the Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Popular culture has attributed these disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings.

Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were spurious, inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is similar to that in any other area of ocean.
The boundaries of the triangle cover the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean island area and the Atlantic east to the Azores. The more familiar triangular boundary in most written works has as its points somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Miami; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, with most of the accidents concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

The area is one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north.

History

Origins

The earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 16, 1950 Associated Press article by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door", a short article by George X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. NavyTBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered in the April 1962 issue of American Legion Magazine. It was claimed that the flight leader had been heard saying "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." It was also claimed that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars." Sand's article was the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. In the February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis's article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" argued that 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.

"The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" argued that 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.

Others would follow with their own works, elaborating on Gaddis's ideas: John Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969, repr. 1973);Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda Triangle, 1974);Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974), and many others, all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined by Eckart.

Crew of Flight 19 Honored
by Elisabeth Goodridge

The disappearance of Flight 19, a Navymission that began the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, is still unexplained but not forgotten 60 years later.

The 27 Navy airmen who disappeared somewhere off Florida's coast on Dec. 5, 1945, were honored in a Houseresolution Thursday. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., said he hoped the gesture would help bring closure for surviving families.

What happened is the question that has befuddled, entertained and tormented both skeptics and believers in the Bermuda Triangle, a stretch of ocean between Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Miami that many believe is an area of supernatural phenomena.

"There's just so many weird things here that experienced pilots would have not acted this way," Shaw said. "Something happened out there."

Five U.S. Navy Avenger airplanes left the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine training mission over the Bahamas. The five pilots and nine crewmen, led by instructor Lt. Charles Taylor, were to practice bombing and low-level strafing on small coral shoals 60 miles east of the naval station. They were then to turn north to practice mapping and then southwest to home. The entire flight, which Air Station pilots took three or four times a day, should have lasted three hours.

From radio reports overheard by ground control and other airplanes, the compasses on Taylor's plane apparently malfunctioned 90 minutes into the mission.

With no instruments to guide him over the open ocean, Taylor thought the flight had drifted off-course and was actually south over the Florida Keys. As a result, he directed the planes to fly due north to hit land.

"He was not in the Keys, he was out in the end of the Bahama chain," said David White, who at the time was a flight instructor stationed at Fort Lauderdale. "When he went north, he wasgoing out to the wide ocean."

Just about the time the squadron was to have landed back at Fort Lauderdale, a last radio message from Taylor was received: They would keep flying "until we hit the beach or run out of gas." Due to weakening radio signals, no reading could be made on the direct location of the planes.

Radio messages show that some of the students wanted to fly east, said Allan McElhiney, president of the Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale Historical Association.

Yet military discipline overruled.

"You stay with the leader, that's the Navyway," McElhiney said.

 

The mystery deepened when a few hours later a Navy rescue airplane, a Martin Mariner with 13 crewmen, also vanished. Though a passing ship reported seeing bright lights in the sky indicating what could be an in-air explosion, no evidence of the Mariner was ever found either.

The next morning, White became part of one of the largest rescue missions in American naval history. Civilian vessels and units of the Coast Guard, Army and Navy scoured an area of more than 250,000 square miles, but no wreckage was ever found.

"In all the times I remember we never had one plane missing," White said. "Five all qualified pilots missing at one time? I couldn't believe it."

Even the official review offered little explanation. The Navy Board of Inquiry report concluded, "We are not able to even make a good guess as to what happened."

Did Flight 19 turn east? Was landfall ever reached? Where was the debris?

Several ocean expeditions, documentaries and books offer varying theories, ranging from paranormal activities to sightings of alien activity. The SCI-FI channel will broadcast a new documentary Nov. 27, 2005.

the  triangle movie

 

       A shipping company employs four people: a reporter, a psychic, a meteorologist, and an oceanographer to discover the secret of the Bermuda Triangl, a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Ultimately the team, with the help of a Greenpeace survivor and the tycoon, find out the truth about a high-tech underwater facility from the US Navy (and its relation with the Philadelphia Experiment), and close the Triangle, destroying it forever. Their efforts also make it so the Triangle never existed and everyone who was taken is returned and they end up living their lives as though they were never taken. In the new Triangle-less timeline the only ones who know the Bermuda Triangle existed is the team that destroyed it.