Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is an urban legend focused on a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The idea of the area as uniquely prone to disappearances arose in the mid-20th century, but most reputable sources dismiss the idea that there is any mystery. Notable incidents include: the sail training ship HMS Atalanta (originally named HMS Juno), which disappeared with her entire crew after setting sail from the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda for Falmouth, England on 31 January 1880; The USS Cyclops carrying a full load of manganese ore and with one engine out of action, which went missing without a trace with a crew of 309 sometime after March 4, 1918, after departing the island of Barbados; the Carroll A. Deering, a five-masted schooner, which was found hard aground and abandoned at Diamond Shoals, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on January 31, 1921; Flight 19, a training flight of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945, while over the Atlantic; the G-AHNP Star Tiger, which disappeared on January 30, 1948, on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda, and the G-AGRE Star Ariel, which disappeared on January 17, 1949, on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica; a Douglas DC-3 aircraft, number NC16002, which disappeared while on a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami on December 28, 1948; the Connemara IV, a pleasure yacht, found adrift in the Atlantic south of Bermuda on September 26, 1955; and a pair of US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aircrafts collided and crashed into the Atlantic 300 miles (480 km) west of Bermuda on August 28, 1963. The earliest suggestion of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 17, 1950, article published in The Miami Herald (Associated Press) by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door”, a short article by George Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19. Sand’s article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place, as well as the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine. In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote 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.” He also wrote that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes “flew off to Mars.” In February 1964, Vincent Gaddis wrote an article called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” in the pulp magazine Argosy saying 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. Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968, as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, but the Bimini Road is of natural origin. Some hypothesize that a parallel universe exists in the Bermuda Triangle region, causing a time/space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe. Others attribute the events to UFOs. Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.