The Bermuda Triangle

The reason I chose my topic to be the Bermuda Triangle is because the

Bermuda Triangle has long been a mystery to me and I am sure it has been a

mystery to a number of other people.

The Bermuda Triangle, also called the Devil's Triangle, is an area in the

Pacific Ocean off the southeast coast of Florida and is responsible for the

disappearances of ships and airplanes on a number of occasions. These

disappearances have led to speculation about unexplainable turbulences and

other atmospheric disturbances. Violent storms and downward air currents

occur frequently there, but studies have not revealed any significant peculiarities

about the area in question.

The boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle are formed by imaginary lines

from Melbourne, Florida, to Bermuda, to Puerto Rico, and back to Florida.

The Bermuda Triangle occupies a disturbing and almost unbelievable

place in the world's catalog of unexplained mysteries. More than a hundred

planes and ships have vanished into thin air.

Map of the Bermuda Triangle

English:

Map of the Bermuda Triangle

Most of them since 1945. More

than a thousand lives have been lost in the last twenty-six years. No bodies or

wreckage from ships have been found. The disappearances have not stopped

happening either. Many planes have vanished while in radio contact with their

base, or terminal destination until the very moment of their disappearance. Lots

of them have radioed extraordinary messages saying that they couldn't get their

instruments to function, and that their compasses were spinning, and that the

sky had turned yellow and hazy on a clear day and that the ocean which was

calm near by did not look right, without further clarification of what was wrong.

A group of five planes, a flight of Navy TBM Avengers were on a mission

from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on December 5th, 1945, were the object,

along with the Martin Mariner sent to rescue them, which also disappeared.

After one of the most intensive ground sea operations ever conducted, although

no life rafts, oil slicks, or wreckage was ever located. Other aircraft's, including

passenger planes have vanished while receiving landing instructions, almost as

if they had flown through a hole in the sky. Large and small boats have

disappeared without leaving wreckage, as if they and their crews had been

snatched into another dimension. The Marine Sulphur Queen, a 425-foot-long

freighter, and the USS Cyclops, 19000 tons with 309 people aboard, have simply

vanished while other ships and boats have been found drifting within the

Triangle, sometimes with an animal survivor such as a dog or a canary, who

could not give any indication about what happened, although in one case a

talking parrot had vanished along with the crew.

Unexplained disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have continued to

the present day and no plane or ship is reported as overdue and finally classed

as 'search discontinued' by the Seventh Coast Guard without the expressed or

unexpressed comment or feeling among the public or the searchers that there is

some connection with the past and present phenomenon of the Bermuda

Triangle.

There seems to be a growing public awareness that something is very

wrong with this area. Recent numerous reports from planes and boats which

survived are contributing toward a new folklore of the sea, although the case of

the unexplained menace to planes and ships within this area is as mysterious as

ever.

The most varied and imaginative explorations have been offered and

seriously considered to account for the continuing disappearances and assumed

(because no bodies have been recovered) fatalities. These explanations include

sudden tidal waves, caused by earthquakes, fireballs which exploded the planes,

attacks by sea monsters, a time-space warp leading to another dimension, electro

magnetic or gravitational vortices which cause planes to crash and ships to lose

themselves at sea, capture and kidnapping by flying or submarine UFO's

manned by entities from surviving cultures of antiquity, outer space, or the

future, looking for specimens of currently existing earth inhabitants. One of the

most striking suggestions was actually predicted by Edgar Cayce, the 'sleeping

prophet, ' a psychic and healer who died in 1944. Cayce predicted, decades

before the possibility of laser beams was suspected the ancient Atlanteans used

crystals as a power source, specifically located in the Bimini area, and

presumably subsequently sunk in the Tongue of the Ocean off Andros, in the

Bahamas, where many of the disappearances have taken place. In this concept, a

maverick power source sunk a mile deep to the west of Andros would still be

exerting it's occasional pull on the compasses and electronic equipment of today's

