Bermuda Triangle:

They entered never to return...

by Amal HEWAVISSENTI

Bermuda Triangle or the Devil's Triangle is a vast watery stretch in the Atlantic Ocean in which a number of ships and air craft are presumed to have disappeared without leaving behind a trace whatsoever of the craft or the crew, either on surface or underwater. The reports of incredible happenings at Bermuda's sea disappearance cases which have thrown the hearers off balance. Most planes and vessels in this area fall beyond the boundaries of man's understanding and reasoning. They also claim that acts of piracy or war or other natural geographical factors may have come in the form of supernatural happenings. As most of these disappearances have remained unexplained, some others say that it might be an activity by aliens or the paranormal. Yet there are some scientists and explorers who are highly critical of the reports and deny the validity of the reported sightings of mysterious happenings.

The rough triangular boundaries of this mystery sea, cover the points of the coast of Florida, Puerto Rico, Sanjuan and the Atlantic Island of Bermuda. Christopher Columbus and his crew were the first historic sailors to espy the 'strange dancing lights on the horizon and flames in the sky' and the unusual compass bearings.

The strange fog

On December 4, 1970 Bruce Gernon and Rob MacGregor were flying in the Berumuda triangle in perfectly clear skies when they saw a bizarre cloud hovering over Bermuda shore. Just as they flew over the cloud, the cloud began to open out in a speed exceeding that of their aircraft which was by then at 11,500 feet above the sea. Though they were of firm belief that they escaped the cloud, soon they found themselves trapped inside a tunnel of the thick cloud. Gernon clearly saw the lines on the walls of the fog tunnel curling counter clockwise and then understood that the single way to escape the cloud was to go through the tunnel until they would come out of it. Gernon saw his compass running counter clockwise while his navigational equipment were operating into confusion which made him give up his hopes for life. He was completely astonished to see a greyish white haze instead of the blue, clear sky when they came out of the fog tunnel and Gernon and his friend noticed nothing ahead of them - no horizon, no sky, no ocean below them.

Gernon quickly contacted Air Control to get radar dandification but the controller said there were no okabes in radar screen. After a few minutes, the air traffic controlled reported that a plane had been noted straight over Miami where he was bound. At the same time he saw the cloud tunnel fading away in long strips. The navigational instruments began to operate normally and the Miami beach was directly below them. The plane's clock and their watches indicated that there had been a loss of time in the tunnel and they had arrived at Miami 45 minutes ahead of usual time which showed that the 'electronic' fog had time travel qualities. Many other pilots have had experiences of emerging from an unusual cloud tunnel while flying over the sea of Bermuda. As the scientific basis, Gernon thinks that hig powered electro magnetic storms from within the earth, break through the surface and come into the atmosphere to disappear after a few minutes, leaving an electronic fog. A Swedish scientist has revealed that the fog happens to be more at Bermuda area than anywhere on earth because magnetism is comparatively weaker n Bermuda.

Many cruise ships, and a number of pleasure crafts regularly travel for harbours in the Americas, Florida, Europe and the Caribbean Islands. Equally it is a highly flown route for many a commercial and private plane making for Florida Caribbean and South America. The explorers say that the combination of violent storms and hurricanes striking the area make it inevitable that ships could founder in tempestuous weather and be lost without a trace specially before the improved telecommunication, radar and satellite technology was introduced during the 20th century.

Strange disappearances

The Flight 19, a group of five US Navy bombers on a training mission was among the first vessels which fell prey to the 'unknown' and had no trace whatsoever of the crew on board. The flight went missing on December 5, 1945 while it was flying over the triangle. As was later revealed the flight encountered unusual phenomena and bizarre compass readings although the flight took place on a calm day under the supervision of Charles Caroll, an experienced pilot. When they entered Bermuda Triangle, their communication with the main control room was being broken now and then and their reports of surroundings were strange to hear. The flight leader had been heard saying 'we're entering white water. Nothing seems right. We don't know where we're. Now the water has turned green - no white. Sky is whirling around us. The sky has turned yellow' It was claimed that the officials at the Navy Board of Inquiry stated the planes 'flew off to Mars' and this was the first reference to the Flight 19 to connect with the supernatural.

Another striking story of disappearance within Bermuda was the Japanese ship 'Raifuku Maru', a famous incident of mystery which took place somewhere in 1921. It is said that the vessel abruptly went down with all the crew on board after sending a distress signal which was fragmented and hardly audible. The distress call said 'come quick'. Danger like dagger now. It is like a dagger. 'They had seen a giant waterspout terrifyingly whirling towards them. Subsequent search operations within the sea area where the incident took place, confirmed the absence of even the slightest trace of the vessel or the crew. A special team of rescue divers was despatched the following morning but to their utter surprise they found no oil slick, any articles used by the crew as a sign of wreckage or drowning though the surface of the sea seemed perfectly calm.

