BOOK: Richard Winer, "The Devil's Triangle" (cont.)

Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

More examples of healthy skepticism

Winer often mentions events that could easily become classic mysterious ‘disappearances’ if it hadn't been for the presence of some witness, due to whom we know what happened. The implication, I guess, is that many of the mysterious disappearances may have similarly mundane reasons, just that there weren't any witnesses around at the time. This is again a fine example of Winer's preference for sober rather than paranormal explanations. See e.g. pp. 54–55, describing how the crew of a ship, the Discoverer, saw in 1971 a cargo plane plunge into the sea nearby, and no debris or oil slick was found in the area (just one of the chunks of beef that the plane had been carrying): “Had the Discoverer not been present when the Connie [i.e. the Super Constellation plane] went down, there again would have been another chapter added to the legend of the ‘Triangle of Death’.” (P. 55.)

Similarly, when the Sno' Boy vanished in 1973, it turned out that it was badly overloaded with both cargo and passengers, it was caught in a storm, and plenty of debris was eventually found — hardly a mysterious Triangle disappearance (p. 66).

The 53-foot Ixtapa disappeared in December 1971; only a piece of its cabin was found a few days later. “One UFO buff went so far as to say, ‘Spacemen had to remove the cabin in order to get at the hiding crew.’ [. . .] But by far the greatest number of boating men [. . .] adhered to the opinion that the yacht had been run down by a ship that kept going because her crew was completely oblivious to the accident./ Suppose the boat that found the Ixtapa's cabin top had reached that location just a minute or two later when total night had decended upon the area? Or if her course had been just a few yards farther away in either direction leaving the wreckage engulfed in darkness?” The cabin top would probably not have been found, and “more fuel would have been added to the legend of the ‘sea of lost ships.’ ” (Pp. 90–91.)

Writing about the Marine Sulphur Queen, Winer concludes: “There was nothing mysterious or supernatural—simply an industrial explosion at sea.” (P. 136.) He cites, as an example. another similar accident, that of the V. A. Fogg: “Had it been the ‘Devil's Triangle’ and not the Gulf of Mexico where the V. A. Fogg was lost, she would certainly have been listed as another strange disappearance.” (P. 136. In fact it was listed as such even so, e.g. by J. W. Spencer, Limbo of the Lost, pp. 122–5.) But the V. A. Fogg sunk in shallow water, on a short course, and a pilot had reported seeing smoke in the area where the ship was supposed to have been lost. As a result, its wreck was soon found: “It was obvious that the V. A. Fogg had exploded and sunk within second. A number of bodies [. . .] were recovered.” (P. 138.) But the same event had occurred in Bermuda Triangle and if nobody happened to see the smoke, the wreck would be “resting in thousands of feet of water [. . .] beyond the reach of divers or most sonar scanning devices” and she would be listed as another mysterious Triangle disappearance (p. 138).

In the section about the Teignmouth Electron, which was found abandoned after its owner and captain committed suicide, Winer adds a very good remark: “What if Donald Crowhurst had taken his tape recorder and logbook with him when he decided to end it all? His disappearance would be labeled as another great unsolved mystery of the sea. If the facts concerning other ‘ghostships’ were discovered, would they too prove to be the results of earthbound causes?” (P. 179.)

Similarly he mentions the curious story of the Gulf King V, a fishing ship whose captain went berserk one day; the crew eventually escaped from the ship and were picked up by sister ships soon afterwards. But, Winer adds, if things turned out just a little bit different, we would have another perfect Bermuda Triangle mystery at our hands. If, for example, the crew had escaped at night, or when the other ships were too far to find them, they might have drowned; the deranged captain might have ended up somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and, driven mad by hunger and thirst, would perhaps jump into the sea himself — and the ship would be discovered some time later, in seaworthy condition and missing all its occupants for no obvious reason (pp. 196–7).

