Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (3 page)

At ten past two in the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the naval air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The commander of Flight 19, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, had been assigned a routine two-hour training flight of fifteen men on a course that would take them out to sea sixty-six miles due east of the airbase, to the Hen and Chickens Shoals.

There the squadron would carry out practice bombing runs, then fly due north for seventy miles before turning for a second time and heading back to base, 120 miles away. Their plotted flight plan formed a simple triangle, straight forward to execute, and Lieutenant Taylor and his four trainee pilots headed out into the clear blue sky over a calm Sargasso Sea. Even though everything seemed set fair, some of the crew were showing signs of anxiety. This was not unusual during a training flight over open water. Less usual was the fact that one of the fifteen crewmen had failed to show up for duty, claiming he had had a premonition that something strange would happen on that day and that he was too scared to fly.

And, within a few minutes after takeoff, something strange did happen. First, Lieutenant Taylor reported that the sea appeared white and “not looking as it should.” Then, shortly afterward, his compasses began spinning out of control, as did those of the other four pilots, and at 3:45 p.m., about ninety minutes after takeoff, the normally cool and collected Taylor contacted Lieutenant Robert Cox at flight control with the worried message: “Flight Control, this is an emergency. We seem to be off course. We can't make out where we are.”

Cox instructed the pilot to head due west, but Taylor reported that none of the crew knew which way west actually was. And that too was highly unusual, as even without compasses and other navigational equipment, at that time of day and with the sun only a few hours from setting, any one of them could have used the tried-and-tested method of looking out of the window and following the setting sun, which will always lie to the west of wherever you find yourself.

Just over half an hour later, Taylor radioed flight control again, this time informing them he thought they were 225 miles northeast of base. His agitated radio message ended with him saying, “It looks like we are … ” and then the radio cut out. By then they would have been desperately low on fuel, but the five Avengers had been designed to make emergency sea landings and remain afloat for long enough to give the crew the chance to evacuate into life rafts and await rescue.

A Martin Mariner boat plane was immediately sent out to assist Flight 19 and bring the men back; but as it approached the area in which the stricken crew were thought to have been lost, it too broke contact with flight control. None of the aircraft and none of the crew were ever found, and the official navy report apparently concluded that the men had simply vanished, “as if they had flown off to planet Mars.” To this day, the American military has a standing order to keep a watch for Flight 19, as if they believe it was caught up in some bizarre time warp and might return at any time.

At least, that is how the story goes. And it would have had a familiar ring for some, as it wasn't the first time a mysterious disappearance had been reported in the area. On March 9, 1918, the USS
Cyclops
left Barbados with a cargo of 10,800 tons of manganese (a hard metal essential for iron and steel production) bound for Baltimore. The following day, Lieutenant Commander G. W. Worley, a man with a habit of walking around the quarterdeck clad in nothing but his underwear and a hat and carrying a cane, reported that an attempted mutiny by a small number of the 306-man crew had been suppressed and that the offenders were below decks in irons. And that was the last anybody ever heard from Worley or any of his crew. The twenty-thousand-ton
Cyclops
simply vanished from the surface of the sea, into thin air.

The conclusion at the time was that the ship had been a victim of German U-boat activity, but when investigations in Germany after the end of the First World War revealed that no U-boats had been located in the area, that theory was ruled out. Instead, speculation ranged from the suggestion—proffered quite seriously—by a popular magazine that a giant sea monster had surfaced, wrapped its tentacles around the entire ship, dragged it to the ocean bed, and eaten it, to the rumor, with UFO hysteria in full swing (see “The Famous Aurora Spaceship Mystery,” page 3), that the vessel had been lifted, via giant intergalactic magnets, into outer space.

And then, in 1963, eighteen years after the disappearance of Flight 19, it happened again. The SS
Marine Sulphur Queen
was on a voyage to Norfolk, Virginia, from Beaumont, Texas. On February 3, the ship radioed a routine report to the local coast guard to give her position: she was, at the time, sailing close to Key West in the Straits of Florida. Shortly afterward she vanished. Three days later the coast guard, searching for any sign of the missing vessel, found a single life jacket floating in the sea. Since then, no other evidence of the
Marine Sulphur Queen
, its cargo, or the thirty-nine-man crew has ever been found.

Back in 1950, connections had already been made between the disappearance of Flight 19 and of the USS
Cyclops:
reporter E.V.W. Jones was the first to suggest mysterious happenings in the sea between the Florida coast and Bermuda. Two years later,
Fate
magazine published an article by George X. Sand in which he suggested that the mysterious events—thousands of them, by his calculation—had taken place within an area that extended down the coast from Florida to Puerto Rico and in a line from each of these to Bermuda, creating what he called a “watery triangle.” His views were shared by one Frank Edwards, who published a book in 1955 called
The Flying Saucer Conspiracy
in which he claimed that aliens from outer space were also operating in the same area; hence the sky was incorporated into the “watery triangle,” which became known as the “Devil's Triangle.”

In 1964, following the disappearance of the
Marine Sulphur Queen
, journalist Vincent Gaddis wrote an article for
Argosy
magazine in which he drew together the many mysterious events that had taken place within the triangular area of sea and sky. He called it “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” thereby coining the famous expression that was to be come synonymous with unexplained disappearances the world over. Ten years later, a book by former army intelligence officer Charles Berlitz, simply titled
The Bermuda Triangle
, sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into thirty different languages. In 1976, the book won the Dag Hammarskjold International Prize for nonfiction and the world became gripped by Triangle fever—and has been ever since. But it is worth noting that even as recently as 1964 the Bermuda Triangle, as we now know it, simply did not exist.

