On 5 December 1945, five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers on a
test-exercise left the air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and
were never seen again. Later that day a Martin Mariner sent to
search fo the patrol also vanished. The disappearance of these
aircraft and their 27 crew members simply defied explanation.
Associated Press jounalist E.V.W. Jones used this story in
September 1950 to put forward the claim that a triangular area
linking Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico comprised a "limbo of the
lost" where aircraft and ships "vanished in the thin air". Over the
years other reporters have added to the legend. It was rumoured
that the doomed pilots had sent strange radio transimssions. One
writer, Art Ford, claimed that a radio operator had overheard
Lieutenant Charles Taylor, the patrol leader, say, "They look like
they are from outer space -- don't come after me." In an article in
Argosy magazine in
February 1964, Vincent Gaddis coined the term "Bermuda Triangle"
and called the vanished aircraft the "most incredible mystery in
the history of aviation".
Ten years later Charles Berlitz's best-seller The Bermuda Triangle cemented the
phrase in popular consciousness. Other books, magazines and
broadcasts speculated about disappearances in the Triangle, which
were said to have begun in the mid-19th century and to have
included more than 40 ships and 20 aeroplanes. Some theorists
suggested gravitational or magnetic anomalies caused a time or
dimensional warp that snatched the vessels from our reality into a
parallel one. Others suspected malevolent UFO beings, or an
undersea civilisation kidnapping surface dwellers. In time most
writers agreed that the Bermuda Triangle was one of 10 or 12
equally sinister areas in the world. Occult author Ivan T.
Sanderson called them vile vortices, lozenge-shaped areas in
parallel bands exactly 72 degrees apart on opposite sides of the
equator.
Then librarian Lawrence Kusche of the Arizona Sate University did
something no other Triangle chronicler had done -- he studied the
original documents of the 1945 patrol. His 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved
revealed some embellished facts. "Calm seas" in the documentation
were shown in weather records to have been beset by raging storms.
The pilots' alleged messages did not coincide with recordings.
Pilot error and instrument malfunctions probably led the five
planes far off course until they ran out of fuel and crashed,
sinking so deep that they have never been recovered. The Mariner, a
notoriously unsafe aircraft known as a "flying gas tank", is
thought to have exploded in mid-air, its remains raining into the
ocean. Other planes and ships that had vanished in the Triangle
were usually found later or plausibly accounted for. Moreover,
Llyod's of London's extensive records provided "no evidence to
support the claim that the 'Bermuda Triangle' has more losses than
elsewhere".
No Triangle proponent has mounted a convoincing challenge to
Kusche's debunking of the myth. But the mystery survives for those
who, choosing between legend and fact, prefer the former.
***end***
