The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda TriangleLimbo 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, did not receive its most famous nickname until 1964, but reports of bizarre happenings there, or nearby, have been recorded for centuries. In fact, 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....
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