Something about Bermuda Triangle
The
Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the
western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface
vessels allegedly disappeared mysteriously. Popular culture has attributed
these disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings.
Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents
were 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 that in any other area of ocean.
History Origins
The
earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a
September 16, 1950 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 X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and
ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger
bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the
now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would
be covered 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 suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. In the
February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis's article "The Deadly
Bermuda Triangle" argued 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, Invisible Horizons.
Others
would follow with their own works, elaborating on Gaddis's ideas: John Wallace
Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969, repr. 1973); Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda
Triangle, 1974); Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974), and many others,
all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined by Eckert.
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,
such anomalies have not been shown to exist. Compasses have natural magnetic
variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have
known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are
only exactly the same for a small number of places - for example, as of 2000 in
the United States only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the
Gulf of Mexico. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is
something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as
large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.
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