its disappearance as this was a notoriously dangerous model, and the crew of the ship "Gaines Mills" reported seeing the aircraft catch fire in mid-air and plummet into the sea where it exploded on impact. This report was supported by the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier "USS Solomons" who watched as the plane disappeared from their radar screens.
To add to the confusion there is a lot of misreporting on the case of Flight 19, and in his book about the Bermuda Triangle Charles Berlitz (grandson and heir to the phrase book founder) reports the last transmission from the lead pilot as "Don't come after me! They look like....” when in fact it was "We will have to ditch unless landfall.... When the first plane drops to ten gallons we all go down together." This kind of misreporting is apparently common with Berlitz and comes as no surprise to researcher Larry Kusche who says of him that "If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other colour is almost a certainty."
Time after time, when the Bermuda Triangle is discussed, the same phrases seem to crop up; "lost radio contact," "compasses spinning out of control" and "vanished without trace.” Many of them appear in the “Miami Herald,” of which Doug Clifton was executive editor, and he is also an avid collector of tales concerning the Bermuda Triangle, such as those which Berlitz lists in his book. Twelve of these are major vessels which have completely disappeared, and seven are of ships found floating Mary Celeste-like, abandoned and undamaged.
For example, the “Rosalie” was found in 1840, abandoned with its sails set and its cargo intact, but there are far earlier cases than this, such as the “Sea Venture” in 1609 which was carrying English settlers to Virginia but was shipwrecked off the island of Bermuda. On September 1st, the vessel's longboat set off on the 500 mile trip to the U.S. coast for help but was never seen again. In 1750, five Spanish treasure ships were caught in storms off Cape Hatteras and three of them completely vanished with no signs of debris or survivors.
More recently, in 1962, a large U.S.A.F. Boeing Stratotanker took off from Langley, Virginia and headed east for the Azores. Soon afterward, the control tower received weak radio signals from the plane, and when these stopped a full scale rescue was launched but it was in vain as no sign of the aircraft or its crew was ever found. Even more inexplicably on March 23rd 1962 the massive 20,000 ton freighter "Anita" vanished without trace. The Bermuda Triangle doesn't seem to respect age or experience either, as one of the world's most experienced sailors, Joshua Slocombe, and his yacht “Spray” vanished off the coast of Miami, though Slocombe's son feels that this was just an unfortunate accident and was nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle.
Not everybody though is so unlucky, some do manage to escape, such as the “USS Tigrone,” an American submarine, which, despite being fitted with sonar and radar, went miles off course and collided with a reef. However, this was apparently not an unusual occurrence in the navy, and at the time sailors did not think it strange. One man who can count himself very lucky indeed is Chuck Wakely.
In November 1964, Wakely was flying solo from Nassau to Miami, a flight he had made before, and as he climbed to 8,000ft he noticed a faint glow coming from the plane’s wings, but he assumed that it was just an optical illusion perhaps caused by the aircrafts cockpit lights being reflected through the tinted windows. After about five minutes the glow got brighter until he eventually had difficulty in reading his instruments because of the glare. His electronic equipment began to develop problems and so he had to operate the controls manually. The wings were now glowing blue-green and looked "fuzzy" and Chuck was having so much trouble controlling the plane that he let go of the controls and allowed it a "free rein" as the glowing increased and became blinding. Eventually though, it began to fade until it disappeared altogether and the instruments again began to work properly, allowing him to safely complete his memorable flight, but even more memorable than Wakely's flight was that of businessman Bruce Gernon who commutes regularly all over Florida in his private plane.
During one flight he saw a cloud over the Bahama bank with a "tremendous build up of electricity inside it." As he flew deeper into the cloud he could see more and more electrical activity, but he said that it wasn't like lightning, "they were just bright, pure white flashes." Gernon was flying along what seemed to be a tunnel in the cloud that was just wide enough for his plane, and it seemed to have some "sort of silver lining." At the other end of this "tunnel" he could see clear blue sky which he tried to concentrate on and fly towards, and when he was clear of the cloud he could no longer see either the horizon, the ocean or the sky, but just greyness, and he thought that he was in some sort of "electronic fog." He tried to find his exact position but neither he nor his co-pilot were able to calculate it because all of the planes instruments were malfunctioning.
At the side of them, huge slits had opened up showing clear blue skies, and they were able to make contact with air traffic control who told them that they were much closer to Miami than the two men had thought possible, so Gernon checked his watch and the aircrafts clock and saw that he had only been airborne for about thirty minutes which would have put him a full ninety miles away from Miami.
Gernon believes that he had flown through some kind of vortex that had shifted "through time and space by about one hundred miles or thirty minutes, or both."
