Mystery of  Bermuda triangle        Mystery Solved?     

                                                           History of Bermuda Triangle

                              Bermuda Triangle, region of the western Atlantic Ocean  that has become associated in the popular imagination with mysterious maritime disasters. Also known as the Devil's Triangle, the triangle-shaped area covers about 1,140,000 sq km (about 440,000 sq mi) between the island of Bermuda, the coast of southern Florida, and Puerto Rico.
The sinister reputation of the Bermuda Triangle may be traceable to reports made in the late 15th century by navigator Christopher Columbus  concerning the Sargasso Sea, in which floating masses of gulfweed were regarded as uncanny and perilous by early sailors; others date the notoriety of the area to the mid-19th century, when a number of reports were made of unexplained disappearances and mysteriously abandoned ships. The earliest recorded disappearance of a United States vessel in the area occurred in March 1918, when the USS Cyclops vanished.

                          The incident that consolidated the reputation of the Bermuda Triangle was the disappearance in December 1945 of Flight 19, a training squadron of five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers. The squadron left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 14 crewmen and disappeared after radioing a series of distress messages; a seaplane sent in search of the squadron also disappeared. Aircraft that have disappeared in the area since this incident include a DC-3 carrying 27 passengers in 1948  and a C-124 Globemaster with 53 passengers in 1951. Among the ships that have disappeared are the tankership Marine Sulphur Queen  with 39 men aboard in 1963 and the nuclear-powered submarine Scorpion with a crew of 99 in 1968.
                               
                           Books, articles, and television broadcasts investigating the Bermuda Triangle emphasize that, in the case of most of the disappearances, the weather was favorable, the disappearances occurred in daylight after a sudden break in radio contact, and the vessels vanished without a trace. However, skeptics point out that many supposed mysteries result from careless or biased consideration of data. For example, some losses attributed to the Bermuda Triangle actually occurred outside the area of the triangle in inclement weather conditions or in darkness, and some can be traced to known mechanical problems or inadequate equipment. In the case of Flight 19, for example, the squadron commander was relatively inexperienced, a compass was faulty, the squadron failed to follow instructions, and the aircraft was operating under conditions of deteriorating weather and visibility and with a low fuel supply. Other proposed explanations for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle include the action of physical forces unknown to science, a "hole in the sky," an unusual chemical component in the region's seawater, and abduction by extraterrestrial beings. Scientific evaluations of the Bermuda Triangle have concluded that the number of disappearances in the region is not abnormal and that most of the disappearances have logical explanations. Paranormal associations with the Bermuda Triangle persist in the public mind, however.

             STORIES CONCERNING WITH BERMUDA 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. Bermuda Triangle complete with enigma and has proven to be so for much of recorded
                          history. Many seemingly inexplicable occurrences and disappearances have taken place in this
                          particular area. No rational explanation that will satisfy the materialistic parameters of the
                          typical scientist has been offered that would account for all the mysterious happenings that
                          have taken place in the Bermuda Triangle during the course of many thousands of years. 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, a training squadron of five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers. The squadron left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 14 crewmen and disappeared after radioing a series of distress messages , 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."

Aircraft that have disappeared in the area after Flight 19 include a DC-3 carrying 27 passengers in 1948 and a C-124 Globemaster with 53 passengers in 1951. Among the ships that have disappeared are the tankership Marine Sulphur Queen with 39 men aboard in 1963 and the nuclear-powered submarine Scorpion with a crew of 99 in 1968. 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 mishapscan 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 actuallyhappened within the Triangle's borders. Sea disasters as distant as Portugal, Ireland and the Pacific and Indian Oceans have beenblamed on the Bermuda Triangle. We might then just as well rename it as "The Worldwide Curse of All Seas." Some have turnedthis fact on its head by proposing this as evidence that the Devil's Triangle is expanding in scope.

Other proposed explanations for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle include the action of physical forces unknown to
science, a "hole in the sky," an unusual chemical component in the region's seawater, and abduction by extraterrestrial beings.
Scientific evaluations of the Bermuda Triangle have concluded that the number of disappearances in the region is not abnormal
and that most of the disappearances have logical explanations. Paranormal associations with the Bermuda Triangle persist in the public mind, however!