Vanished without a trace in paradise
Chandra Devi RenganayarTHE clear blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda seem like paradise.
Within this paradise, however, lies a deadly place from which some believe there is no escape — the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle covers about 1.3 million square kilometres of some of the world’s most dangerous waters.
Its treacherous ocean floor drops from shallow blue waters into a dark trench several kilometres below the surface.
Over the centuries, ships have vanished without a trace, planes have disappeared from clear skies and hundreds of people have gone missing.
For hundreds of years sailors and aviators have reported spooky goingson but it was the disappearance of five planes all at once that put the Bermuda Triangle on the map.
On Dec 5, 1945, Naval Flight 19 comprising five TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida vanished while on a routine training mission in the Bermuda Triangle.
Rescue planes scoured the seas and skies but found nothing of Flight 19 and the 14 men on board the planes. What made the incident more mysterious was the disappearance of one of the rescue planes.
How could six planes disappear into thin air, without a trace? Another baff ling incident was the disappearance of a boat called Witchcraft in Miami in 1967. The boat, reputed to be unsinkable, disappeared while at one of the harbour’s buoys in calm waters.
The most puzzling incident, however, was the disappearance of the USS Cyclops, a 19,000-tonne navy collier en route from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia in the United States in 1918.
The ship vanished without sending a distress signal.
The mysterious incidents at the Bermuda Triangle have perplexed many people. Countless theories — from strange electromagnetic forces, deadly electronic fog, time warp to abduction by alien forces — have surfaced trying to explain the phenomenon.
Gian Quasar is one of those people.
He has devoted 15 years to studying the mysteries behind the Bermuda Triangle and Flight 19. He has written a book that covers just about every theory, from UFOs (unidentified flying objects) to USOs (unidentified submerged objects). The latter is based on the belief that aliens prefer to travel by sea, cruising in underwater vessels.
Quasar, along with many others, believe in the Hutchison Effect, a theory formulated by John Hutchison.
According to the theory, electronic fog surrounds metallic objects and wreaks havoc with electronic equipment.
Psychic Edgar Cayce, however, linked the strange happenings to the legendary lost continent of Atlantis which he claimed had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle. Cayce believed that some power crystals remained from this continent, which fire at ships and planes, disintegrating them into nothingness.
For naturalist Ivan Sanderson, it is the work of “vile vortices”. He described these as specific areas of ocean characterised by violent sea currents, radical temperature changes, and electromagnetic anomalies.
Oceanographer Arthur Mariano, who has been studying the gulf stream in the Bermuda Triangle for years, believed ships and planes disappeared without a trace due to something called “turbulent dispersion”. When a ship or plane goes down, strong winds and currents pummel the vessel and scatter it over several kilometres within a matter of minutes.
The Bermuda Triangle mystery continues to confound us today. Is there an evil force wreaking havoc? Or is one of the world’s greatest mysteries simply a case of bad weather and bad luck? Find out about the many rumours and theories surrounding the strange disappearances on the National Geographic Channel’s (Astro Channel 553) Is it Real? Bermuda Triangle on Oct 30 at 9pm.