He also complains about the sensationalism with which the events in the Bermuda Triangle are often treated. For example, when he wrote a few articles about it for the Saga magazine, the editors changed his titles “The Devil's Triangle: Part I” and “Part II” into “Bermuda Triangle — UFO Twilight Zone” and “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle Flying Saucer ‘Space Warp’ Domain” (pp. 198–9). He also complains about the phrase ‘Bermuda Triangle’ itself: “If a geographical designation is to be applied to the name, it should refer ot the area where the most happenings have taken place—the ‘Florida-Bahama Triangle.’ ” (P. 199.) But it seems clear that ‘Devil's Triangle’ is his preferred term, and this, if you ask me, is just as silly and sensationalist as ‘Bermuda Triangle’ — even more so, in fact.

He also criticizes J. W. Spencer for his silly theories about UFOs kidnapping people, planes and ships in the Triangle, and for the errors in his account of the sinking of the V. A. Fogg (p. 198).

Incidentally, Winer does not categorically reject the possibility of UFOs, but he maintains a skeptical attitude towards them (p. 208). Regarding their supposed involvement in the Triangle events, he says that “certain magazines and writers have exploited that hypothesis” (p. 209) but responsible UFOlogists haven't, and they in fact say that the level of UFO activity in the Triangle is not unusually high (pp. 209–10).

Miscellaneous

Chapter 2 contains an impressively lurid description of what it must have been like when a hurricane sunk a group of Spanish ships in the Caribbean in the early 16th century. “Those who opened their eyes into the wind-driven rain had their eyeballs splattered out of the sockets. Clothes were ripped away, and bodies were masses of torn flesh as though they had been lashed and beaten by King Neptune's own master-at-arms. Mouths that opened to scream spewed forth blood instead of words. Cargoes shifted. Vessels capsized. Men were crushed. Others drowned. Those dying prayed to live. Those living prayed to die.” (Pp. 27–8.) It seems clear that if Winer's paranormal writing hadn't taken off, he could still have made a good living by writing horror stories :) But I wonder if a hurricane really would have had all these effects. Anyway, the point of this chapter, I guess, is to emphasize how easily ships may ‘disappear’ in that area for perfectly natural reasons.

A couple of interesting ‘firsts’ mentioned in the book: the first steam-powered ship of the U.S. Navy to disappear in the Triangle was the tug Nina, en route from Norfolk to Cuba, in 1910 (p. 66). The first known aviator to vanish in the Triangle was one Herbie Pond, a rumrunner, in 1931 (p. 33).

I was interested to read (p. 69) that the U.S. Navy still uses a few wooden ships (or at least did use them when this book was written, in the 1970s), namely minesweepers: “As long as magnetic mines are used in warfare at sea, the navies of the world will utilize these wooden vessels.”

There's a curious story on pp. 156–7. Supposedly, one night in February 1935, a number of hotel guests at Daytona Beach, Florida, saw an airplane crash into the sea very close to the shore. The coast guard was alerted, but no traces of any wreckage were found, and it turned out that no planes were reported to be missing in that area at that time. If the story isn't totally made up, I really wonder what causes this sort of mass delusion.

Winer also mentions the Ellen Austin, whose crew sighted an abandoned ship in 1881 and put a prize crew on it. The two ships were later separated by a storm and after a while the Ellen Austin found the derelict again, but sans the prize crew. A new prize crew boarded it, and despite many precautions, a couple of days later the two ships lost contact again and neither the derelict nor its prize crew were ever seen again (pp. 164–5). There's an interesting section about this case in Kusche's book (pp. 52–3); Kusche found that all mentions of this case eventually trace back to a 1944 book, The Stargazer Talks by one Rupert Gould, who didn't mention his source of information about this story. Furthermore, he didn't mention the second prize crew and its disappearance, so the later authors (like Winer) who mention this must either have had some other source of information or they simply made the thing up. So this part of Winer's book does seem somewhat less than perfectly trustworthy. There really ought to be some kind of law that would prohibit the publication of books about the Bermuda Triangle unless they cite their sources very pedantically :)

In his account of the Deering, Winer says that the message in a bottle, which suggested that the ship was a victim of pirates, had been proven to be authentic. Supposedly the wife of the Deering's captain had the message analyzed by handwriting experts, who found that the note was written by one Henry Bates, the ship's engineer (pp. 169–70). But Gian Quasar in his considerably more extensive story of the Deering, on his website, says that the message was actually a forgery, written by the man who claimed to have found it; he admitted this at some point and it turned out that he had hoped his ‘discovery’ of the message would help him get a job at a local lighthouse.

