Myths and Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle is an area over the Atlantic Ocean that many have speculated is the cause of several mysterious disappearances of air and watercrafts. Some experts believe that the Bermuda Triangle stretches from parts of Florida, to the Azores, to the Bahamas. Others maintain that the area covers all of the Caribbean, while others even include the Gulf of Mexico to the area that the Bermuda Triangle affects.

Bermuda Triangle BackgroundChristopher Columbus first wrote about the Bermuda Triangle in 1492. As he and his crew sailed the Atlantic, they came across mysterious light patterns in the sky near the Caribbean Sea, as well as bizarre compass readings while in this area. It wasn't until 1950 that the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle would surface in mainstream media. It was during this time that several authors began to document and publish articles and books highlighting the disappearance of several ships and planes. All of the crafts written about were never seen again.

Bermuda Triangle Major EventsFlight 19 was the first incident that was heavily reported on, bringing the Bermuda Triangle into the spotlight and under speculation. In 1945, Flight 19, a small aircraft containing 5 U.S. Navy bombers set out over the sea on a training mission. The plane was being flown by an experienced pilot, and for reasons unknown to this day, just vanished. Neither the plane, nor the crew aboard was ever found.As eerie as Flight 19's disappearance was, it was just a prelude to whatever happened to a Douglas DC-3 aircraft that disappeared without a trace over the Atlantic on December 28, 1948. The aircraft vanished without a trace sometime during its flight from Puerto Rico to Miami. Inexplicably, no wreckage, or any of the 32 people onboard were ever found.These disappearances sparked an interest in what some were calling the Devil's Triangle. Research on the area also pointed to the biggest loss of life that the U.S. Navy suffered that wasn't related to combat. On March 4, 1918, The USS Cyclops and its crew of 309 vanished without a trace sometime after leaving Barbados, an island in the Caribbean. Though many theories suggest everything from bad weather to an enemy attack, nothing has ever been proven to explain this mysterious disappearance.One of our True Ghost Tales writers has put together a thorough description of the details behind the disappearance of Flight 19

Bermuda Triangle TheoriesResearchers and scientists have developed a host of theories to explain the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. Many point to irregular and infrequent weather patterns, the Gulf Stream or rogue waves that crop up over the ocean and are difficult to predict. Other theories indicate man as the cause of the disappearances, suggesting error in reading compasses or flight tools, or even acts of violence such as piracy.As theories may point to a natural or explainable reason for the mysteries in the Bermuda Triangle, there are other theories that point to phenomena that cannot be easily explained. Many believe that the Bermuda Triangle sits over the spot of the lost city of Atlantis. Another supernatural theory is that UFOs frequent the area over the Bermuda Triangle, and that the victims of these vanishings have been abducted by aliens.The Bermuda Triangle continues to be a source of intrigue and mystery for many. As most of the vanishings that have taken place here remain unsolved, the mystery widens.Copyright © 2008 True Ghost Tales all right reserved

The Bermuda Triangle: The Stories

One of the strangest wonders, The Bemuda Triangle is a very widely known pheonomena. It also has many different possibilities.

The Bermuda Triangle's Location 

Located in the middle of Miami, Peurto Rico and Bermuda, there is an area of sea that people fear to tread. In the shape of a triangle, the Bermuda Triangle is

home to some of the world's strangest dissapearences.The Dissapearences in The Bermuda Triangle

 SHIPS:

One of the most famous early 20th Century dissapearances was the Cyclops. She mysteriously vanished in 1918 with 308 aboard. People have called it the Navy's

"Greatest Mysteries of the Sea". 

Many US Navy ships dissapeared in the Bermuda Triangle between 1780 and 1824. These Included the General Gates, Insurgent, Hornet, Wildcat, Pickering,

Expervier and Wasp. 

The Rosalie was actually a real ship. Built in 1839, she was 220 tones of wood. In 1840 she was found deserted in the Bahama's (near the BT). She was NOT

the Rossini. 

There are many, many, many, many more, but I wont go into those.  

AIRCRAFT:I will not go in-depth with these, and haven't yet finished my resaeach for

aircraft. It'll be up soon though!   

The Bermuda Triangle's Possible Explanations 

With so many dissapearences that don't leave a clue... or even a distress call, many people wonder why so many planes and ships have just dissapeared. One of the explanations - and one of my favourites is that there may be some type of portal to a parralel dimension, where these innocent people get sucked into. That is to say they may be here, but really not, or they are back in the age of the dinosaurs. Another explanation is that a strange gravitational force pulls most passers by get pulled under with, drowning them. Some also say that 'aliens' await people there to take back to there planets (even though this explanation is highy fictional). A relatively new explanation maybe under control of the government, in a secret project to figure out if time-travel or making objects dissapear is possible. Really nobody will ever know. But the fact that ships and planes just 'go off the radar' seems quite distressing.

