Charles Berlitz - The Bermuda Triangle

FRANKLY, IT'S SPELLBINDING !"*

Chillingly recounts the amazing circumstances surrounding the losses of literally hundreds of ships, planes, and people... Dips into man's archeological past, 'time-space warps,' and 'black holes' to offer some clues... Many of the theories discussed are just this close to being proved ...

IT'S ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING!"

Detroit News

Things are happening in the Bermuda Triangle even as you are reading these words. For over five years, Charles Berlitz has been observing, and making startling discoveries about, this controversial region. And here, at last, he reveals the results of his research.

THE MOST INCREDIBLE SAGA OF UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCES EVER WRITTEN

*Kirkus Reviews

Charles Berlitz

The Bermuda

Triangle

With the collaboration of J. Manson Valentine

AVON

PUBLISHERS OF BARD, CAMELOT, DISCUS, EQUINOX AND FLARE BOOKS

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

Copyright 1974 by Charles Berlitz

Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-3691

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Doubleday & Company, Inc., 277 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

Cover art and design by Stanislaw Fernandes.

ISBN: 0-380-00465-8

First Avon Printing, September, 1975 Eighth Printing

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND

FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK

MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

To the sea and its mysteries whose solution may tell us more about ourselves...

Contents

1 The Bermuda Triangle: A Mystery of the Air and Sea

2 The Triangle of Disappearing Planes

3 The Sea of Lost Ships

4 Some Who Escaped

5 Is There a Logical Explanation?

6 Time-Space Warps and Other Worlds

7 A Suggestion from the Ocean's Past

8 The Surprises of Prehistory

9 The Watchers: Protectors, Raiders, or Indifferent Observers

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle: A Mystery of the Air and Sea

There is a section of the western atlantic, off the southeast coast of the United States, forming what has been termed a triangle, extending from Bermuda in the north to southern Florida, and then east to a point through the Bahamas past Puerto Rico to about 40 west longitude and then back again to Bermuda. This area occupies a disturbing and almost unbelievable place in the world's catalogue of unexplained mysteries. This is usually referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, where more than 100 planes and ships have literally vanished into thin air, most of them since 1945, and where more than 1,000 lives have been lost in the past twenty-six years, without a single body or even a piece of wreckage from the vanishing planes or ships having been found. Disappearances continue to occur with apparently increasing frequency, in spite of the fact that the seaways and airways are today more traveled, searches are more thorough, and records are more carefully kept.

Many of the planes concerned have vanished while in normal radio contact with their base or terminal destination until the very moment of their disappearance, while others have radioed the most extraordinary messages, implying that they could not get their instruments to function, that their compasses were spinning, that the sky had turned yellow and hazy (on a clear day), and that the ocean (which was calm nearby) "didn't look right" without further clarification of what was wrong.

One group of five planes, a flight of Navy TBM Avengers, on a mission from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, on December 5, 1945, were the object, along with the Martin Mariner sent to rescue them and which also disappeared, of one of the most intensive ground-sea rescue operations ever conducted, although no life rafts, oil slicks, or wreckage was ever located. Other aircraft, including passenger planes, have vanished while receiving landing instructions, almost as if, as has been mentioned in Naval Board of Inquiry procedures, they had flown through a hole in the sky. Large and small boats have disappeared without leaving wreckage, as if they and their crews had been snatched into another dimension. Large ships, such as the Marine Sulphur Queen, a 425-foot-long freighter, and the U.S.S. Cyclops, 19,000 tons with 309 people aboard, have simply vanished while other ships and boats have been found drifting within the Triangle, sometimes with an animal survivor, such as a dog or canary, who could give no indication of what had happenedalthough in one case a talking parrot vanished along with the crew.

Unexplained disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have continued to the present day and no plane or ship is reported as overdue and finally classed as "search discontinued" by the Seventh Coast Guard without the expressed or unexpressed comment or feeling among the public or the searchers that there is some connection with the past and present phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle. There seems to be a growing public awareness that something is very wrong with this area. Recent numerous reports from planes and boats which have had incredible experiences within the Triangle and survived are contributing toward a new folklore of the sea, although the cause of the unexplained menace to planes and ships within this area is as mysterious as ever.

The most varied and imaginative explanations have been offered and seriously considered to account for the continuing disappearances and assumed (because no bodies have been recovered) fatalities. These explanations include sudden tidal waves caused by earthquakes, fireballs which explode the planes, attacks by sea monsters, a time-space warp leading to another dimension, electromagnetic or gravitational vortices which cause planes to crash and ships to lose themselves at sea, capture and kidnaping by flying or submarine UFOs manned by entities from surviving cultures of antiquity, outer space, or the future, looking for specimens of currently existing earth inhabitants. One of the most striking suggestions was actually predicted by Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet," a psychic and healer who died in 1944. Cayce predicted, decades before the possibility of laser beams was suspected, that the ancient Atlanteans used crystals as a power source, specifically located in the Bimini area, and presumably subsequently sunk in the Tongue of the Ocean off Andros, in the Bahamas, where many of the disappearances have taken place. In this concept, a maverick power source sunk a mile deep to the west of Andros would still be exerting its occasional pull on the compasses and electronic equipment of today's ships and planes.

In any case the explanation or solution to the mystery seems connected with the sea, itself the last and greatest mystery still confronting the inhabitants of the earth. For, although we stand on the threshold of space, somewhat wistfully contemplating the cosmos while believing that the world, now so thoroughly explored, has not more mystery for us, it is nevertheless true that about three fifths of the world's area, the abyssal depths of the sea, are about as clearly or even less known to us as the craters of the moon. We have, of course, long mapped the general contours of the sea bottom, first through mechanical soundings and more recently by sonar and exploration by submarine and bathysphere, plus deep-sea camera probes charted its surface and undersea currents and are presently prospecting for evidence of oil on the continental shelves and soon perhaps at even greater depths.

Cold war activity and increasing reliance on submarine fleets, despite the danger to submarine activity experienced by the French Navy in the Mediterranean and to the United States Navy in the Atlantic, will certainly contribute considerably, if the material is made public, to our knowledge of the sea bottom. Nevertheless, the deepest parts of the ocean may still reserve considerable surprises for us. The abyssal plain and the adjoining canyons and depths may contain unexpected fauna. The "extinct" coelacanth, a supposedly prehistoric fish with residual limbs, was discovered to be very much alive and well in the Indian Ocean in 1938. This four-legged bluefish flourished about 60,000,000 years ago. Its last fossilized specimen, before the live one was found, had been dated at 18,000,000 years b.c.