He mentions a curious thing he'd noticed one day while filming underwater: “maybe a hundred feet across, possibly seventy-five, but no less than fifty feet in diameter. It was perfectly round. Its color was a deep purple. It was moving slowly up toward us. At its outer perimeter there was a form of pulsation, but there was no movement of water. As we started for the surface, it stopped its ascent. Then slowly it began to descend into the blackening depths.” (P. 202.) I'm not quite sure whether to believe all this, but it sure sounds scary :) He suggests it may have been a gigantic jellyfish (p. 203).

There's a brief discussion of the ‘Devil's Sea’ near Japan on pp. 210–1, but it's unimpressive, just a rehash of the familiar claims about it; Kusche's account of the Devil's Sea (pp. 231–9 in his book) remains by far the best I've read so far.

Conclusion

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book and I think I like it better than those by Berlitz, Jeffrey, Spencer and Quasar. If I had to recommend you just one book about the Triangle, I wouldn't know what to say; but if I could recommend two, they would be this one and Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved.

ToRead:

• This book says on p. 223 that Winer “is writing his second book, entitled Cyclops, an in-depth study” of that ship's disappearance; but I can't seem to find any mention of it on ABE.

• He does seem to have written several further books on more or less paranormal subjects, however: The Devil's Triangle 2 (1975); From the Devil's Triangle to the Devil's Jaw (1977); Haunted Houses (1979); More Haunted Houses (1981); Houses of Horror (1983) Ghost Ships (2000).

• Vincent Gaddis: Invisible Horizons. Mentioned here e.g. on p. 35 in relation to the disappearance of five (out of seven) fighter planes near Kindley Field in late 1944, one year before the Flight 19.

• Joshua Slocum: Sailing Alone Around the World. Mentioned on p. 127.

BOOK: Richard Winer, "The Devil's Triangle"

Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

When I saw the super-lurid blurbs on the front and back cover of this book (a dinky trade paperback, of course), I expected it would be a typical Bermuda Triangle volume, with emphasis on sensationalist coverage of the disappearances and probably with lots of efforts to explain them as the workings of this or that paranormal phenomenon. And the publisher's blurb on p. i cites the “Danger like dagger now” from the Raifuku Maru case, which seems to have been apocryphal, to judge by the description in Larry Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. [Winer suggests that the ‘dagger’ may have been the crew's effort to describe a waterspout, which they might not have seen before; p. 78.]

Anyway, I was very pleasantly surprised. The book strikes an impressive balance. It describes the events in the Triangle in an interesting and fairly detailed way, but without falling into excessive sensationalism; and it never espouses any paranormal theories about the Triangle, and in fact the author always makes an effort to point out possible natural explanations, even in cases where such explanations admittedly seem unlikely. Unlike J. W. Spencer, who wrote soberly most of the time but then mentioned matter-of-factly that it must all have been due to UFOs that are kidnapping the planes and boats, Winer here really doesn't seem to be defending any paranormal theory about the Triangle. This is about as sober a book as one can write unless one decides to become a hard-core debunker (like Kusche) dead set on explaining away each and every case as something unremarkable. See e.g. p. 10 for a nice statement of Winer's moderate but open-minded skepticism. And on p. 53: “without doubt, the greatest single cause [of plane disappearances] is running out of fuel after becoming lost or disoriented. [. . .] And if a pilot is lost, how does he radio the position where he is ditching?”

Flight 19

The first chapter is about Flight 19 and contains some interesting things that were new for me (or maybe I'd forgotten about them if I'd heard them already somewhere else). He cites a letter from Lt. Cox (the Wikipedia page about Flight 19 refers to him as Fox — I'm not sure which is correct), a pilot who communicated with Flight 19 for a while soon after they first reported being lost; Cox says quite refreshingly that “there is no mystery at all”, just a “chain of unfortunate events and plain human frailty” (p. 10).