These strange clouds that Gernon describes actually feature in many tales of disappearances and unusual happenings in the Bermuda Triangle, and it is this which lends the supernatural or extra-terrestrial reputation to the area, and people talk of the clouds concealing U.F.O.s that abduct crafts and their crews. Another experience of such a cloud, only this time at sea level, occurred in 1966 to Captain Don Henry who was the owner of a salvage company in Florida. Henry was on board a tug that was towing an empty petroleum tanker, and the weather was calm and clear, but suddenly the compass needle began to spin clockwise and the sea became turbulent. Henry "couldn't see where the horizon was, the water, sky and horizon all blended together." All the electrical equipment on board stopped working, and the generators continued to run but would produce no power.
Behind the tug, the tanker had vanished beneath a cloud of fog and Henry signalled full speed ahead, but he felt that something was holding them back, until suddenly the tug pulled free but the tanker remained hidden underneath the fog for a few minutes until the tug pulled it out. The tugboat's generators now began to work normally again but all of the batteries on board were dead, even those that were in the crews torches, and they had to be thrown away.
We know that a compass will behave oddly near a magnet or a mass of iron ore, but there is no known way to suddenly drain a battery of all its power or to prevent a generator that is running from producing electricity, if there were it would be of enormous benefit militarily, so how could this have happened?
The Bermuda Triangle is not alone in its capabilities to “devour” ships and planes as there is another area which also claims to possess this ability, and it is known as “The Devil's Sea.”
The Devil's Sea lies in the Pacific Ocean 800 miles south east of Japan in between Iwo Jima and Marcus Island, and perhaps it doesn't attract the same media attention as its American counterpart because it is neither on the immediate coast or in a very busy area. There was always said to be a higher than usual incidence of losses in the Devil's Sea, but it reached a peak between 1950 and 1954 with nine ships disappearing without trace, and these losses prompted the Japanese Government to declare it a danger zone. In 1955 they sponsored an expedition to the Devil's Sea, and a group of scientists set sail on board the ship “Kaiyo Maru No. 5”. Almost predictably neither the ship nor the scientists were ever seen again.
Ivan Sanderson is an avid collector of all things strange and he keenly follows reports of strange incidents. One day he marked the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea on a map, and he found that both of them lie between thirty and forty degrees north of the equator and are approximately the same size. He also looked at other so called “Devil's Graveyards” and found that there are twelve such areas which lie symmetrically around the world, two of them being the north and south poles, and Sanderson suggests that the Bermuda Triangle is the most notorious because it is in one of the busiest parts of the world.
Of the twelve Devil's Graveyards that Sanderson found, he noticed that most lie where warm and cold currents collide, and they are "Nodal Points" where the surface and the subsurface currents turn in different directions, and he suggests that the difference in temperature and direction could cause magnetic vortices and thus interfere with compasses. Unfortunately this is not supported by any evidence, and doesn't explain the land locked Devil's Graveyards that he found. Nor does it go any way towards explaining any of the ships that are found floating devoid of crew when they are in perfect working order. What was needed was a fresh line of inquiry.
In April 1963, the crew of a Boeing 707 saw what looked like an atomic explosion in the sea and they watched as the water rose up into a great mound half a mile wide. The pilot checked with the coast guard to see if there had been an earthquake, but he was told that there had been no such occurrences in the area, so what could it have been?
Azerbaijan has many of what are called “gas spouts” which can push mud and water up to the surface from twelve kilometres underground to form five hundred metre high mud mountains, and in one area alone, up to twenty thousand cubic metres of methane gas is released daily, and in 1947 the Purugay mud volcano released over five hundred cubic metres of methane rich gas and fifty thousand tons of rock fragments.
Such gas seeps occur, not only on land, but also on the sea bed. They can be used to help locate oil and gas fields, and the southern Caspian Sea was one of the first to be exploited. Ship's Captain, Kishi Mytallimov, has been sailing the Caspian Sea for over thirty years and he has seen many of what he calls mud volcanos from the surface. He says that they are unmistakable and you can see the water "boiling" and gas and mud coming up to the surface. He says that the ones he has seen are usually only about one and a half metres high but can be up to five kilometres in circumference.
Doctor Chingfz Muradov is a diver in the Caspian and he has also witnessed a release of gas, but his view was from underwater as it happened during one of his dives. He says that it is not a steady flow and nor is it localised, but is spread over a whole area, not from one mud volcano. Muradov says that some of the bubbles were small, others big, and there were huge ones which were like a column of gas, and it was as though the sea was boiling. The effect that this gas being released into the water has is that the waters density is reduced and the effect that it has at the surface can be devastating. It means that the water will give less support to passing ships and may possibly sink them.
Tests have been done in the wave tank at Texas A+M University, the largest in America, with calibrated and weighted ships. The model ships are floated on the surface of the wave tank and gas is released from the bottom of the tank as the ship passes over it. The result of these tests is that time after time the ship is sunk as it gets reduced support from the water as its density is decreased by the gas.
