THINK TEEN 2 PROJECT :MYSTERY WORLD

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

By Konstantinos Katsantonis

     The Bermuda Triangle, sometimes called the Devil's Triangle, is an area in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. The triangle doesn't exist according to the US Navy and the name is not recognized by the US Board on Geographic Names.

     However, a number of airplanes and ships are said to have disappeared in the triangle under unknown circumstances. People have attributed such disappearances to supernatural beings and activities. A high percentage of the incidents were inaccurately described and therefore came of the imagination of people.

Origins of the Bermuda Triangle:

The first incidents of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area were described in September 16, 1950 in an Associated Press article by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door", a short article by George Sand, covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to report the Bermuda area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine. It was claimed that the flight leader had been heard saying, "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." It was also claimed that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars." Sand's article was the first to describe a supernatural element in the Flight 19 incident. In the February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis's article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" stated that Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region. The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book named Invisible Horizons. Others would follow with their own works, based on Gaddis' ideas like: John Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969 and 1973), Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda Triangle, 1974), Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974), and many others based on supernatural events.

Supernatural explanations of the disappearances:

Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation puts the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is a rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle. Followers of the 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, although geologists consider it to be of natural origin.

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

Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.

Natural explanations:

Compass variations:

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, but such anomalies have not been found. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. But people may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which is normal.

Gulf Stream:

The Gulf Stream is a deep ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and then flows through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic. In essence, it is a river within an ocean, and, like a river, it can and does carry floating objects. It has a surface speed of up to about 2.5 meters per second (9 km/h). A small plane making a water landing or a boat having engine trouble can be carried away from its reported position by the current.

Human error:

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error.  Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, the Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958.

Violent weather:

Hurricanes are powerful storms, which form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives lost and caused billions of dollars in damage. The sinking of Francisco de Bobadilla's Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

A powerful downdraft of cold air was suspected to be a cause in the sinking of the Pride of Baltimore on May 14, 1986. The crew of the sunken vessel noted the wind suddenly shifted and increased speed from 32 kmh to 95–145 kmh. A National Hurricane Center satellite specialist, James Lushine, stated "during very unstable weather conditions the downburst of cold air from aloft can hit the surface like a bomb, exploding outward like a giant squall line of wind and water." A similar event occurred to the Concordia in 2010 off the coast of Brazil.

Methane hydrates:

An explanation for some of the disappearances has focused on the presence of large fields of methane hydrates (a form of natural gas) on the continental shelves. Laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water; any wreckage consequently rising to the surface would be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream. It has been hypothesized that periodic methane eruptions (sometimes called "mud volcanoes") may produce regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning.

Publications by the USGS describe large stores of undersea hydrates worldwide, including the Blake Ridge area, off the southeastern United States coast. However, according to other papers of theirs, no large releases of gas hydrates are believed to have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle for the past 15,000 years.

Rogue waves:

In various oceans around the world, rogue waves have caused ships to sink and oil platforms to topple. These waves, until 1995, were considered to be a mystery and/or a myth.