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In an attempt to cure my lockdown ennui, I watched the "World of Mysteries" documentary on The Bermuda Triangle last night. It's fairly lightweight, but does cover pretty well all of the plausible (human error, thunderstorms, methane bubbles, rogue waves, waterspouts etc.) and less plausible (magnetic anomalies, time warps, aliens etc.) hypotheses.
Flight 19 dominates the middle of the documentary and, around the 20 minute mark, the rumour is floated (no pun intended) that flight leader Lieutenant Charles Taylor not only survived ditching his Avenger, but made it ashore to one of the small islands he had mistaken for the Florida Keys. There, sick with remorse for the deaths of his flight crew and fearful of being court martialled, he lived out his life under an assumed identity and married a native Bahamian. There was speculation (citation definitely required) that an elderly unknown man in latter years may have joined the public at the annual 5 December commemoration service for Flight 19 at Fort Lauderdale. Almost certainly bunkum, but a nice twist on the Triangle mythos, which I didn't recall hearing before. I can see Hollywood making that into a movie some time!

 
Colavito is not impressed.

Review of Forbidden History S06E09 "Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle"


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The Bermuda Triangle is a hoax invented by George Sand in Fate magazine in 1952. This fact, however, is the forbidden history that Forbidden History forbids its viewers from learning. I will, however, say that I did not expect this episode to descend into the hellish depths of Ancient Aliens or for one of the stars of that show to make a guest appearance like visiting head of state. This show was always the fringe history and conspiracy theory show, not the alien one. It rarely invoked aliens and instead preferred giants, Templars, and Illuminati. I had expected a dry discussion of famous disappearances, maybe a visit to a stretch of ocean—the kind of stuff all the other Bermuda Triangle shows do all the time. But now, we went full Ancient Aliens. Suddenly, it’s like all of cable fake history is collapsing in on itself toward either a black hole or a singularity where everything becomes Ancient Aliens. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/r...ory-s06e09-mysteries-of-the-bermuda-triangle#
 
When was the last time the triangle was 'officially' blamed as the reason for an aircraft or ships demise?

The light aircraft carrying New York businesswoman Jennifer Blumin and her two children disappeared over the Bermuda archipelago in 2017. Some debris was subsequently spotted by a coastguard, but I don't believe the question of what caused the twin-engined MU-2B to disappear from Radar at 24,000 feet has been fully answered.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...amily-goes-missing-near-bahamas-a7739106.html
 
The Tampa newspaper story is paywalled. Here's a more accessible version from the New York Times ...
Coast Guard Suspends Search for Missing Boat With 20 Aboard

The U.S. Coast Guard suspended its search on Friday for an overdue boat that was headed to Florida from the Bahamas with 20 people aboard, after the authorities said they had exhausted their efforts to find it.

The boat, a blue-and-white 29-foot Mako Cuddy Cabin, departed from Bimini, the Bahamas, on Monday, the Coast Guard said.

The boat did not arrive as expected in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., which is about 10 miles south of Palm Beach.

The Coast Guard said it and other agencies, including the authorities from the Bahamas, searched about 17,000 square miles for more than three days. ...

The authorities in the Bahamas reported the boat missing on Tuesday after a family member of someone on board didn’t get a call that the boat had made the 140-mile trip to South Florida, Petty Officer Third Class Jose Hernandez said on Saturday.

Many details about the trip, including why the boat was going to Florida, which part of Lake Worth Beach it was headed to, the capacity of the boat and the names and nationalities of those on board, were not immediately known ...

FULL STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/us/coast-guard-suspends-search.html
 
Just for reference ...

Here's a representative photo of a Mako Cuddy Cabin boat (same model series as the boat that disappeared). Now imagine 20 people on board ...

7614327_0_051020201440_0.jpg
 
OK, did it sink because it was overloaded? Looks more likely than any mystery forces.
 
OK, did it sink because it was overloaded? Looks more likely than any mystery forces.

At face value that's a reasonable hypothesis. However, I think it's premature to jump to that conclusion.

Without knowing why 20 people of unknown origin were crammed onto a small boat to make the passage to Florida there remains the possibility the voyage was for some illegal purpose (e.g., smuggling) and the boat was deliberately 'disappeared' as part of the plan or plot.

I suspect authorities will be following up on this incident rather than letting it drop. Whether we'll see any subsequent news about it is a different matter.
 
