Bermuda
 
Shorts: 
A Brief History of the Devil's Triangle 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 famousnickname 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.
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. 
 
 
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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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." 

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. 

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. 

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.