The Bermuda Triangle Mystery, Solved -- Again

 In recent days I have come across a series of articles in various newspapers letting us know that an Australian author, Karl Kurszelnicki, has solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. He began his research in 2017 and has concluded that, based on his research the incidents attributed to the Bermuda Triangle are not anomalous but simply the result of probabilities, navigational challenges, natural hazards, weather, and human error.

Well, color me surprised. I had no idea.

First, a little personal background. I was introduced to the concept of the Bermuda Triangle in a book, This Baffling World by John Godwin, published in 1968. He had a chapter entitled, “The Hoodoo Sea,” which was about the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn’t a very comprehensive analysis and incorporated shipwrecks that were nowhere near the Triangle.

In 1974, I attended a UFO conference in Denver, Colorado. Jim Lorenzen was there and he spoke about the Bermuda Triangle, noting that five Navy Avenger Torpedo Bombers, on a training mission and flying in formation, all disappeared at once. His question was how do five aircraft, flying in formation, just disappear without a trace. (Hint: Based on the official documentation, they did it on order from the flight leader.) And a rescue aircraft, sent out in search of those torpedo planes, also disappeared, without a trace. (It was seen to explode not long after take-off.)

In fact, I blogged about the idea that the Bermuda Triangle was solved years ago. You can read it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-bermuda-triangle-new-programming.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/06/editorial-comment.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-bermuda-triangle-flight-19-and-josh.html

I had always thought the best way to defeat the skeptical arguments, was to read their arguments and analyze their research. That’s why I picked up a copy of Lawrence David Kusche’s The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved published in October 1975. That book answered the questions about those disappearances and provided the source material. Some of those original sources explained what exactly what had happened, but later writers simply repeated what others had written without following all the information to its original source. Kusche did that and came up with the answers and this is why I sometimes chase footnotes.

I was in a unique position to answer one of the Triangle disappearances. I was the group intelligence officer of the 928^th Tactical Airlift Group, which was a subordinate unit to the 440^th Tactical Airlift Wing, which was based in Milwaukee. In June 1965, a C-119 from the 440^th disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and is listed in those various books and articles about the Triangle. I covered this in depth several years ago. You can read it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/09/disappearing-aircraft-part-3-bermuda.html

Here’s the point. The answers to the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle have been around for decades. I covered some of it myself with my connections to the 440^th. As I noted, while I was attending a staff conference in Milwaukee, they even showed me parts of the recovered wreckage. For some reason I didn’t bother to photograph the wreckage but some of it was clearly labeled with the aircraft number. It didn’t disappear without a trace. It crashed into the ocean.

C-119 cargo plane like that crashed in the Bermuda Trianglw.
Picture courtesy 440th Tactical Airlift Wing.

Too often, reporters simply don’t have time to do the proper research with daily deadlines pressing them for the constantly shifting stories. Book authors do have the time, but their personal bias often get in the way. I communicated with Charles Berlitz about his book about the Bermuda Triangle. It was clear from his response that he wasn’t interested in answers. He was interested in spreading the mystery with half-baked research and ignored fact.

I had a confrontation with an author about a book he’d published on another topic. I noted some of the errors in the books and provided the sources for verification. He wasn’t overly interested, saying, “I have a book to protect.”

Peter Robbins, on the other hand, learned the truth about his book written in collaboration with Larry Warren, Left at East Gate, announced that his book was filled with inaccurate information, largely supplied by a single, unreliable source. On learning the truth, and to his credit, Peter provided a retraction for the book and gave the reasons for it. You can read about that here:

http://www.kgraradio.com/peter-robbins-deception-a-review-and-critical-analysis-of-the-book-encounter-in-rendlesham-forest/

Peter Robbins at a MUFON Symposium.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The real take away here is that another author, Kurszelnicki, made an independent study of the Triangle and came to the same conclusions that many of us did decades ago and yet we are still bombarded with TV documentaries suggesting there is something to this “mystery.”

A final note on this. A few years back, after one of those Triangle documentaries, I talked with some of the men in Florida who have doing in depth research on that very subject. What they told me is quite interesting and I did interview them on the A Different Perspective radio show/podcast. You can listen to it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Flight+19#google_vignette

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/05/flight-19-last-post-probably.html

I find nothing mysterious about the alleged Bermuda Triangle. I do watch out for material about it because I hope they find the five Navy aircraft at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, so that we can put that mystery to rest. That should mark the end of the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle but I fear until that happens, we are going to have more half-baked theories about this manufactured mystery.