Review of Forbidden History S06E09 "Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle"
The Bermuda Triangle is a hoax invented by George Sand in Fate magazine in 1952. ...
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/r...ory-s06e09-mysteries-of-the-bermuda-triangle#
AFAIK George X. Sand was the first writer to specify and focus upon a geographic area as the scene for, and possibly somehow the cause of, such unexplained incidents (Fate magazine, 1952). Sand was the first to describe this area as a triangle whose vertices correlated with Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Florida.

The complete George X. Sand article from FATE magazine is accessible on the 'Net (PDF format) at:
https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/BermudaTriangle/GeorgeXSand.pdf
 
Prior to Sand's 1952 article there was a single source from which the Bermuda Triangle mythos arose - an Associated Press article originating with a Miami Herald writer (E. V. W. Jones) in September 1950.

Here (below) are the text and the accompanying map graphic from that 1950 article. Note the map's caption, which simply refers to the region of these disappearances as "Dat Ole Debbil Sea." This may well be the inspiration for the label "The Devil's Triangle" which would be the most common name used until Gaddis' coining "Bermuda Triangle" over a decade later.
Miami Herald, 17 September 1950, page 6F
Same Big World

Sea's Puzzles Still Baffle Men In Pushbutton Age
By E. V. W. Jones
Miami Associated Press Writer

It's a small world? No, it's still the same vast globe the ancients knew, with the same misty limbo of the lost.

We think it is small because of speeding wheels and wings and the voice of radio which comes out of the void. A mile is only a minute's travel by wheel or a few seconds flight -- but it is still a mile.

The miles add up to a vast unknown into which a hundred and more persons have flown or sailed within brief memory, to be swallowed up just as ships were swallowed in the old sailing days.

The Sandra carried radio. It was a 350-foot freighter which sailed with 12 men on board from Miami to Savannah. There 300 tons of insecticide were loaded for Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. The Sandra sailed -- and disappeared without a trace.

On June 16, in the "small world" year of 1950, search was abandoned. The fate of the craft and the dozen on board was written down as an official mystery.

Where are the men and women and two babies -- 32 presons in all -- who happily boarded a plane at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and flew 1,000 miles toward Miami? A radio message at 4 a. m. Dec. 27, 1948, reported them 50 miles south of their goal. They never arrived.

Searchers scanned 310,000 miles of sea and land, but the elusive limbo into which they flew was on no map.

On Jan. 18, 1949, a great task force of the United States Navy was on maneuvers south of Bermuda. That same day a British airliner, the Ariel, vanished in the thin air through which it flew. The plane had left Bermuda with 20 persons on board on its way from London to Chile.

The naval force abandoned its maneuvers. Aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers combed the waters with thousands of pairs of shap eyes on watch. They found no hint of the Ariel's fate.

A year earlier, on Jan. 31, 1948, another Britsh plane, the Star Tiger, approached Bermuda with 29 on board. The craft radioed its position several times. Then silence enveloped it, and mystery. To this day no trace has been uncovered.

An older but more perplexing mystery is that of the five torpedo planes. They took off from the Navy's Fort Lauderdale air station on Dec. 5, 1945, for a navigational training flight. The hours passed and darkness fell. Anxious officers called to them by radio and were answered only with silence.

The hour passed when their fuel would be exhausted and search planes were sent out. Among the searchers was a big, lumbering rescue craft, a PBM with 13 men on board.

None of the five torpedo planes with the 14 crewmen were found despite the greatest search in Florida's history. Nor did the PBM rescue craft ever return.

These and other modern mysteries have established a roll of about 135 persons who went forth confidently into a world they thought small.

But it is the same big world the ancients knew, into which men and their machines and ships can disappear without a trace.

evwjonesmap.gif

DAT OLE DEBBIL SEA has shrouded in riddles the fate of 135 persons who flew or sailed the Atlantic in recent years. Modern man with his pushbutton miracles has no clue to what happened to those who were swallowed without trace in the loss of ships and planes indicted on this map.​

SOURCE: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/BermudaTriangle/evwjones.html
 
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I wonder how the Japan’s Dragon Triangle relates to the Bermuda Triangle ?

Are they opposite to each other ?
 
