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LEGEND OF THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or D evil’s T riangle, covers a bout 500,000 square miles of ocean off the

southeastern tip of Florida . When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his r st voyage to the New World,

he r eported t hat a g reat ame o f re (pr obably a m eteor) crashed into t he s eaone n ight and that a st range l ight

appeared i n the distance a f ew weeks l ater. He a lso wrote about erratic co mpass r eadings, perhaps because a t that

time a s liver of the Bermuda Triangle was one o f the few places on Earth where true north and m agnetic n orth lined

up. After gaining widespread fame as the rst

1909 voyage from Martha’s V ineyard to South America. Though it’s u nclear exactly what happened, many sou rces

later attributed his d eath to the Bermuda Triangle. William Shakespeare’s p lay “The Tempest,” which some s cholars

claim was based on a real-life Bermuda shipwreck, may h ave enhanced the area’s a ura of mystery. Nonetheless,

reports o f unexplained disappearances d id not really c apture the public’s a ttention until the 20th century. An

especially infamous t ragedy o ccurred in March 1918 when the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy ca rgo ship with

over 300 men an d 10,000 tons of manganese or e onboard, sank som ewhere between Barbados and t he Chesapeake

Bay. The Cyclops ne ver sent out an SOS distress ca ll despite b eing equipped to d o so , and a n e xtensive se arch

found no wreckage. “Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship,” U.S. President Woodrow

Wilson later sai d. I n 1941 two of the Cyclops’ sister shi ps similarly v anished without a trace along nearly the same

route.A pattern a llegedly b egan forming in w hich vessels t raversing the B ermuda Triangle w ould e ither di sappear or

be found a bandoned. Then, in December 1945, ve Navy bo mbers car rying 14 men took off f rom a F ort Lauderdale,

Florida, aireld in order t o conduct practice bombing runs o ver som e nearby sh oals. But with his co mpasses

apparently m alfunctioning, the leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got seve rely l ost. All ve planes ew

aimlessly u ntil they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea. That same day, a rescue plane and its 1 3-man

crew also disappeared. After a m assive weeks-long search failed to turn u p any e vidence, the official Navy report

declared t hat it was “as i f they had own t o Mars.” BERMUDA TRIANGLE THEORIES AND COUNTER-

THEORIES ..By the time author Vincent Gaddis co ined the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” in a 1964 magazine article,

additional mysterious a ccidents h ad o ccurred in the a rea, including three p assenger planes t hat went down d espite

having just sent “all’s w ell” messages. Charles B erlitz, whose grandfather founded the Berlitz l anguage schools,

stoked the legend even further in 1974 with a sensational bestseller about the legend. Since then, scores o f fellow

paranormal writers h ave blamed the t riangle’s su pposed lethalness o n e verything from aliens, Atlantis and sea

monsters t o t ime warps an d reverse gravity e lds, whereas m ore sci entically minded theorists h ave pointed to

magnetic a nomalies, waterspou ts o r huge eruptions o f methane gas f rom the ocean oor….In a ll probability, however,

there is n o single theory t hat solves t he mystery. As o ne skeptic p ut it, trying to nd a common cause for every

Bermuda Triangle disappearance is n o more logical than trying to nd a common cause for ever y a utomobile accident

in Arizona . Moreover, although storms, reefs a nd the Gulf Stream can cause navigational challenges t here, m aritime

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insurance leader Lloyd’s of London does n ot recognize t he Bermuda Triangle a s an especially hazardous p lace.

Neither does the U.S. Coast Guard, which says: “In a review of many a ircraft and vessel losses i n the area over the

years, there has b een nothing discovered that w ould indicate that casualties w ere the result of anything other than

physical causes. No extraordinary factors h ave ever been identied.”