As early as the mid 1970s, Doctor Richard Maciver, a geochemist and scientist in the gas and oil trade for thirty years, knew that gas leaks could sink a ship, and his tests at the Institute of Oceanographic Studies in England proved it, but he was puzzled as to how a gas seep could account for bringing an aircraft down, but he says that the solution came to him from a most unlikely source, his daughter's asthma.
One day Maciver’s daughter brought home an air ioniser (negative ion generator) and switched it on in her bedroom. When Maciver passed his hand over the top of it he noticed that the hairs on the back of his hand and arm would stand on end. He read the instructions that came with the device and he found that it emitted clouds of negative ion air, and this negative ion air can also be found near "agitated water" i.e. waterfalls and bubbling streams, so in the event of an underwater gas seep the surface becomes "agitated" and so there would be masses of negative ions in the air which creates a magnetic field. This magnetic field would in turn affect the passing aircraft's compasses so that they behaved erratically. Could this magnetic field also be responsible for draining batteries or stopping generators from producing power? Electrical motors do make use of magnets so theoretically a magnetic field well interfere with them.
Maciver then thought back to his school history lessons and how thousands of early nineteenth century miners had lost their lives due to underground methane gas which was ignited by their lamps or sparks they made as they worked.
As methane gas is much lighter than air it rises rapidly, so a plane would fly into it and, either the white hot exhaust or a tiny spark, would ignite it and destroy the plane. If it didn't catch fire then, like the ships, it would suffer a loss of uplift from the lighter than air gas and this may also bring it down.
It would be quite feasible for an aircraft to ignite gas as a similar event occurred in 1979 in western Siberia as two trains passing each other in a valley that was filled with escaped gas somehow ignited it, causing the deaths of a thousand people. He also suggests that these clouds of ignited methane gas could explain the reports of strange clouds and U.F.O.s seen over the Bermuda Triangle which he believes is not so individual in the actual elements found there, but the volume of traffic both on the sea and in the air serves to make it appear so.
Maciver goes on to say that once the plane is damaged it would hit the water and sink to the bottom where it would be buried by the sediments as they settle back into the hole left by the escaped gas, thus covering all traces of it. This has been the case with several floating drilling rigs and drilling ships which have been sunk by gas seeps while drilling into gas and oil deposits and have then been buried in the crater which is left by the escaped gas as the ocean floor settles back over them concealing them completely.
Professor Richard Selley, head of Geology at Imperial College, London, says that we know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about our sea beds, but there are ideas about both how the methane is created and ultimately released. The build up of methane is caused by dying marine life which sinks to the bottom, and the water pressure combined with a low temperature, only about one degree or so, creates gas molecules surrounded by water molecules which “trap” the gas as though in a cage. They are then known as “hydrates,” and they can be made from almost any gas and not just methane, and for this creation of hydrates to take place you need four ingredients. They are gas, water, the right pressure and the right temperature.
These conditions can be found in areas of permafrost, and it is widely estimated that there could be something like 1016 m3 (ten thousand trillion cubic metres) of methane hydrates built up around the continents.
They can be trapped on the continental margins by sediment build ups where shallow waters drop quickly to great depths. Warming of the water or more probably movement in the sediments or the continental shelf itself can cause a release of the gas, and testament to this movement are the transcontinental communication cables which are several inches thick, yet which would break with relative regularity.
Could there be, beneath the waters off the Florida coast line, a deposit of methane hydrates? It is certainly very possible, but if that were the case and these gas blowouts are the cause of the disappearances within the Bermuda Triangle, where are all the accounts of blowouts which haven't caused a sinking, and where are all of the accounts from ships and planes that have had a scrape with disaster or merely witnessed a gas seep? Should there not be a higher incidence of lucky escapes? One would have thought that there should be more near misses and eye witness accounts of lucky escapes than of actual disappearances, but this does not seem to be the case. Why also was there an upsurge in incidents since 1945 and in the Devil's Sea between 1950 and 1954? Is it due to a higher rate of movement in the continental shelves, or is it due to a higher volume of traffic in the area of Bermuda since 1945 and in the Devil's Sea after 1950, and falling again when the Japanese Government declared it a danger zone and sponsored an investigation in 1955? If it is either of these two things then how do we explain the tunnel that Bruce Gernon flew through before finding himself far closer to Miami than he really ought to have been?
The truth is that you don't have to go to the Bermuda Triangle to find tales of people being moved forward in time and distance, so it isn't an exclusive phenomenon to the triangle.
It has been pointed out in the past that the Devil's Sea is a storm in a teacup as its legend is based upon the loss of only nine ships in a period of five years in an area of unspecified size, and eight of the nine missing ships were fishing vessels, only one of which had a radio transmitter, so is there really a Devil's Sea at all? In the 1970s there were reports that a U.S. Investigator discovered that the term "Devil's Sea" was not a familiar one to Japanese Maritime Officials, and so must be a legend borne out of a few over-zealous newspaper accounts. So are the occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle natural or are they supernatural?