Winer also cites a very interesting letter from Melvin Baker, a radio operator at Port Everglades who was in contact with Flight 19 throughout that fateful afternoon (pp. 12–16). Baker describes his efforts to estimate the position of Flight 19, by changing the power of his signals and testing at which point the planes became unable to hear him. However, he was unable to convince Lt. Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, to follow his directions: “I think that I never convinced him that I knew what I was doing. I pleaded with his superiors at the Lauderdale NAS [Naval Air Station] to please issue him orders to fly by my signals. They would not come on the air. They did not ever come on the air. [. . .] He finally told me he was going to change course, which he did. [. . .] The leader became more faint by the second. [. . .] He continued on in the same direction and went to his fuel exhaustion.” (Pp. 15–16.)

Baker also says (p. 14) that he and Taylor switched to the emergency radio frequency, but the rest of Flight 19 probably didn't; this might explain (p. 18) why people listening to the other plains thought that one of the other pilots took over the command of the group. From Kusche's book I had the impression that Taylor never switched to the emergency frequency, so I'm somewhat confused about what exactly the facts are about this.

The Cyclops

Chapter 5 is about the Cyclops and is wonderfully detailed, more so than in any other Bermuda Triangle book that I've read so far. However, I still think that Gian Quasar's account of the Cyclops is a bit better. Winer writes (p. 115) that the Cyclops was last heard of one day after it left Barbados, when it exchanged radio messages with some other ship and reported that the weather was fair. However, Quasar writes that “[i]nvestigation by the Navy did turn up that Cyclops was seen two days after she left Barbados. This is not commonly known. A British patrol boat on 2 occasions sighted her far off course, both on the 5th and 6th of March, and guided her back.” But Winer also has a few details that I don't remember from Quasar's account, e.g. that the Cyclops was seen leaving Barbados in a southern direction initially (as reported by the son of the British consul there, whom Capt. Worley of the Cyclos had visited during his stay on Barbados); pp. 113, 117.

Winer also mentions a few amusing coincidences regarding the name Cyclops. “It was ascertained that the Cyclops never reached Germany” (as some people had speculated); “[h]owever, a more thorough examination of the archives did reveal the name Cyclops. Far up in the North Atlantic, a U-boat commanded by a Lieutenant Doenitz, who would one day become Hitler's grand admiral, sank a Britishs hip with all hands: her name was Cyclops.” (P. 117.) I really like it how he writes this so dramatically, as if it had anything at all to do with the Cyclops that disappeared in the western Atlantic :) And later, in 1941, when the Cyclops's sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, disappeared (probably sunk by German subs): “once again there was mention of the Cyclops. In January, 1941, off Cape Sable in the North Atlantic, a British ship was torpedoed and sunk, taking all ninety-four aboard down with her. The ship's name was Cyclops.” Well, I guess the message is clear. Don't name your ships Cyclops, folks, or if you do, at least make sure that you insure them well and don't travel on them personally, and that there isn't a major war going on!

Joshua Slocum

There's a short chapter about the disappearance of Joshua Slocum (ch. 6), the first man to single-handedly sail around the world. He mentions an excellent tall tale from a book by Slocum. At some point during his solo voyage round the world, Slocum became sick to the point of delirium, and what is worse, a storm started at the same time. “He passed out. Sometime later he awakened. [. . .] he saw, to his astonishment, a man at the helm holding the Spray on a steady course in spite of the turbulence of the sea. The man was dressed in clothing of centuries past. The stranger introduced himself as being a member of Columbus's crew, the pilot of the Pinta. He said that he had come to guide Slocum's ship that night.” (P. 127.) The next morning, “[t]he strange helmsman was nowhere to be seen. [. . .] The sails that he [= Slocum] had been too sick to furl were sill set and pulling. They should have been ripped to shreds. [. . .] the Spray had made a good ninety miles right on course during the night. Only a helmsman could make that possible.” :)))

Incidentally, it appears that Slocum could not swim (p. 128).

