Bermuda Triangle
"I guess you've heard about the Bermuda triangleThere's something going on
Nobody seems to know just what it is
And the airforce won't let on"
With theses lyrics Fleetwood Mac startet their song "The Bermuda Triangle" on their 1974 album "Heroes are Hard to Find". They wrote the song in the same year in which Charles Berlitz had started a media hype with his book "The Bermuda Triangle". The book describes many disappearances of ships and aircrafts and Berlitz let these incidents appear in a mysterious light, especially the loss of five US Navy Avenger topedo bombers, which is known as the "Flight 19" incident. The book was an immediate bestseller and people liked it because of the way he mingled facts with various daring theories, including temporal holes, the lost empire of Atlantis and of course Aliens. For many people it is still an area in which the laws of physics, as they are known and accepted by all serious scientists, are not valid or at least changed.
"It might be hole down in the ocean
Yeah or a fog that won't let go
It might be some crazy people talking
Or somebody that we ought to know
Down in Bermuda, the pale blue sea
Way down in the triangle, it's easy to believe"
continues Fleetwood Mac's song.
The ocean area between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Fort Lauderdale, Florida is called the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle or "The Devil's Triangle" is noted for a high occurrence of strange losses of ships and aircrafts. Since the publication of the book "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved" by Larry Kusche in 1975 it shoud be clear that there is no mystery about this place, but many believers keep on treating it as one of the biggest mysteries of our time. Kusche had used records other writers had neglected and he worked out that the number of airplanes and ships gone missing in this area is not significantly larger than in any other regions of the oceans. He pointed out, that missing ships will be reported but not in every case the return. He also found out that some of Berlitz's reports, in which he stated that ships disappeared in good weather conditions didn't match with the weather reports, i.e. they were lost in storms.
Loss of gas from gas hydrate might be a possible explanation for at least some of the "mysterious" disappearances. There seem to be large amounts of methane hydrates in the sea floor sediments, especially on the continental shelves and below the Bermuda Triangle. Methane eruptions can produce frothy and foaming water with such a decreased density that a ship will not be able to float anymore. This could happen very rapidly, so a ship could sink without warning. This theory has been verified in experiments with scale model ships.
Image by Fotolia, copyright by Sean Gladwell