A gas seep could be a perfectly natural cause, but could it reproduce all of the symptoms we see in cases of disappearances? The seep would release gas which could easily sink a ship that was sailing along the surface above it by lowering the density of the water and thus giving the ship less buoyancy, and the agitated water at the surface creates negative ions and thus a magnetic field which would interfere with compasses. As the gas, possibly methane, rises into the air it would affect the airflow over an aircraft's wings and this could be enough to bring it crashing down, but otherwise it may be ignited by the aircraft and eye witnesses may describe this as lights in the sky, fire in the sky or a flash in the sky, in short a U.F.O..
The ship or plane would then sink to the bottom of the sea, and all traces of it would be hidden as it falls into the crater left behind by the gas and is covered by the sand as it resettles over it again.
So it could happen theoretically, but the answer must surely lie with the world's largest insurer of ships and planes, Lloyds of London, who keep records of their shipping losses on file for decades.
Norman Hooke at Lloyds Maritime in Colchester, England, investigates various claims and one classic example he remembers is that of the “Marine Sulphur Queen” which left Texas and sailed through the Gulf of Mexico and then out into the Atlantic where it was lost sometime after passing the tip of Key West. At the time, and for some time afterwards, it was thought by many to be another victim of the Bermuda Triangle when no bodies or wreckage could be found by search and rescue teams. However, sometime later, flotsam was found, and this included a life ring from the ship which had been carried north by the Gulf Stream, so Lloyds obviously considered it to be a normal, run of the mill marine casualty.
The deciding factor though, is likely that Lloyds have got no reason to consider the Bermuda Triangle in any way mysterious, because in their records they find, statistically speaking, no greater incidence for the loss of vessels in this area than in any other large expanse of water in the world, and if anybody ought to know, it would surely be them.
So it would seem that a whole realm of folklore is exactly that, invented by over-zealous or romantic reporting of shipping and aviation losses in what is one of the busiest areas of the world for both sea and air traffic.
The triangle was first noticed by the reporter E.V.W. Jones who looked at many disappearances of vessels and saw that they all occurred within a relatively small area off the Florida coastline. The term itself was coined by the author of a book on sea mysteries, Vincent Gaddis, who also referred to it as the "Triangle of Death."
It is made up by the area which lies in between the three points of Miami, Puerto Rico and of course Bermuda and, since 1945, over 100 ships and planes are said to have vanished there with over one thousand lives lost. The disturbing thing though, is that the losses are total, with no signs of either wreckage, debris or bodies.
The U.S. Coastguards who patrol the area are familiar with the weather conditions they experience there, and they claim to “know” every stretch of water. Most of the vessels they are called to rescue are stranded due to bad weather, strong currents or just bad judgement on the part of would be sailors, and they say that, contrary to popular belief, they don't have any U.F.O. sightings to report.
They describe these waters as the boating capital of America as they play host to hundreds of boats, especially in the summer months, which is also the time of year when the thunderstorms can appear at very short notice indeed with the seas turning from calm to waves of eight feet high and winds up to hurricane level, all of which are easily capable of capsizing a boat. If you throw into this hostile mix the fact that you have inexperienced sailors taking a boat out for the first time, or worse still, those who dine out locally and then use their place mat with a map of the area to try and navigate their way to the Bahamas, then you have a recipe for disaster. Especially when you consider that the Gulf Stream can carry you north at anything up to four miles an hour, and if you can't see land, you wouldn't even realise.
However, it isn't such mundane mishaps as these which lend the Bermuda Triangle its reputation, it is often the much more amazing tales of military aircraft and large ships which are quoted, such as the tale of the two planes pursuing a U.F.O. which swallowed them up. This is the stuff of mystery, intrigue and romance that serves to increase the notoriety of what is after all just a stretch of water much like any other in the world.
One of the triangle's most famous cases of all occurred on December 5th, 1945 to “Flight 19” when five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers left Fort Lauderdale on a routine training flight. Each plane should have had on board an officer pilot and two crew members, but one of the crew members had had a premonition of disaster and stayed away. The projected flight was around five hundred miles and each plane was carrying enough fuel for one thousand miles of flight, but the five aircraft and the fourteen men were destined never to return, and every year since 1945 a memorial service is held at Fort Lauderdale in commemoration of flight 19.
