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That afternoon five torpedo-bombers took off on a routine training flight. Soon, things began to go wrong. The flight leader reported equipment malfunctions, gyro-compasses went crazy, and he lost his horizon. Finally, he reported that he was lost. This happened just off the Florida coast and, as the day progressed, the weather worsened rapidly. Two hours later, the aircraft disappeared and were never seen again. No bodies were found and no wreckage spotted.<BR><BR> In isolation, the tragedy was not unprecedented. Disorientation is easy to achieve over water and, if lost, it is easy to fly until your fuel runs out, simply falling from the sky. The lack of evidence of a crash was unusual but, again, it has happened before. But what do we make of a sixth plane - part of the search and rescue operation - blowing up less than half an hour after take-off, with total loss of life? <BR><BR> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> <BR> <script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> <BR><BR><font face='tahoma' size='2'> <B>A CATALOGUE OF DISASTER</B> <BR><BR> The above is one of the major episodes of what has become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Others include the loss of two aircraft in 1948, taking sixty lives. In 1950 a freighter disappeared with all hands. 1963 saw a triple tragedy with the loss of another freighter and three large aircraft. Indeed, if you add up the minor incidents as well you come up with a continuous list of mysterious disappearances of over 140 ships and planes and a thousand lives. The greatest tragedy happened in March 1918. Sailing from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia, the US Navy Supply Vessel Cyclops disappeared without trace, taking three hundred lives. The Bermuda Triangle stretches from Bermuda to Cuba, and along the US coast from Miami to New York. Sceptics would argue there is no mystery as traffic is so dense that disasters are inevitable. But a whole industry of the fantastic has been built up to explain such disappearances. <BR><BR> <B>PSEUDOSCHOLASTIC SHENNANIGANS</B> <BR><BR> Vincent Gaddis blamed a space-time continuum touching our dimension at this point. Charles Berlitz put it down to UFO activity and time warps. A Dr Kenneth McCall postulated the tormented souls of black slaves thrown overboard to be cursing the area. Ivan Sanderson suggested a slightly less bizarre theory with his magnetic vortices. Identifying similar areas around the Earth, such vortices are formed where warm and cold currents collide. A further idea is offered by geo-chemist, Dr Richard McIver, who blames gas hydrates trapped in the seabed. Geo-disturbances can cause the release of large amounts of methane. When this happens, the sea can go frothy, like the head of beer, causing ships to lose buoyancy and sink. When the methane reaches the air, a plane engine can cause it to ignite, the wreckage falling into the frothy sea and disappearing. However, whilst this last theory holds real possibilities, perhaps we are looking at the mystery from the wrong angle. <BR><BR> <B>CLEARING THE FOG</B> <BR><BR> From the myriad disasters and close escapes in the area a list of factors leading to disaster can be highlighted. For instance, escapees speak, almost unanimously, of faulty gyro-compasses, equipment malfunction, loss of horizon, lack of wreckage, planes blowing up, water seeming to rise up as if a water-spout, dense banks of sudden fog, and sudden turbulent waters. Yet each of the above events are experienced all the time by sailors and airmen the world over. There is nothing really unusual about any of them in isolation. What IS unusual is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, they all seem to strike at once. We have a word for such a congregation of events. Coincidence. Even skeptics are wary of using this word to explain the Bermuda Triangle. Better, they think, to not think about it at all. After all, the mystery is just so ridiculous. But this is a mistake. For instance, you do not need to study other disasters for long before you realize that coincidence is often the major factor in disaster. It is the coming together of small mistakes and failures that build up to the coincidental congregation of events that cause disaster. <BR><BR> <B>AN INEVITABLE THEORY</B> <BR><BR> This is, actually, inevitable. The universe is obviously designed in such a way as to allow coincidental happenings to occur. If it wasn’t, they simply wouldn’t happen. The law of chance itself demands that coincidences DO occur. Indeed, in such a ‘coincidental’ universe, the Bermuda Triangle is, itself, an inevitability, for coincidence would dictate that sometime, somewhere, a congregation of events must come to a particular location. Folklore would speak of such an inevitability with terms such as curse or jinx. This, in itself, is interesting. For inevitability can have a marked effect on the human mind, causing people to make silly mistakes they otherwise would not make. For instance, if you think you’re going to have an accident, you will be wary and perform different to the norm, increasing the possibilities of an accident happening. Hence, could it be that, as a culture of disaster arose in the area, human psychology dictated that the prevalence of mistakes would increase? Science is quite rightly based on Reductionism, where the simplest explanation is preferred, and the ‘incidences’ of single events take priority over the wider ‘pattern’ of related events. But I am sure that science requires a bedfellow in terms of a more holistic way of looking at things – a discipline I have called Patternology, or P-ology. The Bermuda Triangle could be a classic example for P-ological study, for nowhere else has such a congregation of events occurred, ripe for analysis and study. The suggested statistical bias towards disaster, combined with a possible collective human psychology of inevitability, could be studied in the raw, with the possible outcome of a ‘science of disaster’ that could offer guidance for avoiding disaster in the future. To ignore such a possibility is to condemn us to a continuing bias towards disaster. <BR><BR> © Anthony North, April 2007 <BR><BR> <script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> <BR><BR> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Limbo of the Lost. The Twilight Zone. Hoodoo Sea. The Devil's Triangle. The vast three-sided segment of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, did not receive its most famous nickname until 1964, but reports of bizarre happenings there, or nearby, have been recorded for centuries. In fact, many claim that Christopher Columbus bore witness to the Bermuda Triangle's weirdness.