In 1881, the ocean liner Ellen Austin suddenly came in contact with a derelict ship in the deep sea within the triangle and the ship's captain made arrangements to accompany it to the port in New York. The derelict, which had a crew of top class businessmen on board, disappeared without any trace and the Commander of Ellen Austin, unsuccessfully attempted to track down the ship, but to no avail. About two hours later, the derelict made an abrupt reappearance this time without the crew or anything on board but a talking parrot known to have been on board, had vanished along with the crew with no trace at all. In utmost confusion, the captain sent some of his crew on board the derelict and despatched it to New York under the dependable commandership of a friend of his. Soon he learnt, to his utmost distraction, that the derelict disappeared for the second time together with the star-crossed passengers including his friend.

In the course of two days, the vanished ship was rediscovered floating within the triangular area without the crew. But it was virtually obvious that the ship had borne no marks of violence or impact, of outside influence.The large ocean liner USS Cyclops is answerable for the single largest loss of life in the history of US Navy unrelated to warfare-when the massive ship, under the command of Worley, went missing without a noticeable sign of existence. The ship reportedly vanished with the crew of 309 somewhere in March 1918 after departing the port of island of Barbardos. Confusingly enough, the unexpected disappearance of the ship gave no strong evidence for destructive storms, capsizing or enemy activity as the popular belief has it.

On December 28, 1948 an aircraft vanished while on a flight but no trace of the aircraft or the 32 people on board was ever found. A rescue plane in search of the disappeared aircraft too vanished. At the moment of the sudden disappearance, the pilots have radioed the most astounding messages which said that they were surrounded by sky suddenly made deadly and their navigational equipment were really going crazy, while the sea below was getting sparingly violent.

On the other hand, there are some disappearances of ships, and aircraft which have been ascribed to the 'paranormal activity' of the Bermuda Triangle but have really taken place thousands of miles away from Bermuda. Writers often have showed a partiality for crediting such disappearance cases to the mysterious functioning of Bermuda. For instance, two passenger aircraft, Star Tiger and Star Aerial simply disappeared without trace en route to Bermuda and Jamaica respectively. On the moment of disappearance neither aircraft gave out a distress call and their last messages were quite ordinary. Even if these disappearances were presumed to have occurred within Bermuda Triangle, actually a possible clue to their disappearance was found in the mountains of Andes. Another case of disappearance attributed to have been in Bermuda is the flight of an Avro airliner which too had been flying over the deadly Bermuda. There were numerous rumours that the plane had crashed head on into the horrifying jaws of Bermuda sea but in fact it had crashed into a mountain with a heavy impact which fragmented the plane beyond recognition.

The plane's remains were discovered at the melted end of a glacier suggesting that either the crew did not pay attention to their instruments or faced an instrument failure on the way to Santiago when it hit a mountain peak and was buried in the consequent avalanche. What about the secret? The Bermuda Triangle definitely accounts for more than 50 ships and 20 aircraft to have vanished without leaving a trace and for over 1000 men who have lost their lives in the past two hundred years.

Magnetism and methane play a part

There have been several subsequent attempts at unravelling the baffling mystery by means of possible or imagined situations but no theorist has ever been able to convincingly trace the reality underlying this phenomenon. In almost every account of mystery surrounding the triangle, there is reference to strange compass anomalies where a compass points to the north rather than magnetic north and causes it to malfunction and ships and planes to get off-course. A compass works because its magnetic needle is attracted by the earth's magnetism which draws it to point to the constantly shifting North Pole. The magnetic anomalies of this stretch of sea are assumed to have caused compass needle to swing violently which threw the crew off balance. Moreover an explanation for some of the disappearances has indicated the presence of vast area of methane within the triangle and experiments have proved that bubbles can make a ship go down by decreasing the water's density. There are powerful water currants which are like rivers in oceans and might have carried wreckage away from its reported position on the sea. Extremely huge waves can roll on at random, even in calm seas. Such a rogue wave is able to cause even the world's largest ship to capsize or to keep a medium sized boat adrift or carry it away for thousands of miles. The powerful storms or hurricanes spawned within Bermuda region are also presumed to have been responsible for thousands of lives lost and ships and aircraft turned to wreckage.

Human error

Human error, whether deliberate or accidental, has been accountable for the catastrophe and losses within Bermuda Triangle stubbornness, lack of proper training and negligence are thought to be the prime cause of disappearances within this region of sea but in what way they were responsible for the destruction, will never be known. Furthermore, acts of war and piracy are suggested to be yet another plausible theory for the mysterious disappearances in Bermuda which took the world by fright.

Many of the sinkings have been ascribed to the secretly planned and organised attacks by pirates and submarines particularly during the world wars. Some other observers claim that piracy for cargo theft is more common in Western Pacific and Indian Oceans while drug smugglers steal small boats (thought to have vanished in the Bermuda region) for smuggling operations and they may have been involved in crew and boat disappearances in the triangle area. Some pirates were known to have shone a light on shore to misdirect ships which would then sink on the shone and be plundered. Sometimes these shipwreckers killed any crew who would protest the theft of cargo.

Yet, some other critics who are highly sceptical about the disappearance stories are of the view that triangle's mysterious influence is a manufactured mystery, boosted by some writers who either purposely or unknowingly used fallacious concepts and sensations. They go on to say that the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft which pass through regularly.

They justify their claims by asserting that science does not have to answer questions about the Bermuda Triangle because those questions are not valid in the first place.