At the start of the flight there were no expected problems as the weather at the 2pm take off was good and the forecast was clear. The five Avengers were well maintained and in regular use at the time and the pilots were highly trained. They were on a combat training exercise over the Atlantic, and all was apparently going well until about 3:15pm when the commander of the flight, Captain Charles C. Taylor, radioed in to say that they were off course and could not see land. When asked to give his position he said that he could not. It was soon clear to the tower that the pilot's instruments were not working correctly as they could hear the conversation passing between the other aircraft and they were saying that their instruments were "going crazy" and they all had a different reading.
Don Poole who had trained the pilots was present in the tower at the time, and Taylor told him that he thought that he was in the Gulf of Mexico. Poole knew that he was nowhere near it, but still Taylor could not work out where he was. Soon communication became difficult because heavy static began to obscure transmissions and Poole told Taylor to head west, if his compass wasn't working properly he should fly toward the sun and this would bring him back to land somewhere along the Florida coast. Either Taylor didn't hear him or chose to ignore him as he kept altering course, flying west for a while, but then turning east again when he thought that he was in the Gulf. A rescue boat was put on standby and the man on board, Jim Ward, was listening in on the conversations between the tower and the planes and was awaiting instructions. He heard Poole tell Taylor to fly toward the sun, and that way even if he was in the Gulf of Mexico he should still hit the coast of Texas. He asked Taylor how much fuel he had left and Taylor estimated that he had enough for about twenty minutes further flying time. The twenty minutes ticked slowly by with still no sign of the aircraft returning, and those on the ground knew that they must be down, but they had no idea where.
Rescue planes were sent, one of which was a twin engine Martin Mariner with thirteen crew on board, and this plane, like the five it sought, was never seen again. A total rescue operation involving over three hundred planes and many, many boats failed to find any clues as to the fate of the five missing Avengers and their fourteen crew, or the Mariner and its thirteen crew.
Captain Richard Roberts led an official investigation into the incident, but still no aircraft were found, and nor was any explanation for their loss. John Myhre of Florida believes that he can explain the loss of Flight 19 and "update" the official report made by Captain Roberts. His work took him fifteen years and he has calculated the wind speed, ocean currents and weather conditions of the day, and he is confident that he knows both where the planes went down and when.
He says that the wind direction and speed were not the same as they had planned and Taylor was confused. They flew into a bad storm system, which was further complicated by nightfall, and on their final known course they were heading for the Florida coast and would have made it back but for Taylor running out of fuel at 6:04pm. Once Taylor ditched, Myhre believes that the remaining planes flew in different directions in a last desperate attempt to reach dry land, and each aircraft now lies on the ocean floor below the spot where it ran out of fuel.
For a time it looked as though the five planes had been found on the sea bed but the planes found proved not to be those from Flight 19, and others raised aircraft have also been found not to be the five in question. The missing Martin Mariner which has also never been found may have a rational explanation for its disappearance as this was a notoriously dangerous model, and the crew of the ship "Gaines Mills" reported seeing the aircraft catch fire in mid-air and plummet into the sea where it exploded on impact. This report was supported by the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier "USS Solomons" who watched as the plane disappeared from their radar screens.
To add to the confusion there is a lot of misreporting on the case of Flight 19, and in his book about the Bermuda Triangle Charles Berlitz (grandson and heir to the phrase book founder) reports the last transmission from the lead pilot as "Don't come after me! They look like....” when in fact it was "We will have to ditch unless landfall.... When the first plane drops to ten gallons we all go down together." This kind of misreporting is apparently common with Berlitz and comes as no surprise to researcher Larry Kusche who says of him that "If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other colour is almost a certainty."
Time after time, when the Bermuda Triangle is discussed, the same phrases seem to crop up; "lost radio contact," "compasses spinning out of control" and "vanished without trace.” Many of them appear in the “Miami Herald,” of which Doug Clifton was executive editor, and he is also an avid collector of tales concerning the Bermuda Triangle, such as those which Berlitz lists in his book. Twelve of these are major vessels which have completely disappeared, and seven are of ships found floating Mary Celeste-like, abandoned and undamaged.
For example, the “Rosalie” was found in 1840, abandoned with its sails set and its cargo intact, but there are far earlier cases than this, such as the “Sea Venture” in 1609 which was carrying English settlers to Virginia but was shipwrecked off the island of Bermuda. On September 1st, the vessel's longboat set off on the 500 mile trip to the U.S. coast for help but was never seen again. In 1750, five Spanish treasure ships were caught in storms off Cape Hatteras and three of them completely vanished with no signs of debris or survivors.
More recently, in 1962, a large U.S.A.F. Boeing Stratotanker took off from Langley, Virginia and headed east for the Azores. Soon afterward, the control tower received weak radio signals from the plane, and when these stopped a full scale rescue was launched but it was in vain as no sign of the aircraft or its crew was ever found. Even more inexplicably on March 23rd 1962 the massive 20,000 ton freighter "Anita" vanished without trace. The Bermuda Triangle doesn't seem to respect age or experience either, as one of the world's most experienced sailors, Joshua Slocombe, and his yacht “Spray” vanished off the coast of Miami, though Slocombe's son feels that this was just an unfortunate accident and was nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle.
