HOW, WHY: Exploring the Enigma of the Bermuda Triangle

Mate, usually it's Fort Lauderdale. Are you referring to FT28 to Fort Lauderdale? Have you made any progress on the myth of the Bermuda Triangle?

The myth of the Bermuda Triangle began on the 5th of December 1945 when a group of five airplanes mysteriously vanished. Everything is wrong. Even the sea looks different.

Flight 19 was a routine training mission of five Avenger torpedo bombers. The three-seater Avenger was the US Navy's top ship and submarine killer. It could carry up to 2,000 pounds of ordnance and had a range of a thousand miles. The Avenger was robust and reliable.

The doome Flight 19 left Fort Lauderdale at ten past two on a clear winter's afternoon. Four hours after they took off, they vanished into thin air.

Fearing the worst, a Naval Air search and rescue plane took off into the darkening skies 20 minutes later. At 7:47 p.m., the rescue plane also disappeared.

After a massive search, no wreckage was found and nothing was ever heard from them again — until now, over the last 60 years.

This mystery has sustained the wildest theories about what strange forces may be at work out here. Legend has it that the triangle covers the oceans between Miami, the island of Bermuda, and Puerto Rico — an area of one and a half million square miles.

Since 1492, when Columbus first sailed into the area and saw strange lights in the sky, the list of unexplainable vanishings in the Bermuda Triangle has grown. Thousands of ships and planes have simply disappeared — no warning, no distress calls, no wreckage.

Richard Winer has written many best-selling books about these strange disappearances: "We don't know our own planet. We know more about the moon. We're probably learning more about Mars than we know of our own planet. We know about the Earth, but we don't know about the sea."

The boatyards of Key West buzz with stories about those who were lost in the triangle — tales of giant sea monsters, cosmic time warps, spinning compasses, and holes in the ocean that swallowed ships have echoed throughout the world. Yet, the disappearances continue.

"I would say, oh, there's some kind of anomaly going on down there that we can't explain, something that occurs far, far below the deepest rays, the last rays of sunlight, deep down. There's something happening down there."

The Bermuda Triangle's reputation for paranormal activity has been bolstered by various accounts and theories over the years. One of the most famous incidents occurred in 1918 with the USS Cyclops, a massive Navy cargo ship that vanished without a trace along the Triangle's southern boundary. With a crew of 309 and a cargo of manganese ore, the Cyclops was on a routine voyage from Brazil to Baltimore when it seemingly disappeared. Despite extensive search efforts, no wreckage or clues to its fate were ever found. This incident marked the largest non-combat loss of life in U.S. Navy history outside of action, adding to the Triangle's mystique.

Critics of the Bermuda Triangle phenomena argue that its mysterious reputation is more myth than reality. They suggest that the number of incidents within the Triangle is not significantly greater than in any other similarly trafficked region of the world's oceans. They attribute the disappearances to natural causes such as sudden storms, navigational errors, or mechanical failures, all of which can be perilous in the vast and often unpredictable environment of the open sea.

In conclusion, whether one believes in the paranormal aspects of the Bermuda Triangle or views it as a product of natural phenomena and human error, its legacy as a place of mystery and intrigue remains deeply ingrained in popular culture and the annals of maritime history.