The Witchcraft

Winer also mentions the well-known case of the Witchcraft, which disappeared one night in December 1967. The two men on board had sailed about a mile away from the shore to watch the lights of Miami. At some point the owner radioed that his propellers had struck something under the water and he would need a tow back to the shore; but when the Coast Guard came to the location of his boat just 18 minutes later, the boat and its occupants was nowhere to be found. Winer reports one or two curious details that I don't remember seeing in other versions of the story. In particular: “After being fully cooperative with the press throughout the first five days of the search, the coast guard suddenly refused to release any information as to exactly what was radioed by Burrack during his first and only message. A coast guard spokesman said only that Burrack sounded like he was in an ‘unusual’ situation. A coast guard legal offucer said they were not at liberty to divulge the information.” (P. 143.) “Burrack's last words, or at least the last ones that the coast guard released, were, ‘It's pretty odd. I've never seen one lie this!’ ” (P. 147.)

Now admittedly it's also worth pointing out a few things from Larry Kusche's much more skeptical portrayal of the case (The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved, pp. 200–2): “in reality, the weather was rather rough”, not really calm as it's usually said to be in the Triangle legend; and “[t]he boat was not at a specified location, as the Legend goes, but was supposed to fire a flare to show the Coast Guard where it was”; should this fail for any reason, e.g. if the boat had been swamped by water, “[o]n a dark night with the sea ‘whipped into a carpet of white foam’, the chances of finding a white boat in an unknown location would be almost nil” (p. 201). And: “Many of the statements attributed to the Coast Guard and the Navy in accounts of the Bermuda Triangle mystery have proved to be untrue in the cases where accident reports are available. Unfortunately, no such report is available for this incident” (p. 202). Incidentally, Kusche doesn't mention the Coast Guard's supposed reluctance to divulge more information, but he does mention claims of some Triangle authors that the Coast Guard supposedly said that “the boat was ‘presumed missing, but not lost at sea’ ” (p. 202).

Incidentally, Kusche spells the owner's name “Burack” rather than “Burrack”. He cites several newspaper articles about the case, so I would guess that he got the spelling right and that Winer's version is perhaps less trustworthy.

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: Larry Kusche, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved" (cont.)

Lawrence David Kusche: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. London: New English Library, 1975. 252 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

Bill Verity, a solo sailor, is sometimes reported as having disappeared in the Triangle near Puerto Rico. However, it turns out that he was merely blown off course by a hurricane, and turned up a few weeks later in San Salvador. Kusche even spoke to him by phone (p. 212). Similarly, the cabin cruiser Jillie Bean ‘disappeared’ in 1970, was sought for three days, not found — and then it sailed into port, the three crewmembers “were in no trouble and had no idea they were being sought” (p. 214). In short, anything unusual that happens in the area of the Triangle is quickly blamed by some authors on the supposed paranormal phenomena inside it (p. 230).

There's an chapter on the sinking of the tanker V. A. Fogg in 1972. It turns out that the tale was much embellished in the telling, but in this case the events were recent enough that Kusche was able to find out the truth directly from the people who were involved in the discovery of the ship (p. 225). Another interesting example is the sinking of the twin ships Norse Variant and Anita in 1973. They would have been perfect Triangle material if it hadn't been for the inconvenient fact that one of the crewmen of the Norse Variant survived and explained what happened (“a 40- by 40-foot hatch cover had been ripped off by the storm” and the ship sank in five minutes); p. 226.

There's also an interesting chapter on the Marine Sulphur Queen. Although the disappearance has not been definitely explained, there certainly seems to be no shortage of possibilities of explosion and structural failure (pp. 177–83).

The 63-foot fishing boat Sno' Boy sunk in unexplained circumstances in 1963. However, the event becomes a little less mysterious when we learn that on board the ship there were 55 people (the ship was intended for seven), not to mention 19 tons of ice :))) (p. 185).

Airplane-related cases

Pro-Triangle accounts of airplane disappearances often emphasize the fact that no debris has been found. But in several of these cases it turns out that the search started relatively late, because it took a while before the plane was missed at all; besides searching cannot be done at night, which sometimes causes yet more delay. Sometimes pilots of small planes neglect to file flight plans (where they would have to state the expected time of arrival, and a search would then be started as soon as the plane became overdue). And in the case of the passenger plane Star Ariel, flying from Bermuda to Kingston, the pilot told the Bermuda air traffic controller very early in the flight that he would be communicating with the Kingston air traffic controller from then on; Bermuda said OK, but Kingston never heard from him (p. 148). The problem is that Kingston didn't expect to hear from him until much later in the flight anyway, so that it was hours before anybody noticed that Star Ariel wasn't radioing its hourly position reports as it was supposed to. Even when the search eventually started, nobody had any clear idea of where along its course to look for the plane. Other cases of planes where the search started late were a Martin Marlin in 1956 (p. 165) and a KB-60 in 1962 (p. 172); however, in neither of these two cases was it possible to determine what exactly happened to the planes, so that in a way it wouldn't be fair to say that these two cases are “solved”. Something similar can be said of several small planes that disappeared in January 1967 (p. 199).