The Bermuda Triangle, Flight 19 and Josh Gates

In a strange coincidence, I stumbled across the second part of Josh Gates’ episode dealing with the Bermuda Triangle. I was able to learn the results of the experiment he had conducted with a couple of scientists. They launched a balloon into the upper atmosphere to find out if there were any anomalies to explain the trouble with compasses and other electronics. Yes, they found a spike in the

Josh Gates and me... published here to show that
I'm not really bald.

electromagnetic radiation that they couldn’t explain. Interesting, but not too illuminating.

He also was involved in an experiment created to explain the disappearance of the USS Cyclops, a strange looking Navy ship designed to carry coal to the fleet. That mission explains the weird metallic superstructure. Using a university’s facilities that had been designed to recreate ocean conditions, they created what is now known as a rogue wave to attempt to sink the ship. I expected it to do so, but not with the rapidity that it did. The wave hit the exact model of the ship and took it down in seconds… no time for a radio call, no time to for the sailors to abandon the ship and no time for any sort of rescue. One minute the ship was on the surface and the next it was under water. I might add that there are some portions of the Bermuda Triangle that are the deepest in the North Atlantic. If a ship or a plane sank there, no one is ever going to find any sign of it.

I was more interested in Josh’s take on Flight 19, a five-plane formation of Avenger torpedo planes that disappeared in 1945. This is the cornerstone of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It seems inexplicable and I wondered just what Josh would do about it. He gave a good account of the preliminaries meaning that weather at the time of take- off wasn’t great, the make-up of the flight, and its training mission. Everything was fine as they approached the target, Hens and Chicken Shoals, some 70 or so nautical miles from their base.

Once beyond that, they seemed to have drifted off course. The Flight made a scheduled turn, but the Flight Leader, Charles Taylor, said that both his compasses had malfunctioned. From that point, it seems they made several turns, first flying one direction and then another until they ran out of gas. Radio contact had been lost prior to that and when it was obvious that the Flight was down, a Martin Mariner with a crew of 13 was launched to attempt a rescue. That aircraft slipped off the radar and disappeared as well.

But, unlike the Avengers, there were witnesses to this part of the disaster. The crew of a ship in the area saw an aerial explosion. When they reached the scene of the crash, they spotted floating debris but the bad weather forced them to abandon the search. They next day, no one could find the wreckage… but the ship’s crew did get a good fix on the location.

All this is important because Josh, with another crew using high tech sonar, were able to see the ocean bottom in what looked like high definition detail. Scanning the area, they found debris on the ocean floor that looked suspiciously like the remains of an aircraft. Diving down, Josh found what looked like the type of engine that the Martin Mariner had used, and a propeller blade, or rather the engine hub with all three blades on it. Given all that, it is almost certain that they had found the remains of Martin Mariner. Although Josh and crew were unable to recover the engine or the propeller, it was suggested that it should be recovered at some point.

Given that, and what he learned about Flight 19, Josh suggested that a

combination of events doomed the Flight. It was a cascade of circumstances that brought down the planes and had there been any variation in those events, even a slight one, the tragedy might have been avoided. The conclusion is that it wasn’t some mysterious force that brought down the Flight, it wasn’t aliens and it wasn’t some sort of interdimensional warp… it was bad weather, faulty navigation and a series of other events that combined to doom the Flight.

Again, I was surprised by the rationale brought to this. Josh suggested at the end that there might be some weird weather and magnetic anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle but there was nothing supernatural. That was a conclusion that I had reached many years ago after reading Lawrence Kusche’s book.

Of course, having met Josh (yes, I have to bring that up again), I’m not surprised that he came to the conclusions he did, based on the evidence and the experiments in which he was involved. For those who wish to learn the truth about this, Expedition Unknown has done a good job of relating the facts without delving into the wild speculation that obscures the reality of the situation. I believe that we can say “solved” to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. It is delightful to see an intelligent documentary about the Bermuda Triangle when there is so much nonsense out there.