Not everybody though is so unlucky, some do manage to escape, such as the “USS Tigrone,” an American submarine, which, despite being fitted with sonar and radar, went miles off course and collided with a reef. However, this was apparently not an unusual occurrence in the navy, and at the time sailors did not think it strange. One man who can count himself very lucky indeed is Chuck Wakely.
In November 1964, Wakely was flying solo from Nassau to Miami, a flight he had made before, and as he climbed to 8,000ft he noticed a faint glow coming from the plane’s wings, but he assumed that it was just an optical illusion perhaps caused by the aircrafts cockpit lights being reflected through the tinted windows. After about five minutes the glow got brighter until he eventually had difficulty in reading his instruments because of the glare. His electronic equipment began to develop problems and so he had to operate the controls manually. The wings were now glowing blue-green and looked "fuzzy" and Chuck was having so much trouble controlling the plane that he let go of the controls and allowed it a "free rein" as the glowing increased and became blinding. Eventually though, it began to fade until it disappeared altogether and the instruments again began to work properly, allowing him to safely complete his memorable flight, but even more memorable than Wakely's flight was that of businessman Bruce Gernon who commutes regularly all over Florida in his private plane.
During one flight he saw a cloud over the Bahama bank with a "tremendous build up of electricity inside it." As he flew deeper into the cloud he could see more and more electrical activity, but he said that it wasn't like lightning, "they were just bright, pure white flashes." Gernon was flying along what seemed to be a tunnel in the cloud that was just wide enough for his plane, and it seemed to have some "sort of silver lining." At the other end of this "tunnel" he could see clear blue sky which he tried to concentrate on and fly towards, and when he was clear of the cloud he could no longer see either the horizon, the ocean or the sky, but just greyness, and he thought that he was in some sort of "electronic fog." He tried to find his exact position but neither he nor his co-pilot were able to calculate it because all of the planes instruments were malfunctioning.
At the side of them, huge slits had opened up showing clear blue skies, and they were able to make contact with air traffic control who told them that they were much closer to Miami than the two men had thought possible, so Gernon checked his watch and the aircrafts clock and saw that he had only been airborne for about thirty minutes which would have put him a full ninety miles away from Miami.
Gernon believes that he had flown through some kind of vortex that had shifted "through time and space by about one hundred miles or thirty minutes, or both."
These strange clouds that Gernon describes actually feature in many tales of disappearances and unusual happenings in the Bermuda Triangle, and it is this which lends the supernatural or extra-terrestrial reputation to the area, and people talk of the clouds concealing U.F.O.s that abduct crafts and their crews. Another experience of such a cloud, only this time at sea level, occurred in 1966 to Captain Don Henry who was the owner of a salvage company in Florida. Henry was on board a tug that was towing an empty petroleum tanker, and the weather was calm and clear, but suddenly the compass needle began to spin clockwise and the sea became turbulent. Henry "couldn't see where the horizon was, the water, sky and horizon all blended together." All the electrical equipment on board stopped working, and the generators continued to run but would produce no power.
Behind the tug, the tanker had vanished beneath a cloud of fog and Henry signalled full speed ahead, but he felt that something was holding them back, until suddenly the tug pulled free but the tanker remained hidden underneath the fog for a few minutes until the tug pulled it out. The tugboat's generators now began to work normally again but all of the batteries on board were dead, even those that were in the crews torches, and they had to be thrown away.
We know that a compass will behave oddly near a magnet or a mass of iron ore, but there is no known way to suddenly drain a battery of all its power or to prevent a generator that is running from producing electricity, if there were it would be of enormous benefit militarily, so how could this have happened?
The Bermuda Triangle is not alone in its capabilities to “devour” ships and planes as there is another area which also claims to possess this ability, and it is known as “The Devil's Sea.”
The Devil's Sea lies in the Pacific Ocean 800 miles south east of Japan in between Iwo Jima and Marcus Island, and perhaps it doesn't attract the same media attention as its American counterpart because it is neither on the immediate coast or in a very busy area. There was always said to be a higher than usual incidence of losses in the Devil's Sea, but it reached a peak between 1950 and 1954 with nine ships disappearing without trace, and these losses prompted the Japanese Government to declare it a danger zone. In 1955 they sponsored an expedition to the Devil's Sea, and a group of scientists set sail on board the ship “Kaiyo Maru No. 5”. Almost predictably neither the ship nor the scientists were ever seen again.
Ivan Sanderson is an avid collector of all things strange and he keenly follows reports of strange incidents. One day he marked the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea on a map, and he found that both of them lie between thirty and forty degrees north of the equator and are approximately the same size. He also looked at other so called “Devil's Graveyards” and found that there are twelve such areas which lie symmetrically around the world, two of them being the north and south poles, and Sanderson suggests that the Bermuda Triangle is the most notorious because it is in one of the busiest parts of the world.