The chapter on Flight 19 is wonderfully detailed. In Kusche's view the whole event is rather mundane; a number of little things went wrong, all of which combined to result in the accident as we know it (p. 118). “Taylor [the leader of the group] had transferred to Fort Lauderdale not long before the flight” and wasn't yet quite familiar with the area; he couldn't decide whether he was west or east of Florida; “as a result he changed direction a number of times” (p. 115); he also stubbornly refused to change his radio frequency to 3000 kHz, although this would considerably improve the chances of successful communication with the ground stations (pp. 108, 115); the weather was also deteriorating throughout the afternoon (pp. 105, 116). “The dilemma was not that the men couldn't tell in which direction they were going, but rather that they couldn't decide which direction was the proper one to take.” (P. 116.) At some point the ground stations were able to compute the approximate position of Flight 19, but weren't able to report it to the pilots; first there was a delay because of a broken teletype machine, then the planes were no longer responding to messages from the ground (apparently they couldn't hear them, even though the ground stations could still hear the conversations between the planes); p. 110.

Regarding the Martin Mariner that disappeared as it went to search for Flight 19, Kusche points out that “Mariners were nicknamed ‘flying gas tanks’ because of the fumes that were often present, and a crewman sneaking a cigarette, or a spark from any source, could have caused the explosion.” (Pp. 116–7.) In the transcripts of the conversations quoted by Kusche, there isn't any sign of the statements commonly attributed to the Flight 19 pilots by the pro-Triangle authors (along the lines of “We don't know which way is west. Everything is wrong . . . strange . . . we can't be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn't look as it should!”, p. 99).

Miscellaneous

There's an extremely interesting chapter on the “Devil's sea” — an area near Japan with supposedly similar characteristics as the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche found that all mentions of the story in the West trace back to a handful of New York Times articles from 1952–55. He then made extensive enquiries in Japan and little by little found a mundane enough explanation for the whole thing. One ship was sunk by underwater volcanic activity (p. 233); several other ships were small fishing vessels and, as was common in those poverty-stricken years soon after the war, they were in poor condition and tended to lack radio equipment, so that disappearances all around Japan were nothing unusual (p. 234). The term ‘Devil's sea’ is almost unknown in Japan and seems to be a local appellation for a certain area of the sea (location and size not very clear); pp. 235, 237. “The story is based on nothing more than the loss of a few fishing boats twenty years ago in a 750-mile stretch of ocean over a period of five years. The tale has been reported so many times that it has come to be accepted as fact.” (P. 239.)

Finally there's a chapter about Ivan Sanderson's “Vile Vortex” theory, i.e. the idea that there are twelve “anomalic regions” around the world, one being the Bermuda Triangle, another the Devil's Sea, the others located around the world so as to form the vertices of an icosahedron. Kusche's debunking of this ridiculous bullshit is truly a delight to read (p. 242). “The writings that tell of the Vile Vortices show that the researchers first ‘suspected’ where the areas were and that evidence of any kind of ‘incident’ had ever occurred in the area was proof that it was ‘anomalous’. [. . .] All the parts, assumed or ‘proven’, were then joined to form the corners of equilateral triangles, and the creators marveled at the ‘orderliness of Nature’. ” (P. 242.)

