By Abir Mahmud
The Bermuda Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. Those actual ranges are debated, and some estimates vary between 500,000 to a million square miles. The term “Bermuda Triangle” actually didn’t come into general use until 1964 when it was coined by Vincent Gatos for a cover story for GoSee Magazine. It was used to describe an area where there had been an uncommon amount of disappearing ships and planes. According to Time magazine, between 1946 and 1991 alone there were 100 disappearances of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.
Some incidents:
—The first recorded account was made by none other than Christopher Columbus during his famous journey to discover America. While in the Bermuda Triangle, he along with his crew noted a variety of odd occurrences: the ship’s compass started malfunctioning, there were mysterious lights over the water, and the sea became rougher than it had been during the entire voyage. At one point, he may have seen a fireball fly through the sky and crash into the sea.
—On March 14th 1918, the USS Cyclops—one of the navy’s largest fuel ships at the time—disappeared somewhere north of Barbados. The chilling details of the disappearance are that the captain never sent out a distress signal, and nobody aboard answered any of the calls from the hundreds of ships that reported in the vicinity as the USS Cyclops seemingly drifted out of existence.
—On December 28th in 1948, a Douglass Dakota DC-3 airplane carrying 26 passengers disappeared 50 miles from its destination in Florida. After the flight sent out its final radio call to indicate its nearby position, it was never heard from again.
—In October of 1951, a ship called the Southern Districts disappeared after being seen near the Bermuda Triangle. Four years later in 1955 the only piece of evidence of the ship’s whereabouts was discovered on the Florida Coast—a life preserver eerily bearing the missing ship’s name.
—On December 22nd, 1967, a 23-foot cabin cruiser called the Witchcraft, which was built to be virtually unsinkable, disappeared along with its two passengers, one of whom was an experienced sailor named Dan Burack. The boat had a flotation device in the hole that should have allowed the Witchcraft to remain afloat even if the boat was filled with water. When a Coast Guard vessel came to tow it, the Witchcraft along with Burack and his passenger were nowhere to be found and never to be seen again.
Regardless of these documented disappearances, and whatever may be causing these mysterious events, the Bermuda Triangle remains a highly traveled region through which many travellers continue to pass without incident.