Of the twelve Devil's Graveyards that Sanderson found, he noticed that most lie where warm and cold currents collide, and they are "Nodal Points" where the surface and the subsurface currents turn in different directions, and he suggests that the difference in temperature and direction could cause magnetic vortices and thus interfere with compasses. Unfortunately this is not supported by any evidence, and doesn't explain the land locked Devil's Graveyards that he found. Nor does it go any way towards explaining any of the ships that are found floating devoid of crew when they are in perfect working order. What was needed was a fresh line of inquiry.
In April 1963, the crew of a Boeing 707 saw what looked like an atomic explosion in the sea and they watched as the water rose up into a great mound half a mile wide. The pilot checked with the coast guard to see if there had been an earthquake, but he was told that there had been no such occurrences in the area, so what could it have been?
Azerbaijan has many of what are called “gas spouts” which can push mud and water up to the surface from twelve kilometres underground to form five hundred metre high mud mountains, and in one area alone, up to twenty thousand cubic metres of methane gas is released daily, and in 1947 the Purugay mud volcano released over five hundred cubic metres of methane rich gas and fifty thousand tons of rock fragments.
Such gas seeps occur, not only on land, but also on the sea bed. They can be used to help locate oil and gas fields, and the southern Caspian Sea was one of the first to be exploited. Ship's Captain, Kishi Mytallimov, has been sailing the Caspian Sea for over thirty years and he has seen many of what he calls mud volcanos from the surface. He says that they are unmistakable and you can see the water "boiling" and gas and mud coming up to the surface. He says that the ones he has seen are usually only about one and a half metres high but can be up to five kilometres in circumference.
Doctor Chingfz Muradov is a diver in the Caspian and he has also witnessed a release of gas, but his view was from underwater as it happened during one of his dives. He says that it is not a steady flow and nor is it localised, but is spread over a whole area, not from one mud volcano. Muradov says that some of the bubbles were small, others big, and there were huge ones which were like a column of gas, and it was as though the sea was boiling. The effect that this gas being released into the water has is that the waters density is reduced and the effect that it has at the surface can be devastating. It means that the water will give less support to passing ships and may possibly sink them.
Tests have been done in the wave tank at Texas A+M University, the largest in America, with calibrated and weighted ships. The model ships are floated on the surface of the wave tank and gas is released from the bottom of the tank as the ship passes over it. The result of these tests is that time after time the ship is sunk as it gets reduced support from the water as its density is decreased by the gas.
As early as the mid 1970s, Doctor Richard Maciver, a geochemist and scientist in the gas and oil trade for thirty years, knew that gas leaks could sink a ship, and his tests at the Institute of Oceanographic Studies in England proved it, but he was puzzled as to how a gas seep could account for bringing an aircraft down, but he says that the solution came to him from a most unlikely source, his daughter's asthma.
One day Maciver’s daughter brought home an air ioniser (negative ion generator) and switched it on in her bedroom. When Maciver passed his hand over the top of it he noticed that the hairs on the back of his hand and arm would stand on end. He read the instructions that came with the device and he found that it emitted clouds of negative ion air, and this negative ion air can also be found near "agitated water" i.e. waterfalls and bubbling streams, so in the event of an underwater gas seep the surface becomes "agitated" and so there would be masses of negative ions in the air which creates a magnetic field. This magnetic field would in turn affect the passing aircraft's compasses so that they behaved erratically. Could this magnetic field also be responsible for draining batteries or stopping generators from producing power? Electrical motors do make use of magnets so theoretically a magnetic field well interfere with them.
Maciver then thought back to his school history lessons and how thousands of early nineteenth century miners had lost their lives due to underground methane gas which was ignited by their lamps or sparks they made as they worked.
As methane gas is much lighter than air it rises rapidly, so a plane would fly into it and, either the white hot exhaust or a tiny spark, would ignite it and destroy the plane. If it didn't catch fire then, like the ships, it would suffer a loss of uplift from the lighter than air gas and this may also bring it down.
It would be quite feasible for an aircraft to ignite gas as a similar event occurred in 1979 in western Siberia as two trains passing each other in a valley that was filled with escaped gas somehow ignited it, causing the deaths of a thousand people. He also suggests that these clouds of ignited methane gas could explain the reports of strange clouds and U.F.O.s seen over the Bermuda Triangle which he believes is not so individual in the actual elements found there, but the volume of traffic both on the sea and in the air serves to make it appear so.
