Tim Foley - Where Is the Bermuda Triangle?

On a beautiful sunny afternoon in 1945, five airplanes took off from a runway in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The planes were US Navy bombers, but they werent going to drop bombs. They were just out on a training run. The pilots were supposed to fly east, over the ocean, and then go north for a while before heading back home. The whole flight was supposed to last only two hours. The trip was called Flight 19.

But somehow, the pilots got lost and confused. They didnt know which way to go. The officer in charge had two compasses to show him directions. But both stopped working. He tried to contact the control tower for help, but his radio wasnt working well. Then another pilot flying nearby heard they were lost. He offered to come help, but the officer told him not to.

Before the day was over, all five planes had disappeared without a trace! The navy quickly sent another plane out to search for themand it vanished, too!

How could this possibly happen? How could six planes and twenty-seven men vanish into thin air, never having sent an emergency signal? All the planes had life rafts on board. If the pilots had to land their planes in the ocean, wouldnt at least some of the pilots have survived?

For weeks, the navy searched a wide area of the sea. They never found a single thingnot even a piece of a broken plane floating in the water. Even now, more than seventy years later, the story makes people wonder whether there is something strange and unusual about the area the planes were flying through.

In fact, it is just one of the stories about the Bermuda Trianglethe name given to a triangular area in the ocean, off the coast of Florida, where dozens of ships and planes have disappeared.

Some stories say the Bermuda Triangle sucks ships into the sea. Others say that planes can enter the Bermuda Triangle but never escape. Over the years, ships have been found floating in the waterabandoned ships in perfect condition, with food still cooking on the stove, but no people on board! Huge oceangoing ships have been said to break in half in the treacherous seas. One year, at Christmastime, two men went out on a boat only a mile from the Florida coast. They wanted to gaze at the Christmas lights back on shore. They hit something in the water and called the Coast Guard for help. But when the Coast Guard arrived twenty minutes later, they had vanished. They were never seen or heard from again. To add to the spookiness of this story, their boat was called the Witchcraft.

This is the story of the mysterious area known as the Bermuda Trianglewho vanished, how they disappeared, and why.

Air Traffic Control Towers

How do airplane pilots avoid running into each other in the sky? How do they know when its their turn to take off or land at an airport? Who can help when a pilot gets lost during a flight?

The air traffic control tower is in charge. Every airport has a control tower with people inside who talk to pilots as they fly. The control tower tells each pilot how high above the ground they may fly that daytheir altitude. The tower creates invisible layers of planes, like roads in the sky. This system keeps planes from crashing into each other by never flying in the same place or at the same altitude.

As a plane flies across the United States, it is always in radio contact with the nearest tower. But when Flight 19 got lost, their radio signals were poor. They couldnt always hear what the tower was saying.

Where, exactly, is the dangerous area of water thataccording to storieshas been the cause of so much tragedy? Draw three lines on a map connecting Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami, Florida. The lines will make a triangle in the ocean. Thats the location of the Bermuda Triangle.

The ocean is unusually deep in the Bermuda Triangle. Its three miles deep in many places and over five miles deep in one spot. Hundreds of different species of small sea creatures live miles below the surface.

Christopher Columbus

The first person ever known to sail near the Bermuda Triangle was Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he sailed west from Spain, hoping to find a new route to Asia. Instead, he wound up on an island off the coast of Floridaan island called San Salvador, thats now part of the Bahamas.

But before he reached the Bahamas, Columbus experienced something very strange aboard his ship, the Santa Maria. He sailed into a vast area where the ocean was covered with a thick carpet of weeds. The huge mat of weeds was rotating clockwise. It was like a slow-moving whirlpool. Creatures crawled all over the weedsturtles, crabs, and eels. The air was strangely still.