The bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle (sometimes also referred to as the Devil's Triangle) is a

stretch of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a line from Florida to the islands of
Bermuda, to Puerto Rico and then back to Florida. It is one of the biggest
mysteries of our time - that perhaps isn't really a mystery.

The term "Bermuda Triangle" was first used in an article written by Vincent
H. Gaddis for Argosy magazine in 1964. In the article, Gaddis claimed that in
this strange sea a number of ships and planes had disappeared without
explanation. Gaddis wasn't the first one to come to this conclusion, either. As
early as 1952, George X. Sands, in a report in Fate magazine, noted what
seemed like an unusually large number of strange accidents in that region.

In 1969 John Wallace Spencer wrote a book called Limbo of the

Lost specifically about the Triangle and, two years later, a feature
documentary on the subject, The Devil's Triangle, was released. These, along
with the bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, published in 1974, permanently
registered the legend of the "Hoodoo Sea" within popular culture.

Why do ships and planes seem to go missing in the region? Some authors
suggested it may be due to a strange magnetic anomaly that affects compass
readings (in fact they claim Columbus noted this when he sailed through the
area in 1492). Others theorize that methane eruptions from the ocean floor
may suddenly be turning the sea into a froth that can't support a ship's weight
so it sinks (though there is no evidence of this type of thing happening in the
Triangle for the past 15,000 years). Several books have gone as far as
conjecturing that the disappearances are due to an intelligent, technologically
advanced race living in space or under the sea

Kusche's Theor

In 1975 Larry Kusche, a librarian at Arizona State University, reached a

totally different conclusion. Kusche decided to investigate the claims made by
these articles and books. What he found he published in his own book
entitled The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved. Kusche had carefully dug into
records other writers had neglected. He found that many of the strange
accidents were not so strange after all. Often a Triangle writer had noted a
ship or plane had disappeared in "calms seas" when the record showed a
raging storm had been in progress. Others said ships had "mysteriously
vanished" when their remains had actually been found and the cause of their
sinking explained. In one case a ship listed missing in the Triangle actually
had disappeared in the Pacific Ocean some 3,000 miles away! The author had
confused the name of the Pacific port the ship had left with a city of the same
name on the Atlantic coast.

More significantly, a check of Lloyd's of London's accident records by the

editor of Fate in 1975 showed that the Trianglewas no more dangerous than
any other part of the ocean. U.S. Coast Guard records confirmed this and since
that time no good arguments have ever been made to refute those statistics. So
many argue that the Bermuda Triangle mystery has disappeared, in the same
way many of its supposed victims vanished.

Even though the Bermuda Triangle isn't a true mystery, this region of the sea
certainly has had its share of marine tragedy. This region is one of the heaviest
traveled areas of ocean in the world. Both small boats and commercial ships
ply its waters along with airliners, military aircraft and private planes as they
come to and from both the islands and more distant ports in Europe, South
America and Africa. The weather in this region can make traveling hazardous
also. The summer brings hurricanes while the warm waters of the Gulf Stream
promote sudden storms. With this much activity in a relatively small region it
isn't surprising that a large number of accidents occur. Some of the ones
commonly connected to the Triangle story are:

The USS Cyclops Sinking

One of the first stories connected to the Triangle legend and the most famous
ship lost in the region was the USS Cyclops which disappeared in 1918. The
542 foot long Cyclopswas launched in 1910 and served as a collier ( a ship
that carries coal) for the U.S. Navy during World War I. The vessel was on its
way from Bahia, Salvador, to Baltimore, Maryland, but never arrived. After it
had made an unscheduled stop at Barbados on March 3rd and 4th to take on
additional supplies, it disappeared without a trace. No wreckage from the ship
was ever found and no distress signal was received. The deaths of the 306
crew and passengers of the USS Cyclops remains the single largest loss of life
in U.S. Naval history not directly involving combat.

While the sinking of theCyclops remains a mystery, the

incident could have happened anywhere between Barbados
and Baltimore, not necessarily in the Bermuda Triangle.
Proponents of the Bermuda Triangle theory point to the lack of
a distress call as evidence of a paranormal end for the vessel,
but the truth is that wireless communications in 1918 were
unreliable and it would not have been unusual for a rapidly-
sinking vessel to not have had a chance to send a successful
distress call before going under.