Monday, December 27, 2010

The Bermuda Triangle: Facts and Theories

The Bermuda triangle is one of the most mysterious and dangerous areas of the earth’s oceans, responsible, or blamed, for the disappearance of over 2,000 vessels and 75 airplanes through a rather short period of three centuries.


The Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean whose size varies by the author who happens to be writing about it; although its most common points are San Juan, Puerto Rico; Miami, Florida; and the island of Bermuda. It gains its fame from the large amount of ships and planes that have vanished without a trace within the last century.




The first known documentation of
strange anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle was recorded by the famed explorer Christopher Columbus in October 1492, when he and his crew was said to have passed through the area. On the eleventh of October of that year, Columbus recorded in his log book that his crew had seen “strange dancing lights on the horizon”, “flames in the sky”, and later recorded that he had observed bizarre compass bearings in the area.
This was the first known recording of any strange occurrences in the triangle leading to the discovery of the New World in 1492, but it was not the last. After the discovery by Spain and Portugal that the New World could be a source of valuable minerals and abundant resources, the countries sent galleons to transport the materials from the New World back to Europe.
It was recorded that many of these vessels, loaded with gold stolen from the North American natives, disappeared without a trace throughout the Atlantic and the Caribbean]. Some of these galleons have been recovered within the last century by modern researchers and salvage experts who have analyzed the ocean bottom-but the nature of their disappearances is yet to be explained with certainty.
The term “Bermuda Triangle” was popularized in a 1964 issue of Argosy Magazine by Vincent Gaddis; and in 1974 it largely achieved its fame through the publication of The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. The book recounts the disappearances of many aircraft and ships, in particular, the loss of five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers in 1945, known as Flight 19.

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