Bermuda (or "Devil's") TriangleThe Bermuda Triangle (a.k.a. the Devil's Triangle) is a triangular area in the Atlantic Ocean bounded roughly at its points by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Legend has it that many people, ships and planes have mysteriously vanished in this area. How many have mysteriously disappeared depends on who is doing the locating and the counting. The size of the triangle varies from 500,000 square miles to three times that size, depending on the imagination of the author. (Some include the Azores, the Gulf of Mexico, and the West Indies in the "triangle.") Some trace the mystery back to the time of Columbus. Even so, estimates range from about 200 to no more than 1,000 incidents in the past 500 years. Howard Rosenberg claims that in 1973 the U.S. Coast Guard answered more than 8,000 distress calls in the area and that  more than 50 ships and 20 planes have gone down in the Bermuda Triangle within the last century.Many theories have been given to explain the extraordinary mystery of these missing ships and planes. Evil extraterrestrials, residue crystals from Atlantis, evil humans with anti-gravity devices or other weird technologies, and vile vortices from the fourth dimension are favorites among fantasy writers. Strange magnetic fields and oceanic flatulence (methane gas from the bottom of the ocean) are favorites among the technically-minded. Weather (thunderstorms, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, high waves, currents, etc.) bad luck, pirates, explosive cargoes, incompetent navigators, and other natural and human causes are favorites among skeptical investigators.There are some skeptics who argue that the facts do not support the legend, that there is no mystery to be solved, and nothing that needs explaining. The number of wrecks in this area is notextraordinary, given its size, location and the amount of traffic it receives. Many of the ships and planes that have been identified as having disappeared mysteriously in the Bermuda Triangle were not in the Bermuda Triangle at all. Investigations to date have not produced scientific evidence of any unusual phenomena involved in the disappearances. Thus, any explanation, including so-called scientific ones in terms of methane gas being released from the ocean floor, magnetic disturbances, etc., are not needed. The real mystery is how the Bermuda Triangle became a mystery at all.The modern legend of the Bermuda Triangle began soon after five Navy planes [Flight 19] vanished on a training mission during a severe storm in 1945. The most logical theory as to why they vanished is that lead pilot Lt. Charles Taylor’s compass failed. The trainees' planes were not equipped with working navigational instruments. The group was disoriented and simply, though tragically, ran out of fuel. No mysterious forces were likely to have been involved other than the mysterious force of gravity on  planes with no fuel. It is true that one of the rescue planes blew up shortly after take-off, but this was likely due to a faulty gas tank rather than to any mysterious forces.Over the years there have been dozens of articles, books, and television programs promoting the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. In his study of this material, Larry Kusche found that few did any investigation into the mystery. Rather, they passed on the speculations of their predecessors as if they were passing on the mantle of truth. Of the many uncritical accounts of the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, perhaps no one has done more to create this myth than Charles Berlitz, who had a bestseller on the subject in 1974. After examining the 400+ page official report of the Navy Board of Investigation of the disappearance of the Navy planes in 1945, Kusche found that the Board wasn't

baffled at all by the incident and did not mention alleged radio transmissions cited by Berlitz in his book. According to Kusche, what isn't misinterpreted by Berlitz is fabricated. Kusche writes: "If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty." (Berlitz, by the way, did not invent the name; that was done by Vincent Gaddis in "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle," which appeared in the February, 1964, issue of Argosy, a magazine devoted to fiction.)In short, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle became a mystery by a kind of communal reinforcement among uncritical authors and a willing mass media to uncritically pass on the speculation that something mysterious is going on in the Atlantic.

Spirit Centers - Bermuda Triangle: Energy Field or Time Warp?

by Prabhath P

The Bermuda Triangle became one of the world’s best-known mystery power spots when several ships and aircraft disappeared in this stretch of seaDecember 5, 1945: Five Navy Avenger Bombers were on a routine training mission over the Atlantic Ocean in the Bahamas. They were headed by Lt Charles Taylor, a senior and greatly experienced flight instructor. All five bombers vanished without a trace. A rescue plane that went in search never returned. They had all accidentally strayed into the stretch of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle. 