</font><p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> As the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria sailed through the area in 1492, it is reported that Columbus's compass went haywire and that he and his crew saw weird lights in the sky, but these events have mundane explanations. From the account in Columbus's journal, it is thought that his compass's slight inaccuracy stemmed from nothing more than the discrepancy between true north and magnetic north. As for the lights, Columbus wrote of seeing "a great flame of fire" that crashed into the ocean -- probably a meteor. He saw lights in the sky again on October 11, which, of course, was the day before his famous landing. The lights, brief flashes near the horizon, were spotted in the area where dry land turned out to be. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Another historical event retroactively attributed to the Bermuda Triangle is the discovery of the Mary Celeste. The vessel was found abandoned on the high seas in 1892, about 400 miles off its intended course from New York to Genoa. There was no sign of its crew of ten or what had happened to them. Since the lifeboat was also missing, it is quite possible that they abandoned the Mary Celeste during a storm that they wrongly guessed the ship could not weather. But what makes it even harder to call this a Bermuda Triangle mystery is that it the ship was nowhere near the Triangle -- it was found off the coast of Portugal. </font> <p> <p align="center"> <img border="0" src="bermuda/BT6.jpg" width="310" height="301"><p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> The Bermuda Triangle legend really began in earnest on December 5, 1945, with the famed disappearance of Flight 19. Five Navy Avenger bombers mysteriously vanished while on a routine training mission, as did a rescue plane sent to search for them -- six aircraft and 27 men, gone without a trace. Or so the story goes. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> When all the facts are laid out, the tale of Flight 19 becomes far less puzzling. All of the crewmen of the five Avengers were inexperienced trainees, with the exception of their patrol leader, Lt. Charles Taylor. Taylor was perhaps not at the height of his abilities that day, as some reports indicate that he had a hangover and failed in his attempts to pass off this flight duty to someone else.</font><p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> With the four rookie pilots entirely dependent on his guidance, Taylor found that his compass malfunctioned soon into the flight. Taylor chose to continue the run on dead reckoning, navigating by sighting landmarks below. Being familiar with the islands of the Florida Keys where he lived, Taylor had reason to feel confident in flying by sight. But visibility became poor due to a brewing storm, and he quickly became disoriented. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Flight 19 was still in radio contact with the Fort Lauderdale air base, although the weather and a bad receiver in one of the Avengers made communication very spotty. They may have been guided safely home if Taylor had switched to an emergency frequency with less radio traffic, but he refused for fear they would be unable to reestablish contact under these conditions. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Taylor ended up thinking they were over the Gulf of Mexico, and ordered the patrol east in search of land. But in reality, they had been heading up the Atlantic coastline, and Taylor was mistakenly leading his hapless trainees much further out to sea. Radio recordings indicate that some of them suggested to Taylor that Florida was actually to the west. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> A search party was dispatched, which included the Martin Mariner that many claim disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle along with Flight 19. While it is true that it never returned, the Mariner did not vanish; it blew up 23 seconds after takeoff, in an explosion that was witnessed by several at the base. This was unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence, because Mariners were known for their faulty gas tanks.</font><p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> No known wreckage from Flight 19 has ever been recovered. One reasonable explanation is that Taylor led the planes so far into the Atlantic that they were past the continental shelf. There the ocean abruptly drops from a few hundred feet deep to several thousand feet deep. Planes and ships that sink to such depths are seldom seen again. The deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, the 30,100-foot-deep Puerto Rico Trench, lies within the Bermuda Triangle.</font><p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Combining the circumstances of the failing compass, the difficulty of radio transmissions, and the absence of wreckage, tales of mysterious intervention befalling Flight 19 began to take form. Theories involving strange magnetic fields, time warps, Atlantis, and alien abduction began to appear. Even an official Navy report intimated that the Avengers had disappeared "as if they had flown to Mars." </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> About 200 prior and subsequent incidents have been attributed to the inherent strangeness of the area, which was forever christened the Bermuda Triangle by writer V. Gaddis in a 1964 issue of Argosy, a fiction magazine. Public interest in the "phenomenon" was whipped into a frenzy by Charles Berlitz's 1974 bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, a sensationalized and thoroughly inaccurate account that shunned the facts in favor of mysterious excitement. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> There are two major obstacles to taking the Bermuda Triangle legend seriously. The first is that most of the associated mishaps can be explained by rational means. The second is that most of the associated mishaps did not occur within the Bermuda Triangle. If you plot all of the alleged instances of the area's malevolent influence on a map, you find that only a handful have actually happened within the Triangle's borders. Sea disasters as distant as Portugal, Ireland and the Pacific and Indian Oceans have been blamed on the Bermuda Triangle. We might then just as well rename it as "The Worldwide Curse of All Seas." Some have turned this fact on its head by proposing this as evidence that the Devil's Triangle is expanding in scope. </font> <p> <font face="Tahoma" size="2"> Others may respond that it is evidence that accidents will happen -- no matter where exactly on the land, on the sea or in the air they take place. <BR><BR><CENTER><TABLE width="568" id="table3" bordercolor="#435C7D" cellspacing="1"> <TR><script type="text/javascript"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script></TR> </TABLE></CENTER> <BR><BR>   <a target="_blank" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:11px; font-family:Arial; color: #2A4956;" href="http://www.social-bookmark-script.com/">Liked it ? Want to share it ? 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