On a sunny day, December 5-th, 1945, 66 years ago, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers comprising Flight
19 took off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine
three hour training mission. The setup plan was to take them due east for 120
miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would
return them to the naval base. But that never happened - they never returned.
This mysterious
disappearance has opened a list of the aircraft-related cases of missing people
in the Bermuda Triangle, as before there were only multiple ship-related
incidents reported. While I am still reluctant to consider Bermuda Triangle as True Stories versus Urban Myths (two sections of my Best Hoaxes blog), there are
definitely some circumstances which make this part of the ocean special. Most
likely, they have real scientific explanations, yet to be discovered or
confirmed.
The
Loss of Flight 19
The flight 19 started at 2:10 p.m., as scheduled from
the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida.
Led by instructor Lieutenant Charles Taylor, the assignment was to fly a
three-legged triangular route with a few bombing practice runs over Hen and
Chickens Shoals. Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron,
who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his
compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The
other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on
land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were
successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a
distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6:20 p.m.,
apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously
because of lack of fuel.
Indications are that the flight might become lost
somewhere east of the Florida peninsula and was unable to determine a course to
return to their base. The flight was never heard from again and no traces of
the planes were ever found. It is assumed that they made forced landings at
sea, in darkness somewhere east of the Florida peninsula, possibly after
running out of gas. It is known that the fuel carried by the aircraft would
have been completely exhausted by 8 p.m. The sea in that presumed area was
rough and unfavorable for a water landing. It is also possible that some
unexpected and unforeseen development of weather conditions may have intervened
although there is no evidence of freak storms in the area at the time.
By this time, several land radar stations finally
determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the
Florida coast, and at 7:27 p.m. a search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off
with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its
home base that its mission was underway. The Mariner was never heard from
again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of
Florida of a visible explosion seen at 7:50 p.m.
The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the
13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that
date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of
the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico,
and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No trace of the bodies or
aircraft was ever found.
Although naval officials maintained that the remains
of the six aircraft and 27 men were not found because stormy weather destroyed
the evidence, the story of the "Lost Squadron" helped cement the
legend of the Bermuda Triangle,
an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to disappear
without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from the southern U.S.
coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo
Domingo.
History
of Bermuda Triangle’s Bad Reputation
Unusual features of the area had been noted in the
past. Christopher Columbus wrote in his log about bizarre compass bearings in
the area. However, the term "Bermuda Triangle" was first used in
an article written by Vincent H. Gaddis for Argosy magazine in
1964. In the article, Gaddis claimed that in this strange sea a number of ships
and planes had disappeared without explanation. Gaddis wasn't the first one to
come to this conclusion, either. As early as 1952, George X. Sands, in a report
in Fate magazine, noted what seemed like an unusually large number of strange
accidents in that region.
In 1969 John Wallace Spencer wrote a book called Limbo
of the Lost specifically about the Triangle and, two years later, a
feature documentary on the subject, The Devil's Triangle, was
released. These, along with the bestseller The Bermuda Triangle,
published in 1974, permanently registered the legend of the "Hoodoo
Sea" within popular culture.
Why do ships and planes seem to go missing in the
region? Some authors suggested it may be due to a strange magnetic anomaly that
affects compass readings (in fact they claim Columbus noted this when he sailed
through the area in 1492). Others theorize that methane eruptions from the
ocean floor may suddenly be turning the sea into a froth that can't support a
ship's weight so it sinks (though there is no evidence of this type of thing
happening in the Triangle for the past 15,000 years). Several books have gone
as far as conjecturing that the disappearances are due to an intelligent,
technologically advanced race living in space or under the sea.
In 1975, Larry Kusche, a librarian at Arizona State
University, reached a totally different conclusion. Kusche decided to
investigate the claims made by these articles and books. What he found he
published in his own book entitled The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved.
Kusche had carefully dug into records other writers had neglected. He found
that many of the strange accidents were not so strange after all. Often a
Triangle writer had noted a ship or plane had disappeared in "calms
seas" when the record showed a raging storm had been in progress. Others
said ships had "mysteriously vanished" when their remains had
actually been found and the cause of their sinking explained. In one case a
ship listed missing in the Triangle actually had disappeared in the Pacific
Ocean some 3,000 miles away! The author had confused the name of the Pacific
port the ship had left with a city of the same name on the Atlantic coast.
More significantly, a check of Lloyd's of London's
accident records by the editor of Fate in 1975 showed that the Triangle was no
more dangerous than any other part of the ocean. U.S. Coast Guard records
confirmed this and since that time no good arguments have ever been made to
refute those statistics. So many argue that the Bermuda Triangle mystery has
disappeared, in the same way many of its supposed victims vanished.
The Bermuda
Triangle Facts
The "Bermuda
Triangle" or "Devil's Triangle" is an imaginary area located off
the southeastern Atlantic coast of the United States of America, which is noted
for a supposedly high incidence of unexplained disappearances of ships and
aircraft. The apexes of the triangle are generally believed to be Bermuda;
Miami, Florida; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The US Board of Geographic Names
does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name. The US Navy does
not believe the Bermuda Triangle exists. It is reported that Lloyd's of London,
the world's leading market for specialist insurance, does not charge higher
premiums for vessels transiting this heavily traveled area.
A significant
factor with regard to missing vessels in the Bermuda Triangle is a strong ocean
current called the Gulf Stream. It is extremely swift and turbulent and can
quickly erase evidence of a disaster. The weather also plays its role. Prior to
the development of telegraph, radio and radar, sailors did not know a storm or hurricane
was nearby until it appeared on the horizon. For example, the Continental Navy
sloop Saratoga was lost off the Bahamas in such a storm with all her
crew on 18 March 1781. Many other US Navy ships have been lost at sea in storms
around the world. Sudden local thunder storms and water spouts can sometimes
spell disaster for mariners and air crews. Finally, the topography of the ocean
floor varies from extensive shoals around the islands to some of the deepest
marine trenches in the world. Most of the sea floor in the
Bermuda Triangle is about 19,000 feet (5,791 meters) down; near its southern
tip, the Puerto Rico Trench dips at one point to 27,500 (8,229 meters) feet
below sea level. With the
interaction of the strong currents over the many reefs the topography of the
ocean bottom is in a state of flux and the development of new navigational
hazards can sometimes be swift.
It has been
inaccurately claimed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of the two places on
earth at which a magnetic compass points towards true north. Normally a compass
will point toward magnetic north. The difference between the two is known as
compass variation. The amount of variation changes by as much as 60 degrees at
various locations around the World. If this compass variation or error is not
compensated for, navigators can find themselves far off course and in deep
trouble. Although in the past this compass variation did affect the
"Bermuda Triangle" region, due to fluctuations in the Earth's
magnetic field this has apparently not been the case since the nineteenth
century.
Sources
and Additional Information:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/12/1205_021205_bermudatriangle.html
