The Psychic Explorer Presents New Angles on the Bermuda Triangle – Admiral Christopher Columbus’s fleet of sailing ships, “Nina,” “Pinta,” and flagship “Santa Maria,” had been at sea for three months. Initially confident the prevailing winds would carry them to the fabled lands of Asia, Columbus now faced disaster. Supplies were running low, and his crews threatened mutiny.
On Saturday, September 15, 1492, Columbus recorded in his log that five leagues (17 miles) from the fleet, a strange fire fell from the sky into the ocean. It was probably a meteor, but to superstitious 15th-century sailors, it was an evil omen.
Next, they sailed into a vast area filled with seaweed. Columbus hoped this meant they were near a coast; unfortunately, they weren’t. This unique ecosystem was the Sargasso Sea, hailed today as the “Ocean’s Rainforest.” But for Columbus and his sailors, it was creepy. Fears of being marooned in the seaweed escalated when they entered the doldrums, where all wind halted. For two weeks, they drifted aimlessly until the winds returned—but then all three ships reported their compasses acting erratically.
Part of the Sargasso Sea lies within the notorious Bermuda Triangle, a 720,000-square-mile area stretching between Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico. For centuries, ships and aircraft have disappeared there without a trace. In the last century alone, over 1000 lives have been lost there, giving rise to the nickname “Devil’s Triangle.”
In 1918, the USS Cyclops, at 542 feet long and with a crew of 300, was the largest cargo ship in the US Navy. It vanished without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle. Mysteriously, it never radioed for help or sent out an SOS. President Woodrow Wilson said, “Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship.”
Strangely, in 1941, two other Cyclops-class ships also disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle without a trace. Neither of them sent a distress signal either.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of the Bermuda Triangle was the disappearance of Flight 19 on December 5, 1945. A squadron of five US Avenger fighter/bombers under the command of Lt. Charles C. Taylor took off on a training mission from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, for the Bahamas. Avengers were sophisticated aircraft, and these were flown by seasoned pilots. Lt. Taylor had 2,500 hours of flying time; the other pilots each had 300 hours of flying time.
The squadron was flying at 20,000 feet altitude when suddenly it hit torrential rain. Taylor radioed command that their compasses were malfunctioning: “We cannot be sure of any direction… everything is wrong… strange… the ocean doesn’t look as it should… I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down, and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.”
For reasons unknown, Taylor believed the squadron was off course hundreds of miles to the south over the Florida Keys instead of the Bahamas. Meanwhile, over the Florida Keys, another pilot reported his compass was malfunctioning. Simultaneously, compasses on planes between the Bahamas and the Florida Keys were going haywire. Why?
Standard Operating Procedure for Navy Pilots in the Atlantic is that if something goes wrong, fly due west because you’ll reach land. Flight 19 didn’t because Lt. Taylor thought they were over the Gulf of Mexico, so he didn’t give the order. One of his subordinates radioed, “Dammit, if we would just fly west, we would get home.”
Navy command ordered Flight 19 to use their rescue radio frequency and their ZBX receivers to home in on land-based Navy radio towers. Apparently, they never received the transmission. With fuel running out, Taylor ordered a water landing—his last transmission was static.
The Navy scrambled 2 PBM Mariner seaplanes out of Ft Lauderdale to search for them. Twenty minutes later, one of them exploded. No wreckage was found from this Mariner seaplane’s crash.
A five-day search involving 300 ships and aircraft searched a 300,000 square mile area and found nothing. The Navy investigation concluded Taylor confused the Bahamas for the Florida Keys and thought they were hundreds of miles off course. No wreckage was ever found of Flight 19. The Navy report stated it was “as if they had flown to Mars.”
Growing up on the barrier island of East Coast Florida, I was fascinated by tales of the Bermuda Triangle. As an adult, I examined it while aboard the tall sailing ship “Fantome.” Sailing north of “Fantome’s” home port of Antigua, we anchored at an uninhabited island on the eastern edge of the Bermuda Triangle. The West Indian crew were expert sailors but preferred to avoid sailing directly into the Bermuda Triangle.
From the periphery of the Triangle, I saw turbulent clouds which touched the sea and gently rumbled with thunder. Their ominous beauty beckoned me like the Sirens of Greek mythology, whose enchanting voices lured sailors to their deaths.
While the Bermuda Triangle doesn’t have a disproportionately higher number of disappearances than other parts of the seven seas, it’s the mysterious manner in which ships and planes disappear that engenders its diabolical reputation.
Science may explain the mystery. The methane gas theory proposes a sudden release of methane bubbles from the ocean floor, which destabilizes the ocean and causes ships to sink. As methane rises skyward, it could also disrupt airplane engines.
Rogue waves are huge walls of water caused by ocean swells colliding with waves traveling in the opposite direction. Rogue waves can be 100 feet tall and form so fast that ships don’t have time to send out an SOS.
Rogue waves can’t harm planes at high altitudes, but microbursts can. Microbursts are intense blasts of air from clouds that produce strong winds, sometimes exceeding 100 miles per hour, creating dangerous wind shear for airplanes and ships. Microbursts typically last a few minutes and then vanish. They can also temporarily disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field.
This brings us to electromagnetism. Magnetic North and True North are in two different locations. The true North Pole is in the Arctic north of Greenland. Magnetic North is in Canada, and its location changes due to shifts in the Earth’s Magnetic Poles. According to Oregon State University, Magnetic North has shifted 620 miles to the north-northwest in the last hundred years.
Geologists theorize that deep below the ocean floor of the Bermuda Triangle, there’s a high concentration of molten magnetite, an iron ore with strong magnetic properties. At times, the shift of Magnetic North aligns with True North, which interferes with Earth’s magnetic field, causing compass malfunction and weather anomalies.
Why has no wreckage been found? Strong ocean currents can move plane wreckage, but not large Cyclops-class ships weighing over 520 tons/1 million pounds. Theoretically, electromagnetism could. A vortex is a swirling pattern of energy, like a whirlpool or a tornado. Electromagnetic vortexes of intense magnitude capable of pulling metallic objects rapidly into the vortex may form within the Bermuda Triangle. Once underwater, metallic objects could then be pulled far from their last reported location. Perhaps ships and planes vanish without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle not because of the ocean itself, but because of what lies beneath it.
The waters of the Bermuda Triangle also contain the famed “Bimini Road,” which some speculate may be the ruins of the lost civilization of Atlantis—but that’s a story for another time…
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