In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. This is what we’re taught as children, along with numerous myths that I have addressed previously, such as that the Earth was largely believed flat before Columbus’s voyage. We can thank prolific mythmaker Washington Irving for this myth, as well as many others, such as the character of Santa Claus as we have come to imagine him, and the popular notion that Ponce De Leon came to Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth. Well, thanks to Washington Irving, we also find Christopher Columbus all wrapped up with the myth complex of the Bermuda Triangle. It started with Irving’s account of Columbus crossing the Sargasso Sea. Like a horror story, we learn that his ships were becalmed in a strange expanse, with seaweed all around them yet no sight of land. Moreover, his crew witnessed strange sights, a fire in the sky, and an unusual light in the distance. Then, his compass began to behave strangely. In fact, Irving’s depiction was likely relatively accurate in this case. The Sargasso Sea, so named after the Spanish word for seaweed, would long strike fear into sailors. Typically seaweed was seen only when close to land, though it gathers here in the mid-Atlantic because of its circular currents. Seeing the masses of seaweed, sailors typically feared they might run aground, or worse. Stranded for long periods in this sea, sailors began to see things on the flotillas of sea vegetation surrounding them. Creepy crawly creatures that made their home among the branches and gas-filled berries of the pale brown sargassum seaweed lent it the appearance of movement, such that some believed it was alive, grappling their ships, holding them in place. In fact, movement was impeded in the Sargasso because of the so-called horse latitudes, a belt of waters in which wind was rare, with weather so calm that sometimes sailors felt they could not breathe. It was called the horse latitudes because sometimes, which on ships carrying horses were so becalmed that they ran through their drinking water, horses became so mad with thirst that they leapt overboard. As for the talk of a “great flame of fire” seen in the sky, and later of a strange light in the distance, these episodes are easily explained. The crew likely had spotted a meteor falling, and in fact, there is no sense that the sight was unusual or greatly troubled the sailors, who must have seen such things before. As for the light in the distance, this occurred shortly before they finally sighted land, so it was likely a torchlight held by a night fisherman or a native on a nearby island. Of course, UFO enthusiasts latch onto these lights as an indication that Columbus encountered some kind of mysterious flying object during his voyage, and once the legend of the Bermuda Triangle was established, the incident became proof that Columbus had almost been lost to the mysterious forces of the area, which were often linked to flying saucers. In reality, most of the Sargasso Sea is well outside the area designated the Bermuda Triangle, but it does overlap in its westernmost reaches. In fact, there is at least one indication that Columbus had entered the Triangle: his erratic compass readings. Compasses do in fact behave relatively oddly in the Bermuda Triangle. Considering the fact that the most notorious and most mysterious of Bermuda Triangle incidents, the disappearance of Flight 19, is said to have involved the failure of the planes’ compasses, this does indeed seem to connect the experience of Columbus and his crew and the vanishment of Flight 19 to some anomalous phenomenon in the Bermuda Triangle…but when we look further into this, the “anomaly” may not be as mysterious as it seems, and its effect on Columbus and Flight 19 perhaps entirely embellished by those who would make of the Bermuda Triangle a monolithic paranormal mystery when it is really no more than an assemblage of unrelated tragedies.

As we continue to explore the urban legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we must reckon with the inciting incident, so to speak. Strangely, the inciting incident of this drama was not the first disappearance said to have occurred in the Triangle, but rather the one that drew the most attention. The fame and notoriety of the disappearance of Flight 19 and the plane dispatched to rescue them cannot be exaggerated. It was a major, national front-page story that captured the public’s imaginations. Newspapers called them “The Lost Patrol,” though as I described in part one, they were not on patrol. Rather, they were on a navigational training flight, each of the five bombers crewed with three men, and only one, the lead plane, piloted by an experienced aviator: flight instructor Lieutenant Charles Taylor. All four other planes were being flown by student pilots, crewed with student navigators. Initial public interest in the disappearance of the squadron waned after the Navy conducted its month-long investigation of the incident and cited instrument failure and pilot error as the reasons for the loss of the squadron, but as the report would later be amended to conclude that the flight had been lost due to “cause unknown,” the same report would later fuel speculations about a paranormal cause. The seeds of the legend of the Bermuda Triangle first appeared in a 1950 Associated Press piece by E.V.W. Jones titled “Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age,” which paired the story of Flight 19 with the 1948 loss of a British passenger plane, the Star Tiger, near Bermuda, and the 1949 loss of another plan of the same model flown by the same airline, the Star Ariel, on its flight from Bermuda to Chile. As the title suggests, the short article only points out that modern mysteries still exist, and that even in the modern age “men and machines and ships can disappear without a trace.” It was a simple reminder of how vast and untamed the world still was, with no imputation of supernatural phenomena. But within two years, these supposed mysteries were expanded on in the pages of Ray Palmer’s paranormal phenomena magazine, Fate, a magazine credited with popularizing the idea that flying saucers were real and were piloted by extra-terrestrials. By the mid-fifties, the growing laundry list of supposedly mysterious incidents in the area was reprinted and added to in the pages of numerous books that attributed the losses to UFO’s, including 1954’s Flying Saucers on the Attack, 1955’s The Case for the UFO, and Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucer Conspiracy that same year. The name “Bermuda Triangle” would eventually be coined by Vincent Gaddis in his article for men’s magazine Argosy in 1964, which would be reprinted the same year in Flying Saucer Review. From there, the snowball had gathered enough mass and momentum that it could not be stopped, and eventually we would see the legend fully fleshed out in Charles Berlitz’s work in the 1970s.