Fake News, ABC and the Bermuda Triangle

I have to wonder about ABC News. When I heard that an airplane had vanished on a flight from Puerto Rico to Miami, I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone had to mention it was another mysterious disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle. A solution for that mystery has been available for decades and some of the planes listed as having vanished, in fact, did not. Wreckage has been found. I mentioned much of this a long time ago on this blog, and have, of course, promoted the book, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved by Lawrence Kusche a number of times. For those earlier posts see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-bermuda-triangle-and-abc-evening.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/06/editorial-comment.html

In this latest tragedy, ABC was the first that I saw that mentioned the Bermuda Triangle complete with a map showing the anchors of the triangle at Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Miami. They also mentioned the number of crashes of aircraft and sinking of ships in the area, never mentioning that the numbers are not significantly higher than those for other heavily traveled sea lanes.

From the information readily available, it seems that the aircraft crashed, though I have nothing to suggest why that happened. Wreckage identified as coming from the lost aircraft has been recovered by the Coast Guard. That tells me that the aircraft crashed, not that it disappeared.

A 440th Tactical Airlift Wing C-119.

Once again, I will note that while I was assigned to the 928^th Tactical Airlift Group, which was a unit subordinate to the 440^th Airlift Wing, I had an opportunity to talk with the pilots, crew, and command post staff about the loss of one of their aircraft in the Bermuda Triangle. They had wreckage from the aircraft that was identified with the unit numbers on it, not to mention the serial numbers of some of the parts recovered. The aircraft crashed; though it is still listed in many of the books about the Bermuda Triangle as having disappeared.

I suggest that the news media try to be a little more topical and get off their lazy butts and use Google. There they could learn that the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery that was the result of incomplete facts, flawed research and an abundance of imagination. Rather than fan the flames of mystery, try to learn the truth so that the story doesn’t become one more sensational chapter in a tale that is untrue. 

The Bermuda Triangle and ABC Evening News

In the category of “What Isn’t News,” we have the ABC Evening News on Sunday night (February 9) telling us that scientists have come up with a solution for the Bermuda Triangle. Really? I thought it had been explained more than thirty-five years ago, and in fact, on this very blog several years ago I offered an explanation that I thought was reasonable.

Here’s the deal. Back in the mid-1970s, when I was much younger and believed that those writing books and magazine articles actually engaged in original research and first-hand reporting, I thought there was something mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle. One day, in the local bookstore, I saw a paperback copy of Lawrence David Kusche’s book, The Bermuda Triangle – Solved (copyright 1975). I bought one because I believed that if I was to argue successfully against the Skeptics, I should know what they had to say.

Kusche convinced me that he had solved the mystery. His book, unlike so many others, didn’t rely on what others had reported. He went to the original source material. He found the original insurance papers, the original investigations and the original newspaper articles. He named names and sources so that those of us who followed wouldn’t have to sort through piles of irrelevant material, but could see, for ourselves, exactly what was going on and why Kusche was right when so many others were wrong.

I have found that too often others writing on a topic will look at what the other writers have said, but do not search the original sources to verify the information. Case in point? The disappearance of Oliver Lerch from South Bend, Indiana. Morris K. Jessup, in his book, The Case for the UFO, told us that the facts of the Lerch disappearance were written down at the police department for anyone who cared to look.

Well, I cared to look, and the South Bend police told me that their records didn’t go back into the 1880s. There had been a fire in the 1920s that destroyed most of them. Jessup was wrong about this and I don’t know where he got his information but it was repeated in several other books.

Oh, I checked with the newspapers and searched for other documentation, but none ever surfaced to prove the case. In fact, the available documentation showed that nothing like it had ever happened in the South Bend area. The Lerch story was a hoax but it had been reported as fact by those others who apparently didn’t care to look.

And this is the situation with the Bermuda Triangle. Each mistake was copied by the next writer until it seemed that something truly mysterious was happening in the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche, on the other hand, checked the original sources and offered plausible and well researched explanations for some of the most mysterious of the disappearances. In one incredible case, the ship hadn’t disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. It had been lost in the Pacific Ocean.

And now ABC News tells us they have the solution. It is bad weather in the area. Well, of course, that played a role in many the disasters, but the real solution is all those others who didn’t bother to do any original research. It is those others who didn’t look at weather records and didn’t look at official reports and didn’t bother with the insurance papers. That was the source of the mystery and that is what supplied the solution.

I just thought it was strange that in a news broadcast that has, what, twenty-two minutes to give us the important information of the day, would waste time telling us something we’d known since the middle of the 1970s.

I wonder if they heard about the Internet? That might have told them something about the case that would have suggested that this wasn’t news.