Now infamous the world over, the Bermuda Triangle is an imaginary triangle stretching from the East Coast of Florida to the island of Bermuda back to Puerto Rico. The ocean lying within the Triangle is a peculiar power spot on the planet, suspected to be filled with electromagnetic and gravitational energy anomalies. Not only do aircraft disappear, they also resurface—verified radio messages have been received from pilots who were long lost. This has led to speculation of the Triangle being a gateway to another dimension, where those entering it get trapped. Those venturing near it have also reported encounters with strange clouds and mists below cloud level and malfunctioning of electrical machinery. 

Fame and Notoriety

The Bermuda Triangle entered popular imagination first with an Associated Press dispatch in 1950. E.V.W. Jones wrote of “mysterious disappearances” of ships and planes. In 1952, George X. Sands in Fate magazine noted an unusually large number of strange accidents there. Vincent H. Gaddis first used the term ‘Bermuda Triangle’ in an article for Argosy magazine in 1964. In 1969, John Wallace Spencer wrote a book called Limbo of the Lost and, later, a feature documentary, The Devil’s Triangle, was released. 

These, along with the bestseller, The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz published in 1974, made the Triangle extremely popular. Movies and fictional accounts followed suit. An aircraft disappearance earned a mention in the Steven Spielberg classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Recently, the cult TV series X-Files featured an episode in which FBI special agents Mulder and Scully find themselves on a ship caught in a time warp in the Triangle. 

A historical event attributed to the Triangle is the 1892 disappearance and reappearance of the vessel Mary Celeste. The crew was missing, but their supplies and personal belongings were safe. According to official reports, during the 20th century, more than 50 ships and 20 aircraft were swallowed by the Triangle, including the Indian passenger ship Kairali. 

The Scientific Explanation…

Most scientists attribute the disappearances to tricky ocean currents, hostile weather and human or technical error. In the Triangle area, compasses point to the geographical North Pole rather than the magnetic north, which some think makes navigation difficult causing accidents. Dr Ben Clennel of Leeds University popularized the theory that methane locked below the sea sediments reduces the density of water making ships sink. He also claimed that the highly combustible gas could also ignite aircraft engines, blowing them up. 

The US Navy proposed the possibility of electromagnetic and atmospheric disturbances. Larry Kusche,

the author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, argued that the accidents were not strange but only hyped up by the media and irrational sensationalists. 

…debunked!

Gian Quasar, who has investigated the Triangle since 1990, points out that the rationalistic attempt to deny the mystery or fit it into the existing scientific framework fails like the wild theories they reject. Quasar says the magnetic compass variation explanation is false because the Argonic line (the area of difference in calculation) moves with the rotation of the earth and is not always inside the Triangle to cause accidents. The methane gas theory also falls flat since the Triangle area does not have vast gas reserves. 

Futuristic, New Age and spiritual theories add colour to the Bermuda Triangle mystery, but do not agree on an answer. American psychic Edgar Cayce’s readings indicate that the area beneath the Triangle was part of the mythical lost continent Atlantis and that Atlantean electromagnetic machines were hidden there. Charles Berlitz thought there was a magnetic vortex in the Triangle. Psychic Ed Snedeker believes that the atmosphere above the Triangle is filled with invisible tunnels, which suck in the aircraft, ships and people. 

Supernatural Portal

According to a theory based on physics, the ships and planes mysteriously travel from this world to the anti-matter world where everything has a counterpart. This happens due to a ‘split’ in one world coming close to a ‘split’ in the other world. This could be plausible since scientists have recently discovered a hole consisting of anti-matter in our solar system. New Agers think that the Triangle is a supernatural corridor or planetary energy chakra used by spiritual beings of other dimensions. 

Dr Michael Preisinger, a German historian cum scuba diver, concludes that deviations in magnetic and gravitational fields off the coast of Bahamas could be caused by micro-wormholes. Prof John Wheeler, of Princeton University, USA, believes these wormholes might be ‘transit tunnels’ between different dimensions of reality. Small underwater caves, called ‘blue holes’, have been found in the Triangle area and it is possible that the popping in and out of existence of micro-wormholes formed them. UFO enthusiasts cite these theories to argue that the Triangle is a ‘Star Gate’ used by extraterrestrials for inter-galactic travel. 

Another speculation points to time warps in the Triangle where different temporal dimensions might overlap with our timeline causing ships and aircraft to disappear into the past or the future. Conservative Christians consider the Bermuda Triangle as the gateway to hell, hence the name ‘Devil’s Triangle’. A quantum mechanical explanation sees it as a meeting point of parallel worlds that normally exist separately. But an area of interpenetration could make objects and beings from one world cross over into another. 