The Argosy Magazine issue in which the legend took its final form.

No matter what we might say about the way subsequent writers would add onto the legend, drawing tenuous connections and presenting less than mysterious incidents as mysteries in order to manufacture a myth, a fact is that the loss of Flight 19 did seem a genuine mystery. That’s why it captured the attention of the country at the time, why it warranted a Navy investigation that lasted months, and why even five years later it was being written about as a puzzle by journalists. This was not the loss of a single plane. It was a whole squadron, five bombers, and the fact that a rescue plane sent to find them also was promptly lost made it a true enigma at the time. What could have caused all their instruments to fail? Why did they lose radio contact? Why could they not have simply navigated west, making their way back to Florida, simply by following the sun? When they ran out of fuel, the plane should have been able to float for some time, long enough for the crew, who all wore life vests, to get in their emergency, self-inflating rafts. They should have been capable of surviving on their rafts for some time while awaiting rescue, and they were equipped with radio gear with which they could have continued sending SOS signals while in their rafts. If they had all crashed and been unable to launch their rafts, why was no floating wreckage or bodies ever found? Why were no oil slicks observed in the extensive search? And these questions apply as well to the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to search for and rescue the naval airmen. According to numerous accounts of the last radio transmissions of Flight 19, Taylor indicated that they were experiencing an emergency and were off course. When asked for his position, Taylor said he couldn’t be sure, that they were lost. When told to head west, he reportedly exclaimed, “We don’t know which way is west. Everything is wrong…strange…we can’t be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn’t look as it should!” What possible explanation could there be for all of this?

In fact, if all of these details were accurate, there are still some feasible explanations. For example, the sea looking strange might be attributed to the fact that methane hydrates are believed by scientists to occasionally release frothy and bubbling gas explosions in the area. Or if the flight had gone off course into the Sargasso Sea, perhaps the rafts of seaweed made the waters look unusual to any pilots who were not familiar with it, which, as we will see, flight leader Charles Taylor may not have been. As for the failure of the flight’s compasses, this may be attributed to the unusual compass readings common in the area, as was observed even by the first European to ply these waters, Christopher Columbus. In fact, there are exactly two places where these odd compass readings are known to occur, in the Bermuda Triangle and in a certain stretch of ocean near Japan called the Devil’s Sea or the Dragon’s Triangle, in which, much like the Bermuda Triangle, many ships and airplanes are said to have mysteriously disappeared. This compass variation is said to be caused by some magnetic anomaly in these areas, which could be linked to reports of St. Elmo’s Fire, or witchfire, being common in the Triangle. This weather phenomenon involves the electric field around objects like ship masts or plane wings ionizing the air and create a glowing plasma field. Perhaps this phenomenon could have caused the confusion of Flight 19 and prevented them from seeing the sun and navigating westward? All of this sounds rather scientific and convincing, but it’s hogwash. The compass variation that Columbus experienced is typical and common knowledge even among hikers. Almost everywhere on earth, compasses don’t point to true north, but rather to magnetic north, which gradually changes, requiring some customary adding or subtracting of degrees. Indeed, Columbus realized right away that his compass needle was being drawn to some other pole, as it was not pointing toward the North Star. The fact is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses are known to point to true north, making navigation easier rather than more difficult. Any tales about magnetic anomalies causing spinning compass needles are nonsense; there is no evidence of any strange magnetic phenomena in the area, and though St. Elmo’s Fire is known to appear on the edges of planes, it does not affect instrumentation or the visibility of the sun. As for the Devil’s Sea near Japan, where it is true that as in the Bermuda Triangle, compasses point to true north rather than magnetic north, this sister mystery to the Bermuda Triangle has also been proven false. A series of New York Times articles from the 1950s are responsible for this legend, as they reported some ships being lost to undersea volcanoes and tidal waves in the area. These losses, which the Japanese did not find mysterious at all, would later be latched onto by American writers as evidence that ships were commonly lost in those seas, when the Japanese do not consider it an especially dangerous area. But after all this, when we delve deeply into the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, we discover that none of these potential explanations are even needed, as the transmissions in which Taylor talks about being unable to see the sun and says the seas look strange, it turns out, never even happened. These words of Taylor’s originate from a 1962 American Legion Magazine article that included fictional dramatizations of Flight 19’s final transmissions. Even though none of these radio messages were real, appearing nowhere in the 400-page Naval investigation report, they have been repeated uncritically as real quotations by writers who promote the Bermuda Triangle mystery.