Geographically, the Bermuda Triangle covers an area in the western Atlantic marked by, at its three points, Bermuda, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and Miami in Florida—although, on closer study of the locations of some ocean disasters attributed to the myth, it would be easy to extend that area halfway round the world. Even the
Mary Celeste
, for example (see page 138), has been connected to the Bermuda Triangle, which would extend the Triangle's boundaries closer to Portugal!

But could there be any truth to the myth—some more prosaic explanation to account for the seemingly paranormal events? Is there anything about the actual geography of the area that might cause so many ships and aircraft to vanish apparently without a trace?

To start with, the sea currents in the area are heavily affected by the warm Gulf Stream that flows in a northeasterly direction from the tip of Florida to Great Britain and northern Europe. The warm current divides the balmy water of the Sargasso Sea and the colder north Atlantic and is the reason the climate in northern Europe is much more moderate than might be expected, considering that Canada and Moscow are as far north as England. Once leaving the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Stream current reaches five or six knots in speed, and this affects the heavy shipping in the area in many ways, including navigation.

Inexperienced sailors, particularly in the days before radar and satellite navigation, could very easily find themselves many miles off course after failing to measure the ship's speed with sufficient accuracy, especially when this was calculated by throwing from the bow of the ship a log attached to a rope and timing the appearance of each of a series of knots in the rope as it passed the stern. Failing to do this often enough while sailing in the fast-moving Gulf Stream could quite speedily lead to the crew of a ship becoming hopelessly lost in the vast Atlantic Ocean. Another effect of the fast-moving current would be to scatter the wreckage of lost ships and aircraft over a vast area, many miles from the site of an accident, making it well-nigh impossible for rescue teams to locate survivors.

Then there is the North American continental shelf, which is responsible for the clear blue water of the Caribbean islands. After only a few miles, the shelf gives way to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, an area known as the Puerto Rico Trench. And since it's nearly thirty thousand feet deep, nobody has ever been down there to clear up any mysterious disappearances.

Furthermore, the continental shelf is home to large areas of methane hydrates (methane gases that bubble up through the water after being emitted from the seabed). Eruptions from any of these in the relatively shallow waters cause the sea to bubble and froth, affecting the density of the water and hence the buoyancy of vessels traveling on the surface. Scientific tests have shown that scale models of ships will sink when the density of the water is sufficiently reduced, which could account for the sudden disappearance of various craft within the area. Added to which, any wreckage might be carried away by the Gulf Stream and scattered across the Atlantic in no time at all.

The Bermuda Triangle is also known to be an area of magnetic anomalies, or unusual variations in the earth's magnetic field. Indeed, this area of ocean was once one of the two places on earth where a magnetic compass pointed to true north (determined by the North Star) rather than magnetic north (located near Prince of Wales Island in Canada). The only other place where true north lines up with magnetic north is directly on the other side of the planet, just off the east coast of Japan, an area known by Japanese and Filipino seamen as the Devil's Sea. In both these areas, navigators not allowing for the usual compass variation between true and magnetic north would become hopelessly lost, and mysterious disappearances are equally common in the Devil's Sea. But locals there do not blame UFOs or sea monsters; they blame human error. Christopher Columbus, the famous fifteenth-century navigator credited with “discovering” the Americas, was one of the first people to recognize the difference between true and magnetic north; and he wasn't at all fazed by the odd compass readings he seemed to be getting as he sailed between Bermuda and Florida more than five hundred years ago.

Magnetic anomalies are also thought to be responsible for the fog that appears to cling to aircraft and boats in the Bermuda Triangle and Devil's Sea. In such cases, the fog gives the strange illusion that it is traveling along with the craft rather than that the vessel is traveling through it, creating a “tunneling” effect for the passengers on board. Many reports have been made of the disorienting effect of this curious fog. In one of the most celebrated instances, the captain of a tug towing a large barge reported that the sea was “coming in from all directions” (because of methane hydrates, no doubt) and that the rope attached to the barge plus the barge itself, only a few yards behind the tug, appeared to have completely vanished, presumably shrouded in magnetic fog.

Another natural phenomenon that might be held responsible for the strange disappearances in the region are hurricanes, notorious in that area of the ocean. These must take their fair share of the blame in bringing down small aircraft and swallowing boats, sending the wreckage to the floor of the Atlantic in minutes and leaving no trace of the craft on the surface.

So what really happened in the case of Flight 19, the USS
Cyclops
, and the
Marine Sulphur Queen?
Let's examine the first of these disappearances in a bit more detail. The squadron leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, although an experienced pilot, had recently been transferred to the air station at Fort Lauderdale and was new to the area. Added to which, he was a known party animal and had been out drinking the evening before the fateful day.

A very hungover Taylor tried to find someone else to take over as leader of the training flight—the only point of which was to increase the flying hours of the four apparent novices—but no other pilot would agree to stand in at such short notice. Shortly into the flight, Taylor's compass malfunctioned, and, unfamiliar with the area, he had to rely on landmarks alone. After nothing but open sea, the aircraft eventually flew over a small group of islands Taylor thought he recognized as his home—the Florida Keys.