Energy Anomaly

Despite the conflicting explanations, there is an underlying thread—the probable presence of strange but powerful energy anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle that even some scientists admit. But nobody knows for sure why and how it became a power spot. As Gain Quasar concludes: “I don’t know how one can dogmatically assert any theory since, without doubt, nothing is left from a disappearance upon which to build any unassailable evidence… It is the only honest standpoint.” This is a humbling lesson for humanity. Despite science’s efforts to create a Theory of Everything, earth still holds secrets that we can’t fathom. As Goethe said: “What we know is nothing. What we don’t know is immense.”

Bermuda Triangle FactsThe Bermuda Triangle is a geographic area with it's points being at Miami, Florida, the island of Bermuda, and San Juan Puerto Rico.  In this area, over the course of time, many different aircraft and boats have mysteriously disappeared without a trace, leading many to believe that the triangle has something unusual about it that is swallowing up people, planes, and boats.

There are many theories as to why and how these things disappeared, but it has yet to be conclusively answered.  Many of the wrecks happened such that no remains or wreckage or oil slicks were ever found, and in at least one instance, and entire squadron of bombers, 5 planes, disappeared without a trace.  While out on a search for the bombers, another plane supposedly exploded over the sea, but no trace of it was ever found either.  The final recording of the head pilot back to the base was nearly incoherent, with him mumbling about entering white water, and saying "we can't make out anything." After this event in 1945, people became interested in what exactly was going on in the Bermuda triangle, and why it seemed to attract so much unexplainable disaster.

Bermuda Triangle DisappearancesAfter the 1945 Flight 19 disaster (with the 5 bombers), other disappearances started popping up.  Over the next five years, three more flights would disappear, along with 83 people.  From as early as 1843, ships have been occasionally disappearing from within the Bermuda triangle, and even on land in 1969, two people at the Lighthouse in Bimini suddenly disappeared and were never found.  All of these incidences have relatively similar aspects in that they don't show up later as wreckage, and that in the cases of the aircraft, there was never any oil slicks found on the ocean, which are common indicators of where a crash took place for sea crashes.  There are also a number of wrecks that have taken place that have been accounted for, and were the cause of natural calamities or human error.  It depends largely on what you're willing to believe.

Possible Reasons for the DisappearancesUFOsSome theorists believe that the strange, unexplainable nature of these disappearances points to UFOs and abductions by extraterrestrial beings.  These occurrences first happened at the beginning of the UFO era, and it's thought that while in flight or on the boats, the UFOs come in and disorient the pilots and passengers, and then take the entire flight or boat into their crafts and fly off.  The best evidence of this is the pilot of Flight 19's strange comment, "we're entering white water..." which can't be explained by storms, as it was a clear day. AtlantisThe Lost City of Atlantis has long been considered a myth by most westerners who have heard of it, but some believe that Atlantis used to exist where the Bermuda Triangle is currently located, and that some left over technology deep beneath the sea is interfering with the planes and boats and causing them to crash or sink.  Some believe that the Bimini Road, which was discovered in 1968 underwater off the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas, is actually a road leading from the Bahamas to the former Atlantis, which is now resting under the sea.A WormholeSome believe that the strange disappearances point to odd physical properties somewhere within the Bermuda Triangle itself, suggesting that perhaps, somewhere, there is an element not currently understood by man, that causes certain laws of physics to change within the triangle.  It could, possibly, be a theoretical wormhole that transports those that pass through it to a different time and place in the universe. Natural ReasonsSome have stated that because of the particularly rough weather going through the Bermuda Triangle, that it's possible that quick storms were whipped up that knocked planes out of the sky or sank ships without warning.  Perhaps because of the quick nature of these events, the crashes and sinking's took place quickly, disappearing underneath the service before a rescue party could be scrambled.  Some claim that it's simply human error, and at least one author has suggested that the amount of disappearances in a highly-traveled-through area such as the Bermuda triangle was not any more than the norm, and that the Bermuda Triangle theorists are simply alarmists, and that most of the Bermuda Triangle facts that have been released to the public have been sensationalized to sell papers or magazines.  Others suggest that the lack of explanation has led other, less malevolent authors, to seek out evidence rather that forming a theory based on the evidence as a whole.  You can always find evidence to support your conclusion if you're looking for evidence to support the conclusion in the first place, rather than developing a conclusion based off the evidence.