An early edition of Larry Kusche’s book, whose title, surprisingly, was no exaggeration.

So it went for decades, each writer publishing on the Bermuda Triangle putting their own stink on the mess and not bothering to clean up any of the previous researchers’ garbage. Each new article or book simply recycled what had previously been claimed, listing the incidents others had already compiled without really looking into them or doing much in the way of fact checking. When one of these “researchers” bothered to do some research, it was usually just to find some new incident they could tack onto the lists, rather than actually confirming the mysterious nature of the incidents previously attached to the legend. But then came Larry Kusche in the 1970s. Kusche was a research librarian at Arizona State University. For those who know nothing about library science, this may not seem especially impressive, but if you ever need to track down obscure source material, a reference librarian is who you need, and his background in library science meant he had a strong sense of source quality and credibility and was able to think critically when evaluating what material could be trusted. In the seventies, the topic came to his attention when students wanted to write essays about it and sought out his help in finding credible support material. Kusche took an interest, and while the students who had solicited his help came and went, he continued amassing newpaper and magazine articles and looking further into the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche also just happened to be an experienced commercial pilot, flight instructor, and flight engineer with thousands of flight hours under his belt, making him even more peculiarly suited to cracking the case of Flight 19. Undertaking the project with the intention of writing a book, he wisely moved beyond secondary sources in the news media to examine the actual Navy investigation’s report and the personal records of Lt. Charles Taylor. Over the course of writing his two books on the topic, he conducted almost a hundred interviews, took a ride on an Avenger bomber, and even piloted a solo flight following the same path as Flight 19. What he found was rather surprising. Almost all of the lost ships and flights named by those compiling lists of the Bermuda Triangle’s victims had some rational and mundane explanation—causes as simple and to-be-expected as foul weather, storms that writers failed to mention or even insisted had not occurred—and many happened far outside the area identified as the Bermuda Triangle. As for Flight 19, he discovered that no researcher before him had even bothered to examine the investigative report, which, as he demonstrates convincingly, actually proves that Flight 19 simply got lost, due to flight leader Charles Taylor’s error, and went down in severe weather.

Those who believe nothing can adequately explain the loss of Flight 19 often appeal to the experience and expertise of Lt. Charles Taylor. By all accounts he did have extensive combat piloting experience and was an excellent pilot. But, of course, he was also human, and Kusche recorded indications of his fallibility. For example, he had twice before become lost while piloting and been forced to ditch his planes. The first time was June of 1944. He’d lost his bearings near Trinidad, run out of fuel, and had been unable to launch his raft before his plane sank, triggering the explosion of depth charges below him. He was lucky to have been rescued that day. The next time was January of 1955, earlier the same year as Flight 19’s disappearance. He had lost radio contact and had been unable to find his way to Guam. He put the plane into the water and he and one passenger spent all night in a raft awaiting rescue. This does not indicate that he was a bad pilot, but it does demonstrate a pattern that corresponds with what appears to have occurred on December 5th. There is a story about Charles Taylor having had a premonition about some disaster that would happen on the flight, causing him to ask to be excused and not lead the training flight that day. According to the investigation’s report, he did ask that another instructor take his place, but there is no mention of a premonition. Some writers have suggested that he wanted out of the assignment because he had tied one on the night before and was hung over, or even because he was intoxicated at the time of departure, but there is also no evidence for these speculations. In fact, witnesses said Taylor appeared “normal in all respect.” Just as likely is the possibility that Taylor simply did not feel prepared for the flight. Until recently, he had been based in Miami, flying patrols for a year over the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Keys. All indications suggest that he had never flown the Bahamas route that he was then being asked to instruct trainees in flying. When Kusche examined the lengthy official report of the Navy’s investigation, it became clearer and clearer that not only had the loss of Flight 19 been Taylor’s fault, but the original report had even concluded as much, finding him “guilty of mental aberration.” Yet those who insist on the mystery of Flight 19 consistently claim that the Navy had been unable to determine the cause. This is because Taylor’s mother would later accuse the Navy of wrongfully blaming him, contending that they had no aircraft or bodies, and thus no evidence. So to mollify her, it seems, Taylor was exonerated, and the Board of Inquiry amended their report to state that the cause of the disappearance was unknown. The fact is, though, that the investigation had ample evidence to come to their conclusion about Taylor, all of it from his radio transmissions.

