Limbo of the Lost. The Twilight Zone.
As the Nina, the Pinta and the
Another historical event retroactively attributed to the Bermuda Triangle is the discovery of the Mary Celeste. The vessel was found abandoned on the high seas in 1892, about 400 miles off its intended course from
The Bermuda Triangle legend really began in earnest on December 5, 1945, with the famed disappearance of Flight 19. Five Navy Avenger bombers mysteriously vanished while on a routine training mission, as did a rescue plane sent to search for them -- six aircraft and 27 men, gone without a trace. Or so the story goes.
When all the facts are laid out, the tale of Flight 19 becomes far less puzzling. All of the crewmen of the five Avengers were inexperienced trainees, with the exception of their patrol leader, Lt. Charles Taylor.
With the four rookie pilots entirely dependent on his guidance,
Flight 19 was still in radio contact with the
A search party was dispatched, which included the Martin Mariner that many claim disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle along with Flight 19. While it is true that it never returned, the Mariner did not vanish; it blew up 23 seconds after takeoff, in an explosion that was witnessed by several at the base. This was unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence, because Mariners were known for their faulty gas tanks.
No known wreckage from Flight 19 has ever been recovered. One reasonable explanation is that
Combining the circumstances of the failing compass, the difficulty of radio transmissions, and the absence of wreckage, tales of mysterious intervention befalling Flight 19 began to take form. Theories involving strange magnetic fields, time warps, Atlantis, and alien abduction began to appear. Even an official Navy report intimated that the Avengers had disappeared "as if they had flown to Mars."
About 200 prior and subsequent incidents have been attributed to the inherent strangeness of the area, which was forever christened the Bermuda Triangle by writer V. Gaddis in a 1964 issue of Argosy, a fiction magazine. Public interest in the "phenomenon" was whipped into a frenzy by Charles Berlitz's 1974 bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, a sensationalized and thoroughly inaccurate account that shunned the facts in favor of mysterious excitement.
There are two major obstacles to taking the Bermuda Triangle legend seriously. The first is that most of the associated mishaps can be explained by rational means. The second is that most of the associated mishaps did not occur within the Bermuda Triangle. If you plot all of the alleged instances of the area's malevolent influence on a map, you find that only a handful have actually happened within the Triangle's borders. Sea disasters as distant as
Others may respond that it is evidence that accidents will happen -- no matter where exactly on the land, on the sea or in the air they take place.
1953 • Canada, Sherbrook: Mrs. Orfei heard a knock at the door in the middle of the night and obtained no answer when she asked who it was. When more furious knocks were heard, her Alsatian dog jumped toward the door, but suddenly retreated, trembling as if terrified and retired to a corner. Mrs. Orfei went to an upper door and saw two "indescribable" shadows go away from the house. A while later a big, round object took off 100 m away with a blue-green lightning. The police found broken bushes as evidence of an enormous weight. • Denmark, Brovst: Brovst was the scene of an attempted abduction of a girl by two humanoids emitting a golden light. Their hands were rugged and cold like a fish. | • France, Tours: Claude Pasquier saw two disks flying very low, quite slowly, along a straight course, with a "hard" sound. • France, Tonnerre: A woman saw two objects on the ground and three 1.5-m-tall men running toward the craft. They had oversized heads and wore h
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