BERMUDA TRIANGLE
The Bermuda Triangle is a mythical section of
the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami,
Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and
airplanes have disappeared. Unexplained
circumstances surround some of these accidents,
including one in which the pilots of a squadron of
U.S. Navyвоенно-морской флот bombers became disoriented
while flying over the area; the planes were never
found. Other boats and planes have seemingly
vanished from the area in good weather without
even radioing distress messages. But although
myriad['mɪrɪəd] fanciful theories have been
proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of
them prove that mysterious disappearances occur
more frequently there than in other well-traveled
sections of the ocean. In fact, people navigate the
area every day without incident.
LEGEND OF THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or
Devil’s Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles
of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida.
When Christopher Columbus sailed through the
area on his first voyage to the New World, he
reported that a great flame of fire (probably a
meteor) crashed into the sea one night and that a
strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks
later. He also wrote about erratic compass readings,
perhaps because at that time a sliver of the
Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on
Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.
Did you know?
After gaining widespread fame as the first person
to sail solo around the globe, Joshua Slocum
disappeared on a 1909 voyage from Martha’s
Vineyard to South America. Though it’s unclear
exactly what happened, many sources later
attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle.
William Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” which
some scholars claim was based on a real-life
Bermuda shipwreck, may have enhanced the area’s
aura of mystery. Nonetheless, reports of
unexplained disappearances did not really capture
the public’s attention until the 20th century. An
especially infamous tragedy occurred in March 1918
when the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy cargo
грузовой ship with over 300 men and 10,000 tons of
manganese ore onboard, sank somewhere between
Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay. The Cyclops
never sent out an SOS distress call despite being
equipped to do so, and an extensive search found
no wreckage. “Only God and the sea know what
happened to the great ship,” U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson later said. In 1941 two
of the Cyclops’ sister ships similarly vanished
without a trace along nearly the same route.
A pattern allegedly[ə'leʤɪdlɪ] began forming in
which vessels traversing the Bermuda Triangle
would either disappear or be found abandoned.
Then, in December 1945, five Navy bombers
carrying 14 men took off from a Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, airfield in order to conduct practice
bombing runs over some nearby shoals. But with
his compasses apparently malfunctioning, the
leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got
severely lost. All five planes flew aimlessly until
they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea.
That same day, a rescue plane and its 13-man crew
also disappeared. After a massive weeks-long
search failed to turn up any evidence, the official
Navy report declared that it was “as if they had
flown to Mars.”
BERMUDA TRIANGLE THEORIES AND COUNTER-
THEORIES
By the time author Vincent Gaddis coined the
phrase “Bermuda Triangle” in a 1964 magazine
article, additional mysterious accidents had
occurred in the area, including three passenger
planes that went down despite having just sent
“all’s well” messages. Charles Berlitz, whose
grandfather founded the Berlitz language schools,
stoked the legend even further in 1974 with a
sensational bestseller about the legend. Since then,
scores of fellow paranormal writers have blamed
the triangle’s supposed lethalness on everything
from aliens, Atlantis and sea monsters to time
warps and reverse gravity fields, whereas more
scientifically minded theorists have pointed to
magnetic anomalies, waterspouts or huge eruptions
of methane gas from the ocean floor.
In all probability, however, there is no single theory
that solves the mystery. As one skeptic put it, trying
to find a common cause for every Bermuda Triangle
disappearance is no more logical than trying to find
a common cause for every automobile accident
in Arizona. Moreover, although storms, reefs and
the Gulf Stream can cause navigational challenges
there, maritime insurance leader Lloyd’s of London
does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an
especially hazardous['hæzədəs] place. Neither does
the U.S. Coast Guard, which says: “In a review of
many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the
years, there has been nothing discovered that
would indicate that casualties were the result of
anything other than physical causes. No
extraordinary factors have ever been identified.”