Lt. Charles Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, who was likely responsible for the loss of the five bombers, as Kusche demonstrates

One of the purposes of the training flight was to teach the student navigators the technique of dead reckoning, by which airmen navigate when over the open ocean without any visible landmarks. Dead reckoning requires a timekeeping device, as the plane’s location is calculated according to heading and speed, by keeping track of elapsed time, accounting for wind. During a pre-flight check, apparently it was noticed that the five Avengers had no clocks on board. It’s hard to imagine that the planes would be cleared for takeoff with no timekeeping devices on board, but radio transmissions, in which Taylor was heard more than once asking the time, suggest that this lead plane was without a clock. Nevertheless, even when Taylor began expressing concerns that the flight was lost, there are indications that they were actually right where they were supposed to be. About an hour and a half into the flight, Taylor started asking what one of the other pilots’ compass read, saying, “I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.” Communicating with someone at Fort Lauderdale and mistakenly using the call sign MT-28 rather than FT-28 (MT being the designation he’d been using the past year while flying out of Miami, and FT being the designation for his flight out of Fort Lauderdale), he said, “Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” This is the key to the entire debacle. Flight 19 had flown east and by that time would have been directly over some of the smaller Bahama islands, which can look strikingly similar to the Florida Keys. Taylor had been flying over the Keys for a year but likely had not yet flown over the Bahamas. The simple fact that he looked down and thought he was over the Keys seems to have convinced him that he had accidentally been flying southwest rather than east. Therefore, though there was nothing wrong with his compasses, he presumed they were not working because he felt he could not trust them, believing the evidence of his eyes over an instrument known to sometimes fail. Now we are able to understand why he did not immediately head west, and it was not because the sun could not be seen. Believing himself and the whole squadron to be over the Florida Keys, he believed that to head west would take them out over the Gulf of Mexico, where they would run out of fuel. Instead, he appears to have chosen to fly northward, believing this would take them back to Florida, when in fact it took them out into the Atlantic. We know this to be the case, because about four hours into the flight, Port Everglades, who had come into radio contact with the squadron, was finally able to fix their position well north of the Bahamas. But their position was never transmitted to Flight 19 because radio contact was lost. Like the compasses, this communication failure was no great mystery either. Taylor never switched to the emergency broadcasting channel, which would have had a broader reach, preferring to stay on the channel used for training flights in order to keep in contact with the other planes in the squadron. Then it was dark, and despite what promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend claim about the weather being calm, out over the Atlantic where they ended up, it had grown stormy. As rescue planes would report, the area had high winds and extreme turbulence, and the seas into which the squadron would have been forced to ditch were described as “rough” and “tremendous.”

