Limbo of the Lost. The Twilight Zone. Hoodoo Sea. The Devil’s Triangle. The vast three-sided segment of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, did not receive its most famous nickname until 1964, but reports of bizarre happenings there, or nearby, have been recorded for centuries. In fact, many claim that Christopher Columbus bore witness to the Bermuda Triangle’s
weirdness.
As the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria sailed through the area
in 1492, it is reported that Columbus’s compass went haywire and
that he and his crew saw weird lights in the sky, but these events have
mundane explanations. From the account in Columbus’s journal, it is
thought that his compass’s slight inaccuracy stemmed from nothing
more than the discrepancy between true north and magnetic north. As
for the lights, Columbus wrote of seeing “a great flame of fire” that
crashed into the ocean — probably a meteor. He saw lights in the sky
again on October 11, which, of course, was the day before his
famous landing. The lights, brief flashes near the horizon, were spotted
in the area where dry land turned out to be.
Another historical event retroactively attributed to the Bermuda
Triangle is the discovery of the Mary Celeste. The vessel was found
The Essay on The Bermuda Triangle 6
... legends. The first legends of the Bermuda Triangle begin already with Christopher Columbus. As a captain, he was greatly ... In the past 100 years, the Bermuda Triangle has claimed over 1000 lives. In ... world. Much of the information we have about Columbus is picked up directly from his journal, so ... crew members sighted a few dancing lights on the horizon. Since Columbus, as many as 100 ships and ...
abandoned on the high seas in 1892, about 400 miles off its intended
course from New York to Genoa. There was no sign of its crew of
ten or what had happened to them. Since the lifeboat was also
missing, it is quite possible that they abandoned the Mary Celeste
during a storm that they wrongly guessed the ship could not weather.
But what makes it even harder to call this a Bermuda Triangle mystery
is that it the ship was nowhere near the Triangle — it was found off the
coast of Portugal.
The Bermuda Triangle legend really began in earnest on December 5,
1945, with the famed disappearance of Flight 19. Five Navy Avenger
bombers mysteriously vanished while on a routine training mission, as
did a rescue plane sent to search for them — six aircraft and 27 men,
gone without a trace. Or so the story goes.
When all the facts are laid out, the tale of Flight 19 becomes far less
puzzling. All of the crewmen of the five Avengers were inexperienced
trainees, with the exception of their patrol leader, Lt. Charles Taylor.
Taylor was perhaps not at the height of his abilities that day, as some
reports indicate that he had a hangover and failed in his attempts to
pass off this flight duty to someone else.
With the four rookie pilots entirely dependent on his guidance, Taylor
found that his compass malfunctioned soon into the flight. Taylor
chose to continue the run on dead reckoning, navigating by sighting
landmarks below. Being familiar with the islands of the Florida Keys
where he lived, Taylor had reason to feel confident in flying by sight.
But visibility became poor due to a brewing storm, and he quickly
became disoriented.
Flight 19 was still in radio contact with the Fort Lauderdale air base,
although the weather and a bad receiver in one of the Avengers made
communication very spotty. They may have been guided safely home
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A very significant impression that commercial radio in Asia makes is the strength of commercial radio in the region through the years, especially in comparison with other multi-media platforms. Before the era of the internet, the tri-media through sociological aspects have directly or indirectly created a balance that made the relationship of the three media platforms evenhanded. There are ...
if Taylor had switched to an emergency frequency with less radio
traffic, but he refused for fear they would be unable to reestablish
contact under these conditions.
Taylor ended up thinking they were over the Gulf of Mexico, and
ordered the patrol east in search of land. But in reality, they had been
heading up the Atlantic coastline, and Taylor was mistakenly leading
his hapless trainees much further out to sea. Radio recordings indicate
that some of them suggested to Taylor that Florida was actually to the
west.
A search party was dispatched, which included the Martin Mariner
that many claim disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle along with
Flight 19. While it is true that it never returned, the Mariner did not
vanish; it blew up 23 seconds after takeoff, in an explosion that was
witnessed by several at the base. This was unfortunately not an
uncommon occurrence, because Mariners were known for their faulty
gas tanks.
No known wreckage from Flight 19 has ever been recovered. One
reasonable explanation is that Taylor led the planes so far into the
Atlantic that they were past the continental shelf. There the ocean
abruptly drops from a few hundred feet deep to several thousand feet
deep. Planes and ships that sink to such depths are seldom seen
again. The deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, the 30,100-foot-deep
Puerto Rico Trench, lies within the Bermuda Triangle.
Combining the circumstances of the failing compass, the difficulty of
radio transmissions, and the absence of wreckage, tales of mysterious
intervention befalling Flight 19 began to take form. Theories involving
strange magnetic fields, time warps, Atlantis, and alien abduction
began to appear. Even an official Navy report intimated that the
Avengers had disappeared “as if they had flown to Mars.”
About 200 prior and subsequent incidents have been attributed to the
The Term Paper on Deep Sea Adaptations
1.0 Introduction What is an extreme environment? An extreme environment is an environment where humans could not live without technological assistance. Organisms that live in these environments possess special adaptations that enable them to survive the extreme conditions of their environment.1 An extreme environment can be characterized by conditions that are far outside the boundaries in which ...
inherent strangeness of the area, which was forever christened the
Bermuda Triangle by writer V. Gaddis in a 1964 issue of Argosy, a
fiction magazine. Public interest in the “phenomenon” was whipped
into a frenzy by Charles Berlitz’s 1974 bestseller The Bermuda
Triangle, a sensationalized and thoroughly inaccurate account that
shunned the facts in favor of mysterious excitement.
There are two major obstacles to taking the Bermuda Triangle legend
seriously. The first is that most of the associated mishaps can be
explained by rational means. The second is that most of the
associated mishaps did not occur within the Bermuda Triangle. If you
plot all of the alleged instances of the area’s malevolent influence on a
map, you find that only a handful have actually happened within the
Triangle’s borders. Sea disasters as distant as Portugal, Ireland and
the Pacific and Indian Oceans have been blamed on the Bermuda
Triangle. We might then just as well rename it as “The Worldwide
Curse of All Seas.” Some have turned this fact on its head by
proposing this as evidence that the Devil’s Triangle is expanding in
scope.
Others may respond that it is evidence that accidents will happen —
no matter where exactly on the land, on the sea or in the air they take
place.
