On 5 December 1945, five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers on a test-exercise left the air station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and were never seen again. Later that day a Martin Mariner sent to search fo the patrol also vanished. The disappearance of these aircraft and their 27 crew members simply defied explanation.
Associated Press jounalist E.V.W. Jones used this story in September 1950 to put forward the claim that a triangular area linking Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico comprised a "limbo of the lost" where aircraft and ships "vanished in the thin air". Over the years other reporters have added to the legend. It was rumoured that the doomed pilots had sent strange radio transimssions. One writer, Art Ford, claimed that a radio operator had overheard Lieutenant Charles Taylor, the patrol leader, say, "They look like they are from outer space -- don't come after me." In an article in Argosy magazine in February 1964, Vincent Gaddis coined the term "Bermuda Triangle" and called the vanished aircraft the "most incredible mystery in the history of aviation".
Ten years later Charles Berlitz's best-seller The Bermuda Triangle cemented the phrase in popular consciousness. Other books, magazines and broadcasts speculated about disappearances in the Triangle, which were said to have begun in the mid-19th century and to have included more than 40 ships and 20 aeroplanes. Some theorists suggested gravitational or magnetic anomalies caused a time or dimensional warp that snatched the vessels from our reality into a parallel one. Others suspected malevolent UFO beings, or an undersea civilisation kidnapping surface dwellers. In time most writers agreed that the Bermuda Triangle was one of 10 or 12 equally sinister areas in the world. Occult author Ivan T. Sanderson called them vile vortices, lozenge-shaped areas in parallel bands exactly 72 degrees apart on opposite sides of the equator.
Then librarian Lawrence Kusche of the Arizona Sate University did something no other Triangle chronicler had done -- he studied the original documents of the 1945 patrol. His 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved revealed some embellished facts. "Calm seas" in the documentation were shown in weather records to have been beset by raging storms. The pilots' alleged messages did not coincide with recordings. Pilot error and instrument malfunctions probably led the five planes far off course until they ran out of fuel and crashed, sinking so deep that they have never been recovered. The Mariner, a notoriously unsafe aircraft known as a "flying gas tank", is thought to have exploded in mid-air, its remains raining into the ocean. Other planes and ships that had vanished in the Triangle were usually found later or plausibly accounted for. Moreover, Llyod's of London's extensive records provided "no evidence to support the claim that the 'Bermuda Triangle' has more losses than elsewhere".
No Triangle proponent has mounted a convoincing challenge to Kusche's debunking of the myth. But the mystery survives for those who, choosing between legend and fact, prefer the former.
***end***
