What are the facts about Bermuda triangle?

Answer 1

The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely-defined area of the North Atlantic Ocean that runs down wards from the British dependency of the island of Bermuda to Puerto Rico, North-Westerly to the Southern tip of Florida, and then back up North-easterly to Bermuda. Over the past 200 years it has become mythologised as being a region of the sea where ships, and latterly also aircraft, have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, which have been attributed to paranormal activity or the work of extraterrestrial beings. Famous 'disappearances' include the sailing vessel 'Ellen Austin' in 1881, the USS 'Cyclops' in 1918, the ill-fated USAF training mission Flight 19 (sonsisting of 5 Lockheed Avengers) in December 1945, and the British airliners 'Star Tiger' and 'Star Ariel' in the late '40s. However, the idea that the losses of ships or aircraft (or the discovery of vessels abandoned in the area) is down to paranormal causes, is discounted by most authoratitive sources- the area is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and also covers one of the world's busiest flight paths. Both merchant shipping and passenger cruises use the area heavily, the former as an essential path for the import and export of goods and materials from, and to, the USA to many other parts of the world including Europe, India, West Africa and the West Indies. The area is known as a focus for violent weather including tropical storms, cyclones, sudden rough seas and other extreme weather conditions- it also lies in a gulf stream that produces thermocline circulations, surface currents that originate in the Gulf of Mexico and are carried through the Florida Straits out into the area. These act like a 'river within the ocean', causing vessels that are unpowered or having engine trouble to be easily carried away by the flow from their original positions and sometimes to founder. It also hosts the eruption of methane hydrates from the sea bed, bubbles of methane gas that escape from cracks in the ocean floor which lower water density and make it impossible for ships to remain afloat, as the seawater is no longer dense enough to support their weight. As for aircraft, the first few decades of powered flight were far more prone to human error, mechanical failure and navigational miscalculation that could lead to mid-air collisions, or quite simply aircraft getting lost until they ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea. A number of ships and 'planes that have vanished in the region are also known to have been in poor condition, unseaworthy, or, in the case of aircraft, to have had reputations for being unreliable or dangerous if overloaded with fuel or exposed to heavy air turbulence. When you take the above factors into account, as well as the fact that the 'triangle' is on one of the busiest shipping and aircraft routes in the world, then statistically it's hardly surprising that so many vessels and aircraft have fallen victim to the entirely natural dangers that exist in the region! There are other similar areas of the ocean that combine a number of capricious geographical and meteorological features, one of these being in the South China Sea, where there are a number of deep-sea underwater volcano's as well as sudden typhoons- the British supertanker 'Derbyshire' went down there after being caught in Typhoon Orchid in 1980. So there really is no mystery about it at all, and it is significant that as both shipping and aircraft have become increasingly technically advanced and, from the 1980s, heavily reliant upon computer technology and satellite GSP systems, the number of 'disappearances' has dwindled to amounting to only a couple of small pleasure craft and light aeroplanes every three years or so. It should also be mentioned that many of the so-called 'disappearances' reported in the region are in fact fictional, or have not occurred in the Bermuda Triangle at all but a long way away from it, ranging from the Gulf of Mexico where the 'V.A.Fogg' exploded and sank dramatically in 1972, down to the East Coast of South America and even up as far as the Eastern Coast of the British Isles! If you are interested in the debunking of the Triangle myth, then Lawrence David Kusche's 1975 book 'The Bermuda Triangle Mystery- Solved' can be recommended. Nowadays, thousands of ships and aircraft regularly traverse the area with out any mishap at all, and even in the days when disappearances WERE more frequent, far more 'planes and ships crossed it safely than did not. An unrelated, but still interesting, fact about the Triangle area is that part of The Bimini Ridge lies across the ocean floor beneath it- this is a naturally created line of undersea high ground that was once thought to have been a part of Latin America's East Coast that fell victim to a rise in sea levels, but in fact it has always been there. There are parts of shallow sea further down the coastline of Central and South America where ancient archaeological remnants of the Inca civilisation have been discovered, including walls, roadways and statuary, but these lie only a few dozen feet beneath the surface and probably sank beneath the sea as a result of a combination of earthquakes and land subsidence.

N.B. I should also mention a couple of other factors- one is that in Lawrence Kusche's book, he gives an account of a C-119 'Flying Boxcar' that disappeared in June 1965 carrying a load of machine parts. At the time of it's disappearance, the NASA space mission Gemini lV was in flight, and astronaut James McDivitt reported seeing a white object orbiting the Earth 'with a long arm sticking out' above the Triangle area at the time of the 'plane's disappearance. However, McDivitt later concluded that this was probably a spent section of a rocket booster or a similar piece of 'space junk', and indeed, five such pieces of debris were known to be in the region at the time. All this is documented in Kusche's book- what he fails to mention though, is that some wreckage of the C-119 WERE discovered later floating in the sea, including a wheel chock, the lid of it's first aid box, and a section of cabin lining. Investigators examining these items concluded that the 'plane had exploded in mid-air, probably due to fuel overload or mechanical mishap- the 'Flying Boxcar' was notoriously prone to fire risk.

Another thing is that once the 'Triangle' had earned a reputation for mysterious 'disappearances', it is more than possible that it became favoured as a suitable site for ship-owners who had a vested interest in losing vessels as part of an insurance scam. They might have deliberately over-insured an old or unseaworthy vessel, sailed it into the Triangle, and then secretly had another ship on standby to take the crew off after they had opened the sea-valves and deliberately allowed it to go down. The owner(s) would then have been able to make a huge insurance claim on it's loss, some of which they could have paid to the ship's crew as hush-money- a big incentive to your average merchant crewman, who's pay is notoriously low!