With knowledge of these transmissions, it becomes very clear why the Naval investigation determined that Taylor had suffered a “mental aberration.” Sadly, he became confused, decided he could not trust his instruments, led his squadron in the wrong direction, directly into stormy weather, and they all tragically ended up in the sea. Whether or not they launched their rafts successfully, it’s clear that they were unable to contend with the roughness of the waves. Another unfortunate factor leading to their certain deaths, if they had managed to ditch their aircrafts and survive for some time that dark and stormy night was the fact that the rescue plane sent to search for them was also lost, and further rescue efforts did not commence until the next morning. So now we must consider the loss of the Martin Mariner, the flying boat sent to rescue them the same evening they were lost. First, it must be noted that the Mariner was only one plane among 200 sent to look for the squadron, along with seventeen ships sent to search their last known location. Nothing happened to any of the other planes and ships out searching for Flight 19. When promoters of the Bermuda Triangle myth tell the story, it sounds like the Mariner flew out immediately and then vanished. A tanker out in the area observed an explosion at 7:50pm, made its way to the site of the flames to search for survivors and found only an oil slick and burning gasoline. Legend promoters typically discount this as unrelated, suggesting that this mystery explosion occurred hours after the Mariner had already vanished, but in truth, the Mariner took off at 7:27pm, only 23 minutes before the explosion was seen. And these flying boats were known to be at risk of such random explosions. They were nick-named “flying gas tanks” because they had a problem with the fumes of their fuel leaking out, such that if any crewman snuck a smoke or if any random spark occurred, they could go up in a fireball. Considering this and the evidence found by the tanker, it’s exceedingly clear what happened to the flying rescue boat in the aftermath of the loss of Flight 19. But despite all this evidence and the unmistakable conclusions of the investigation, legend promoters insist it is impossible to comprehend. They point specifically to the fact that, when the search was eventually called off, a standing order was issued to remain on alert for any signs of the lost squadron, and that this order remains “in effect to this very day!” But the reality of the situation is that whenever a search is called off like this, such a standing order is put into effect. It’s nothing unique or strange at all. It just means the search failed, which unfortunately is not uncommon.

A map produced by the Associated Press to illustrate the flight paths of planes lost in the Triangle.

So, we see the insurmountable mystery of Flight 19, the “sea puzzle” that launched the entire Bermuda Triangle myth, was no unsolvable enigma. In fact, it didn’t even really involve the instrument failure so often cited. It was just a matter of pilot error, inclement weather, slow rescue response, and in the case of the exploding rescue boat, an unsafe aircraft. We’ve seen that all of the many lost ships attributed over the years to the Bermuda Triangle likewise had simple explanations. Can the same be said for all the rest of the lost planes? Let’s look specifically at the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel, the two lost British planes originally cited in the first article to ever suggest that planes had a habit of going missing in the area. As with every other of the more than fifty incidents Kusche investigated, the losses of these two passenger flights were also shown to be explainable even if they remained unexplained. The Star Tiger, for example, seems to have encountered stiffer winds than expected, something typically left out of the sensationalist accounts in favor of claims that weather was always perfect during Bermuda Triangle disappearances, and in the case of the Star Ariel, because contact was lost after the pilots had signed off of one frequency but before establishing contact on the next, search and rescue was not dispatched to find them until the next day. While reports of these two flights’ disappearance emphasizes the fact that investigations came to no certain conclusion, suggesting some inexplicable cause, the truth was that their investigations did not rule out any standard cause with any certainty, and even explicitly stated that causes such as fire, engine failure, and loss of control could not be eliminated. The work of Larry Kusche on this topic is an admirable example of critical analysis and skeptical inquiry.

Skeptics like Kusche get a bad rap. Many people use the word “skeptic” as a pejorative, like it means hater or someone who doubts everything unreasonably. In fact, it refers to a systematic approach that should be taken when investigating most topics, involving suspending one’s judgment, evaluating the reliability of evidence and the credibility of sources, and eventually settling on the most reasonable or logical conclusion…or accepting that no clear conclusion can reasonably be reached. Another pejorative used for skeptics that some have applied to Kusche—a label I too have been given from time to time—is “debunker,” giving the impression that we set out determined to disprove a topic from the start, and implying that we would omit or ignore evidence that runs counter to our preferred conclusions. Kusche has addressed this label before, explaining that when he started his research, he really would have preferred to find something truly mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle, as his book would then have surely been a bestseller and earned him a boatload more money than it did. The problem was that his academic sensibilities and ethical approach to research and argumentation made it impossible to perpetuate and amplify what he realized was a total urban legend. This truly resonates with me. I understand that if I didn’t strive for the truth in my podcast, I could probably find far more listeners among those who yearn for the mysterious and the paranormal to be true. But it’s not just ethics that prevent me from promoting such insupportable claims and misinformation; it’s also, as Larry Kusche has explained, the fact that I believe the real story, the fact that such mysteries have been manufactured as frauds perpetrated on the public imagination, to be even more interesting than the far-fetched ideas of E.T. saucers, time portals, and Atlantean death rays. Maybe others who feel the same will eventually find and listen to the podcast in larger numbers, and legends like the Bermuda Triangle can be relegated to the history of mistaken ideas once and for all.

Until next time, remember, skeptic is not a bad word, and debunker shouldn’t be either. You can’t successfully debunk something that is true, so using the word “debunker” scornfully just means you resent when the shams you believe are exposed as false.

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part Two: Dead Reckoning

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