extraordinary%20encounters

42 Bermuda Triangle
have arrived over land and to safety. Because
they were over the Bahamas, however, flying
northward only put them over the ocean.
With weather conditions deteriorating rapidly,
their radio contact with land, already
sporadic, grew ever more difficult. Meanwhile,
amid growing alarm about the planes’
situation, a Dumbo flying boat—a large rescue
aircraft built for flight over large bodies of
water—was dispatched from a seaplane base
in Miami and sent on a blind search. Soon
other planes joined it and flew through the
ever more turbulent weather. One of them, a
Martin Mariner, also disappeared.
None of the missing craft were ever found.
The navy’s investigation determined that Taylor’s
confusion about his location, coupled
with dangerous air and sea conditions, caused
the planes under his command to run out of
gas, crash, and get chewed up by the immense
waves the storm had summoned. At 7:50 that
evening, a ship’s crew saw a plane explode. A
search for survivors and bodies was unsuccessful,
though the vessel passed through a large
oil slick from the craft. The navy believed that
the Mariner, a notoriously dangerous aircraft
that was sometimes called a “flying gas
bomb,” had blown up.
If the facts seemed relatively straightforward,
the legend that would grow in the wake
of Flight 19’s disappearance would be far
more convoluted and fantastic. Flight 19’s
transformation from aviation tragedy to paranormal
mystery would begin in September
1950, when Associated Press writer E.V.W.
Jones wrote a story about what he called the
“limbo of the lost,” an area bordered by
Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, where
strange things happened. None, he wrote, was
stranger than the unexplained fate of five
Avengers and one Mariner on the evening of
December 5, 1945.
Soon books and magazines dealing with
UFOs and other anomalous phenomena—
and even mainstream publications such as The
American Legion Magazine—were picking up
the stories, which grew in the telling. The
term “Bermuda Triangle” was the invention of
longtime Fortean and paranormal writer Vincent
H. Gaddis; his article on the subject in
the February 1964 issue of Argosy was titled
“The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” The next
year he incorporated it into a popular book,
Invisible Horizons, on “true mysteries” of the
seas. In Invisible Residents (1970) Ivan T.
Sanderson pointed to the Bermuda Triangle
and comparable places on Earth as evidence
that “OINTS”—Other Intelligences—live
under the oceans, sometimes snatching
planes, ships, and their unlucky crews.
By the 1970s, the groundwork had been
laid for a popular craze. The 1970 release of a
low-budget documentary, The Devil’s Triangle,
stirred interest outside the core audience of
paranormal enthusiasts. Four years later,
Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, a
compilation of lore that had already quietly
circulated for years, became a major bestseller.
That same year two paperbacks, The
Devil’s Triangle by Richard Winer and Limbo
of the Lost by John Wallace Spencer, fueled
public fascination and speculation. But the
next year, in 1975, Larry Kusche’s in-depth
inquiry into the incidents that underlay the
legend, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—
Solved, undercut the myth-making by documenting
the prosaic explanations that would
have been apparent if the pro-Triangle writers
had done original research and not simply
rewritten each other’s books. The silence of
the writers whom Kusche criticized effectively
ended the discussion.
See Also: OINTS
Further Reading
Begg, Paul, 1979. Into Thin Air: People Who Disap -
pear. North Pomfret, VT: David and Charles.
Berlitz, Charles, with J. Manson Valentine, 1974.
The Bermuda Triangle. Garden City, NY: Doubleday
and Company.
Eckert, Allan W., 1962. “The Mystery of the Lost
Patrol.” The American Legion Magazine (April):
12–23, 39–41.
Gaddis, Vincent H., 1965. Invisible Horizons: True
Mysteries of the Sea. Philadelphia, PA: Chilton
Books.
Kusche, Larry, 1975. The Bermuda Triangle Mys -
tery—Solved. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.