The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle

Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda are prime holiday destinations boasting sun, beaches and coral seas. But between these idyllic settings, there is a dark side: countless ships and planes have mysteriously gone missing in the one and a half million square miles of ocean separating them. About 60 years ago, the area was claiming about five planes every day and was nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle by a magazine in 1964. Today, about that many planes disappear in the region each year and there are a number of theories explaining what could be happening.
Bermuda triangle

Twins George and David Rothschild are among the first passengers to have experienced bizarre effects in the Bermuda Triangle. In 1952, when they were 19 years old, the two naval men had to make an emergency trip home on a navy light aircraft, north over the Florida Keys, to attend their father's funeral. "We had been flying for probably 20 or 30 minutes when all of a sudden the pilot yelled out that the instruments were dead and he became very frantic," says George Rothschild. He had lost his bearings, and not only did he not know where he was, he also had no idea how much gas was left in the fuel tanks. After what seemed like hours, they landed safely in Norfolk, on the Florida coast.

Some speculate that it had nothing to do with the location, but rather the instruments that were available at the time. Pilot Robert Grant says that back in the 1940s, navigating a plane involved a lot of guesswork since they relied completely on a magnetic compass to guide them. "Dead reckoning" was used, which means that pilots would trust their compass and then estimate how the wind would influence their planned flight path to remain on track. "No matter what your mind tells you, you must stay on that course," says Grant. "If you don't, and you start turning to wherever you think you should be going, then you're toast."

Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean in which a number of aircraft and surface vessels are alleged to have mysteriously disappeared in a manner that cannot be explained by human error, piracy, equipment failure, or natural disasters. Popular culture has attributed these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings.[1]

A substantial body of documentation reveals, however, that a significant portion of the allegedly mysterious incidents have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is similar to any other area of ocean.

The Triangle area
The boundaries of the triangle cover the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean island area and the Atlantic east to the Azores; others[who?] add to it the Gulf of Mexico. The more familiar triangular boundary in most written works has as its points somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Miami, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, with most of the accidents concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

The area is one of the most heavily-sailed shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north.

Supernatural explanations
Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968 as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, though geologists consider it to be of natural origin.[20]

Other writers attribute the events to UFOs.[21] This idea was used by Steven Spielberg for his science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which features the lost Flight 19 as alien abductees.

Charles Berlitz, grandson of a distinguished linguist and author of various additional books on anomalous phenomena, has kept in line with this extraordinary explanation, and attributed the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.