Ongoing · The Atlantic Ocean

Mystery That Has Cost 1,000 Lives
There are places on earth with a weight that science alone can’t explain.
One of these is the Bermuda Triangle“>Bermuda Triangle.

It is right there on every map of the Atlantic Ocean — a patch of open water between Miami, Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. A half-million square miles of blue that looks like any other part of the sea from the air. No heads up. Below the surface there was no darkness. If you saw it in a satellite image, it would tell you nothing about this particular patch of ocean that has swallowed up more ships, more planes, more human lives than any comparable body of water on the planet.

But it has. For more than a hundred years ships have gone into the Bermuda Triangle and disappeared. No trash. No signal of distress. There were no corpses. No explanation has ever satisfied the people who study it, the families who lost someone to it, or the sailors and pilots who cross it today with something quietly uneasy in the back of their minds.
The ocean guards its secrets well. Most lose them, the Bermuda Triangle holds them better.

A Mystery Decades in the Making
The disappearances didn’t start in modern times. Ships have been disappearing in these waters since the 19th century without explanation — ships that set out from port in good condition, with experienced sailors on board, sailing in decent weather, and just never arriving at their destination.

But it was the 20th century that really cemented the Bermuda Triangle’s reputation as a terrifying place. As air travel grew and the Atlantic skies were filled with military and civilian aircraft, the mystery grew. Ships were one thing. Another was planes vanishing in clear skies.
Then December 5, 1945, happened. The day that changed everything.

Flight 19 The Disappearance That Stunned a Nation
It was a routine training mission.

On the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers left Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida. All the aircraft were in good mechanical shape. The fourteen men aboard were not student pilots on their first solo flight; they were trained naval aviators who had logged considerable time in the air.

The weather in South Florida was clear and cooperative.
Flight 19 would be back in two hours.
It didn’t come back.

About ninety minutes into the mission something went wrong. The radio of the flight leader crackled with what would become one of the most haunting transmissions in aviation history—the compasses were going haywire. The pilots were unable to tell which way was west.

They could not see the land. Somehow, five experienced pilots flying five different aircraft had become completely, hopelessly lost over a stretch of ocean they had flown before.

The radio calls that followed were desperate and becoming more frantic. The pilots were circling somewhere over the Atlantic burning their last fuel. They could not get their bearings. Ground crews tried to talk them back Nothing helped. The transmissions faded, became confused and then – silence.
All five planes were missing.

The Navy immediately initiated a search and rescue operation. One of the planes dispatched to look for Flight 19 was a Martin Mariner flying boat crewed by 13 men. And it disappeared without a trace.

Twenty-seven men and six planes were lost in one afternoon, vanished into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind only unanswered questions and a single phrase that would echo through history—the Navy’s official determination of the cause of the disappearance: “causes or reasons unknown.”

Explanations That Do not Fully Explain
For decades, scientists and researchers have been trying to come up with a rational explanation for what happens in the Bermuda Triangle and to their credit, they have come up with several compelling theories.

Some researchers have cited sudden, violent weather systems that can arise with little warning over the Atlantic — storms so powerful that they can overcome even well-equipped vessels in minutes. Magnetic anomalies, natural irregularities in the earth’s magnetic field that could throw off compass readings and send pilots and navigators dangerously off course, are one example.

One of the more dramatic scientific theories is the large deposits of methane gas under the ocean floor, underwater. When released suddenly , methane can dramatically reduce the density of the water above it , causing ships to lose buoyancy and sink almost instantaneously , without time to send a distress signal . And the mighty currents of the Gulf Stream, which runs through the triangle, would then sweep away any remaining wreckage thousands of miles from the site of the disaster, making recovery effectively impossible.

The U.S. Coast Guard has officially stated that, statistically, the Bermuda Triangle is no more dangerous than any other heavily traveled stretch of ocean in the world.

Maybe so. Maybe the numbers, cold and emotionless, support that conclusion.
But statistics provide little comfort to the families of the fourteen men of Flight 19, whose bodies were never recovered, whose aircraft were never found, and whose last desperate radio transmissions still echo through the historical record more than seventy years later.

The Mystery That Lingers Ongoing · The Atlantic Ocean

The Bermuda Triangle has taken about one thousand lives in the last one hundred years. Even today ships and aircraft still disappear in its waters—not often enough to make the headlines weekly, but often enough that the mystery has never quite been put to rest.

Every few years there’s a new disappearance on the news. A small plane that disappeared on a clear day. A yacht that sailed out of a Caribbean port and never showed up. A crewless fishing boat adrift and nothing to explain the fate of the men who had been sailing it.

Every new case adds another layer to a mystery that has been accumulating for generations. Every family that leaves without answers joins the long list of people who have looked out over the ocean and asked the same question that can never be satisfactorily answered.
What’s up there?

The Answer We Don’t Have
The simple truth about the Bermuda Triangle is this: we don’t know.

We have answers. We have the numbers. So we have scientific explanations that explain some of the disappearances and others remain completely unexplained. We have official reports that say one thing and eyewitness reports that say something else.
What we do not have is a complete and satisfying explanation of why this particular stretch of the Atlantic Ocean has swallowed so many lives, so many ships, and so many airplanes, and left no trace.

The ocean is big and mostly unknown. Some of the world’s busiest shipping and air travel routes cross at the Bermuda Triangle, yet its depths are as mysterious today as they were when ships first started disappearing in the 19th century.

The answers might be out there, somewhere, deep under those blue waters, in the dark beyond sunlight, in the silence past any radio signal.
The ocean knows the fate of Flight 19. It knows what happened to the thousand whose lives ended somewhere in that triangle of water. It knows things that mankind has been trying to understand for over a hundred years.”
It just is not talking.

The Bermuda Triangle · Ocean Atlantic · 1,000+ lives lost · 500,000 square miles · Ongoing · Flight 19 mystery unsolved · 5 Dec 1945 · 27 Men · 6 aircraft · Never located