The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, or Devi’s Triangle, covers around 500,000 square miles of the ocean located off the southeastern tip of Florida. One of the earliest suggestions of unusual disappearances taking place in this area appeared on September 17, 1950, in an article published in The Miami Herald by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Its believed that Christopher Columbus sailed through this area on his first voyage to the Americas, and reported that he saw a great flame of fire, likely a meteor, crash into the sea one night and that a strange light appeared in the distance several weeks later. He also said that there were erratic compass readings, and this could have been due to the fact that at that time, a small part of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few areas on Earth where magnetic north and true north lined up.

It is also believed that Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” was based on a real-life Bermuda shipwreck, which could have added to the mystery of the area. Most reports concerning unexplained disappearance never really grabbed the attention of the public until the 20th century. One such tragedy occurred in March 1918 when a 542-foot long Navy cargo ship, the USS Cyclops, carrying 300 men and 10,000 tons of manganese ore onboard sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay. The Cyclops never sent out an SOS despite the fact that they were equipped to do so, and an extensive search never found the…