Maciver goes on to say that once the plane is damaged it would hit the water and sink to the bottom where it would be buried by the sediments as they settle back into the hole left by the escaped gas, thus covering all traces of it. This has been the case with several floating drilling rigs and drilling ships which have been sunk by gas seeps while drilling into gas and oil deposits and have then been buried in the crater which is left by the escaped gas as the ocean floor settles back over them concealing them completely.
Professor Richard Selley, head of Geology at Imperial College, London, says that we know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about our sea beds, but there are ideas about both how the methane is created and ultimately released. The build up of methane is caused by dying marine life which sinks to the bottom, and the water pressure combined with a low temperature, only about one degree or so, creates gas molecules surrounded by water molecules which “trap” the gas as though in a cage. They are then known as “hydrates,” and they can be made from almost any gas and not just methane, and for this creation of hydrates to take place you need four ingredients. They are gas, water, the right pressure and the right temperature.
These conditions can be found in areas of permafrost, and it is widely estimated that there could be something like 1016 m3 (ten thousand trillion cubic metres) of methane hydrates built up around the continents.
They can be trapped on the continental margins by sediment build ups where shallow waters drop quickly to great depths. Warming of the water or more probably movement in the sediments or the continental shelf itself can cause a release of the gas, and testament to this movement are the transcontinental communication cables which are several inches thick, yet which would break with relative regularity.
Could there be, beneath the waters off the Florida coast line, a deposit of methane hydrates? It is certainly very possible, but if that were the case and these gas blowouts are the cause of the disappearances within the Bermuda Triangle, where are all the accounts of blowouts which haven't caused a sinking, and where are all of the accounts from ships and planes that have had a scrape with disaster or merely witnessed a gas seep? Should there not be a higher incidence of lucky escapes? One would have thought that there should be more near misses and eye witness accounts of lucky escapes than of actual disappearances, but this does not seem to be the case. Why also was there an upsurge in incidents since 1945 and in the Devil's Sea between 1950 and 1954? Is it due to a higher rate of movement in the continental shelves, or is it due to a higher volume of traffic in the area of Bermuda since 1945 and in the Devil's Sea after 1950, and falling again when the Japanese Government declared it a danger zone and sponsored an investigation in 1955? If it is either of these two things then how do we explain the tunnel that Bruce Gernon flew through before finding himself far closer to Miami than he really ought to have been?
The truth is that you don't have to go to the Bermuda Triangle to find tales of people being moved forward in time and distance, so it isn't an exclusive phenomenon to the triangle.
It has been pointed out in the past that the Devil's Sea is a storm in a teacup as its legend is based upon the loss of only nine ships in a period of five years in an area of unspecified size, and eight of the nine missing ships were fishing vessels, only one of which had a radio transmitter, so is there really a Devil's Sea at all? In the 1970s there were reports that a U.S. Investigator discovered that the term "Devil's Sea" was not a familiar one to Japanese Maritime Officials, and so must be a legend borne out of a few over-zealous newspaper accounts. So are the occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle natural or are they supernatural?
A gas seep could be a perfectly natural cause, but could it reproduce all of the symptoms we see in cases of disappearances? The seep would release gas which could easily sink a ship that was sailing along the surface above it by lowering the density of the water and thus giving the ship less buoyancy, and the agitated water at the surface creates negative ions and thus a magnetic field which would interfere with compasses. As the gas, possibly methane, rises into the air it would affect the airflow over an aircraft's wings and this could be enough to bring it crashing down, but otherwise it may be ignited by the aircraft and eye witnesses may describe this as lights in the sky, fire in the sky or a flash in the sky, in short a U.F.O..
The ship or plane would then sink to the bottom of the sea, and all traces of it would be hidden as it falls into the crater left behind by the gas and is covered by the sand as it resettles over it again.
So it could happen theoretically, but the answer must surely lie with the world's largest insurer of ships and planes, Lloyds of London, who keep records of their shipping losses on file for decades.
Norman Hooke at Lloyds Maritime in Colchester, England, investigates various claims and one classic example he remembers is that of the “Marine Sulphur Queen” which left Texas and sailed through the Gulf of Mexico and then out into the Atlantic where it was lost sometime after passing the tip of Key West. At the time, and for some time afterwards, it was thought by many to be another victim of the Bermuda Triangle when no bodies or wreckage could be found by search and rescue teams. However, sometime later, flotsam was found, and this included a life ring from the ship which had been carried north by the Gulf Stream, so Lloyds obviously considered it to be a normal, run of the mill marine casualty.
The deciding factor though, is likely that Lloyds have got no reason to consider the Bermuda Triangle in any way mysterious, because in their records they find, statistically speaking, no greater incidence for the loss of vessels in this area than in any other large expanse of water in the world, and if anybody ought to know, it would surely be them.
So it would seem that a whole realm of folklore is exactly that, invented by over-zealous or romantic reporting of shipping and aviation losses in what is one of the busiest areas of the world for both sea and air traffic.
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