ships and planes. Any case the explanation or solution to the mystery seems

connected with the sea, itself the last and greatest mystery still confronting the

inhabitants of the earth. For although we stand on the threshold of space, so

wistfully contemplating the cosmos while believing that the world, now so

thoroughly explored, has not more mystery for us, it is nevertheless true that

about three fifths of the world's area, the abyssal depths of the sea, are about as

clearly or even less known to us as the craters of the moon. We have, of course,

long mapped the general contours of the sea bottom, first through mechanical

soundings, and more recently by sonar and exploration by submarine and

bathysphere, plus deep-sea camera probes charted its surface and undersea

currents and are presently prospecting for evidence of oil on the continental

shelves and soon perhaps at even greater depths.

Meteorologists frequently refer to the 'Devils Triangle' as an area

bounded by lines running from Bermuda north to New York and south to the

Virgin Islands, billowing fanwise west to, and encompassing, 75 degrees W L. It

had long been known in maritime circles that many ships had disappeared in

this area, and some of the past disappearances may have contributed to the

legend of the 'Sea of Lost Ships' or the 'Ships' Graveyard,' located in the

Sargasso Sea, part of which lies within the Triangle. Records concerning

disappearing ships seem to indicate disappearances with increasing frequency

since the 1860's possibly because of more detailed reporting. Disappearances

began after the Civil War, thereby ruling out attacks by Confederate Raiders.

But it was some months after World War II that a startling accident occurred,

suggesting that planes flying over the area could vanish from the sky, perhaps

the same reason that ships had been vanishing from the sea. This was the

incident that gave the Bermuda Triangle its name.

The Bermuda Triangle received its name as the result of the disappearance

of six navy planes and their crews on December 5, 1945. The first five were on a

routine training mission with a flight plan designed to follow a triangular flight

pattern starting at the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, then 160

miles to the east, 40 miles to the north and back to their base. It has earned

different names like 'The Devil's Triangle, ' 'The Hoodoo Sea,' and the

'Graveyard of the Atlantic,' and a whole bunch of other names. This is the

conversation the flight leader of Flight 19 had with his base on a routine mission

through the Bermuda Triangle:

'Flight Leader (Lieutenant Charles Taylor): Calling Tower. This is an

emergency. We seem to be off course. We cannot see land....Repeat... We cannot

see land.'

Tower: What is your position?

Flight Leader: We are not sure of our position. We cannot be sure just where we

are... we seem to be lost...

Tower: Assume bearing due west.

Flight Leader: We don't know which way is west. Everything is wrong...

Strange... We can't be sure of any direction-even the ocean does not look as it

should.

It has sometimes been pointed out in minimizing the importance or even

the existence of the Bermuda Triangle that it is not truly a mystery at all in that,

since ships and planes are lost all over the world, a Triangle projected over any

group of important sea lanes would indicated a disturbing incidence of loss if the

Triangle were made large enough. Moreover the ocean is large, planes and ships

relatively small, and the ocean is perpetually in motion, with both surface and

submarine currents.

This is the information I have found, now you can be the judge of what

you think about the Bermuda Triangle, and if you think it is supernatural or that

there is a reasonable explanation for the disappearances of ships and planes.

When I took a survey of what people knew and thought about the

Bermuda Triangle. I have found out that generally people with bigger

imaginations think that it is supernatural. People with less imagination generally

think that there is a reasonable explanation for the Bermuda Triangle.

Bibliography Page

Berlitz, Charles, The Bermuda Triangle.

New York: Doubleday and company,

Inc. 1984 ed.

'Bermuda Triangle.' Grolier Encyclopedia.

1996 ed.

'Bermuda Triangle.'Grolier Encyclopedia.

(342 p.), 1996 ed.

Dolan, Edward F. Jr. The Bermuda Triangle and other Mysteries.

New York: Triumph Books, 1980.