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A GenePoool.com Essay
Bermuda Triangle
A few years ago my wife and I had the rare opportunity to take a vacation-- sans kids-- on the wonderful island of Bermuda. It's a lovely place in general, and delightfully free of giant mice with suspenders. I recommend it highly.
While we spent the bulk of our time sitting on the beach and drinking rum, we did include a small amount of sightseeing on our journey, which is what led us to the Bermuda zoo. It's not a large zoo because there is frankly precious little in the way of indigenous animals on this island, largely thanks to man's occupation for the last four hundred years. As such, a lot of space devoted to aquatic life, which makes sense given that oceanographic studies are the only other good reason to visit there.
I imagine it's this lack of animal variety that led to the exhibit on the Bermuda Triangle disappearances. They had the space for it, and why not? It's interesting. I may have glanced at one or two of the descriptions below one or two of the fish tanks, but I read this wall of information thoroughly.
This is the sort of thing that I think everyone is a bit curious about, in the same way we find the Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster fascinating. Affirmation that the world is much stranger than we generally acknowledge is compelling, after all. T.V. shows about ghosts, Egyptian curses, South American pictograms, and U.F.O.s abound; it's our new mythology, and the Bermuda Triangle fits right in.
The zoo display gave a lot of information, much of it centered on the "first" and best-known incident: the disappearance of Flight 19, on December 5, 1945. As the story goes, briefly, five Avenger bombers never returned from a routine two hour flight out of Fort Lauderdale.
In dispatches between the bombers and the air base the flight leader admitted to being lost, unable to get his bearings or locate the sun. Their last call came in at 4:25 P.M., after which they vanished. A rescue plane was promptly sent out in search of the bombers. It too vanished.
Now, I'd heard of this before, of course. I hadn't bothered to examine details on it prior to my trip to the Bermuda zoo, but these are canonical facts I had no reason to question. Add to the fact that it was on display in a place where one would not expect to find something that was untrue, and that it was printed on some authentic-looking newsprint, and I was convinced.
I'm not any more.
There are some basic points listed above that are essentially accurate. Flight 19 did in fact disappear on December 5, 1945. There was, in fact, no trace. The first rescue plane also did, in fact, disappear. But the devil is in the details.
Let me begin by pointing out that the Navy Board of Investigation, called in to determine what happened off the coast of Florida that day, does not consider this to be in any sense a mystery. The Naval report is nearly four hundred pages long, and it's clear from the outset that nobody involved in the actual investigation considers this a mystery.
Flight 19 was a training mission. The weather conditions were not by themselves hazardous, although the seas were very choppy on that day, which is a telling point that we'll return to momentarily. In all likelihood, the flight leader's compass failed. This is not the only possibility, but it appears to be the most likely one, and it goes a long way toward explaining his assertions, by radio, that he was lost.
Consider how easy it would be to become confused when flying over an ocean that, by nature, has no landmarks, with instruments that are not properly functioning.
But this does not cause planes to crash. Lack of fuel does. This was a two hour mission. The bombers did not have enough fuel to continue airborne beyond that point. Getting lost was an issue simply because they had a very strict time limit, after which they had to ditch. This is where the choppy sea activity comes into play. "Disappearing without a trace" is indeed accurate, but hardly mysterious. They were flying over a large body of water, and bombers have a tendency to sink, because they're made of metal and they're not designed like boats.
The search plane which was sent immediately to look for survivors of the ditched flight appears to have exploded in mid-air, based on eye-witness accounts from a nearby ship. The common presence of gas fumes in the crew area of this type of search plane make such an accident possible.
Everything else that has been reported about this incident seem to be a combination of inaccuracies and downright fabrications. Transmissions that are not in any of the Navy logs (and there is no other source) have been repeated as fact despite a lack of historical record to support them.
Of course, it's not just this account that convinces anybody of the truth behind the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. Even if one were to fit the Navy's official account into the context of the huge number of disappearances that have since been reported, it would stand out as geographically significant. Perhaps, we might wonder, although each separate incident could have a benign explanation, surely the QUANTITY points to larger forces at work.
Let me step back for a moment and reintroduce a writer I've mentioned before. In the late Seventies, Charles Berlitz penned the definitive work on the Bermuda Triangle. (Berlitz also co-wrote a previously cited book on Roswell, proving, among other things, that Berlitz knows how to make lots of money.) Much of the "facts" we know about the Bermuda Triangle come from this piece of "research." A few years later, a writer named Larry Kusche did a little research of his own, using much of the same resource material as Berlitz, but with decidedly different conclusions. Much of the information in this column comes from Kusche, by way of James Randi.
The Bermuda Triangle is an area in the Atlantic defined as the region between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami. Kusche took the time to research all of the incidents cited by Berlitz, and mark their actual locations on a map. I'm looking at this map right now. It's very interesting. Only three of the marks are actually INSIDE the triangle. One mark is even in the Pacific Ocean.
Not all of the incidents Berlitz describes are on the map, but there are two good reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of scale; some took place so far away-- Portugal and Ireland, for example-- that they can't be shown without a loss of clarity. The second reason is even more interesting. Some have been fully explained, which confounds the basic premise. Some have not disappeared at all and are still fully functioning vessels or planes. Others appear to be completely invented; ships and planes whose names appear on no national registry anywhere.
Some of the reported cases seem to be examples of conscious omission. A 1953 flight cited as having disappeared is described as "a flight to Jamaica." This is accurate, only in the sense that Jamaica was its final destination. But it disappeared between the Azores and Newfoundland, where it was scheduled to make a connection before continuing to Jamaica. It never made it to Jamaica. It also never made it to Newfoundland.
What has happened here is that Berlitz has taken advantage of the historical record for his own gain. There's simply no other explanation, because there's no way he could have accidentally committed the huge number of errors in his research.
When one re-examines the Bermuda Triangle, it appears to be no less dangerous than any other region in the world. Accidents happen, of course. Some of them remain without explanation to this day, but how amazing is that, really? If the only people who could offer an explanation for an event die in the event, we can't very well ask them.
In hindsight, I'm still glad the Bermuda zoo
chose to adorn its walls with the legend of the Triangle; it made
for interesting reading. But the truth would have been much more
interesting, and also much more memorable.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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