I wonder how the Japan’s Dragon Triangle relates to the Bermuda Triangle ?
Are they opposite to each other ?
The Dragon's Triangle (aka Devil's Sea) south of Japan is very vaguely defined (if defined at all), so it's difficult to specify its location and extent. The Bermuda Triangle is similarly ill-defined, but at least there's a general consensus where its vertices are claimed to lie. Having said that ...

No, the two 'triangles' are not exactly opposite each other. Their notional center points are on the order of 208 degrees apart (going east from Bermuda). However, both triangles' notional center points are located at or around 25 degrees north latitude.
 
Watched Discovery Channel's Curse of the Bermuda Triangle episode 5 last night.
It focused on the disappearance in 1967 of the supposedly unsinkable luxury cabin cruiser "Witchcraft".
The skipper, businessman and hotel magnate Dan Burack and his close friend a Catholic priest called Father Patrick Horgan, took a short trip on 22nd December 1967 along the Miami coastline, supposedly to enjoy the spectacular Christmas lights.
Around 21:00 Burack radioed the coastguard to report that they had struck an underwater object and would need towing back to the harbour.
He was calm and stressed this wasn't an SOS and that the Witchcraft wasn't in danger of sinking. The Witchcraft was of foam sandwich construction and was remarkably buoyant. Burack gave his position as adjacent to buoy no. 7 - barely a mile offshore and said he would launch a flare to assist the coastguard in locating them.
No flare was spotted, but the coastguard vessel reached the buoy just 19 minutes later, but there was no sign of Witchcraft, flotsam or the two passengers.
The Discovery Channel team looked at all possibilities - including the paranormal but, quite refreshingly, came to the conclusion that the reason the coastguard found nothing around buoy 7 was due to Burack and his boat never having been there. He was, allegedly, in severe financial difficulty and the most likely explanation was that Burack and his friend faked their deaths and fled Miami to start a new, debt-free life abroad (probably Cuba).
I'm always quite impressed when programmes like this eliminate the woo factor and employ a hefty slice of Occam's Razor.

The same episode did report on a particularly strange aircraft disappearance though.
In 1978, a Piper Chieftain (or possibly Piper Navajo) piloted solo by Irving Rivers, was on the final approach to Harry S. Truman Airport. He was cleared to land and the air traffic controller William A. Kittinger visually spotted the aircraft's lights less than 2 miles out.
Kittinger glanced down at his radar screen and when he looked up, the aircraft had apparently vanished.
A search conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard over a four day period failed to yield any wreckage from the aircraft. To date, no trace has ever been found of the Chieftain or its pilot, Irving C. Rivers.

https://www.discoveryuk.com/series/curse-of-the-bermuda-triangle/
 
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Divers Accidentally Found Space Shuttle Challenger Debris in the Bermuda Triangle

A TV documentary crew from the History Channel has unexpectedly uncovered a large segment of the shuttle in the Atlantic Ocean, where it scattered debris 36 years ago.

The crew was looking for the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft in the Bermuda Triangle in March 2022 when it came across the shuttle wreckage on the seafloor off Florida’s east coast. In particular, they saw 8-inch square tiles on a clearly human-made construction. On Thursday evening, the History Channel released video footage of two divers examining red and white tiles partially buried in sand. Some appear to have darker pockmarks.

NASA officials who watched the diving footage confirmed it depicts an artifact from Challenger.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a41936740/shuttle-challenger-debris-found/

maximus otter
 
Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle
Bermuda Triangle Enigma
Channel 5 have three shows over the next three nights - THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE ENIGMA

Their website says "Documentary series exploring the truth about one of the world's most famous mysteries."

...and that's it. They sure know how to sell it!
I have just seen this on 5Select and thought it was excellent.

They looked into rogue waves, navigating aircraft in poor weather, the problems of a lot of inexperienced people sailing in an area which is very prone to storms, the effects of hurricanes, the reefs that surround Bermuda, the depth of the ocean surrounding it (extremely deep) and the presence of a large amount of magnetite in the area. I have probably missed some. I recommend watching if you come across it although it seemed to be simultaneously titled Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle so a bit confusing.
 
The Disappearance of flight N3808H is worthy of inclusion here.
On 28th June 1980, pilot Jose Pagan Santos and his friend Jose Torres, took off from Las Americas International Airport in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, bound for Puerto Rico.
Santos issued a Mayday, describing a strange object forcing them to change course, before his light aircraft disappeared from radar. Full transcription of the very odd radio communications, at the link below.

https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread433103/pg1
 
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