Conclusion

All in all, this was a very, very interesting book. It was great to see how many of the events commonly mentioned in the Triangle lore actually have fairly probable everyday explanations. It was also amusing to see some examples of how the peddlers of the paranormal often treat the reports of anything even remotely unusual within the Triangle, inflating and embellishing and obscuring the stories beyond all reasonable bounds. And, finally, it was also very interesting to see that some few events nevertheless remain mysterious and quite unexplained. This, of course, does not mean that there must be any paranormal phenomenon at work behind them; it does, however, mean that these are the cases that are the most deserving of our attention and curiosity. So for me perhaps the greatest value of a book such as this one is that it helps you separate the really unexplained events from the ones that are only presented as such by the unscrupulous (or naive) promotors of the Triangle.

ToRead:

• Rupert Gould: The Stargazer Talks (1944). Mentioned here on pp. 52–3 (“Gould was a skeptical and dilligent researcher who made authentic attempts to solve the mysteries that he encountered”).

• Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. Mentioned on p. 208. Crowhurst was participating in a sailing race but his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was eventually found abandoned. It turned out that he had been cheating during the race and, realizing that this would certainly be discovered, he ended up committing suicide.

• Gian Quasar's criticism of Kusche's book: link 1, link 2. Quasar later wrote his own pro-Triangle book, Into the Bermuda Triangle, where he peddles paranormal theories no less shamelessly than Berlitz, but at the same time he seems to have made honest and very thorough efforts at collecting archive material related to the various Triangle incidents, so I am inclined to think that there is some merit in his criticism of Kusche (although he is perhaps sometimes too hard on him).

BOOK: Larry Kusche, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved"

Lawrence David Kusche: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. London: New English Library, 1975. 252 pp.

Introduction

Among the better-known books about the Bermuda Triangle, this is (as far as I know) the only skeptical one. Kusche's main message is that most of the incidents that are often described by pro-Triangle authors as mysterious and unexplained (and presumably in need of a paranormal explanation) turn out to be not quite so mysterious if you look at the known facts closely enough. The pro-Triangle authors, according to Kusche, often overlook (or perhaps wilfully ignore) facts that would make the events less mysterious, and they often copy their stories from one another (possibly also embellishing them in the process) rather than doing their own research from their original sources.

This book is divided into a number of short chapters, each of which discusses one particular Triangle-related incident. Kusche first describes each event as it has been presented in the pro-Triangle literature; then he shows extensive excerpts from original reports of the event: sometimes newspaper articles, sometimes reports of official bodies such as the navy or the coast guard. (I was especially impressed by the huge amount of effort that he clearly must have spent in searching through old newspapers — sometimes he was rewarded with some interesting facts, but sometimes he sadly has to conclude that after searching through half a year's run of a certain newspaper he couldn't find any reports of this or that missing ship.) Anyway, based on such reports and newspaper articles, he is often able to conclude that the event has been substantially misrepresented by the pro-Triangle authors and that it is not quite so mysterious as they have made it appear to be.

I enjoyed this book a lot; it's a very pleasant antidote to the typical pro-Triangle authors, who tend to have much less patience for studying (and citing!) original sources. However, it still seems to me that the title of the book is a bit of an exaggeration. He doesn't really provide a solution for all the accidents described here. For some he is simply content to show that the event cannot have possibly occurred anywhere in or near the Bermuda Triangle. This shows that some pro-Triangle author was clearly very sloppy to have discussed it, but the accident itself may remain relatively poorly explained (e.g. the Freya, which was found abandoned on the Pacific coast of Mexico, pp. 56–7). Likewise, he mentions the case of a British transport plane, which disappeared in 1953 and is sometimes associated with the Triangle; the event actually happened 900 miles north of the Triangle, and although the exact cause is unknown, it is known that weather was bad and it may have been a perfectly ordinary accident (p. 155).

Unexplained events

For some events he wasn't able to find any good explanation whatsoever. For example, the chapter on the Mary Celeste concludes that “today the fate of the occupants of the Mary Celeste is still as much a mystery as the day the ship was found deserted at sea” (p. 44). It's true that at least he presented a good thorough overview of such facts as are available, and thus the chapter about the Mary Celeste was still quite interesting and well worth reading; but nevertheless this particular event remains an unsolved mystery.

Likewise he says on p. 59: “The fate of Joshua Slocum and the Spray is truly a mystery of the sea.” But he at least mentions some reports that neither Slocum nor his ship were in as good a shape as on some previous voyages; solo sailing is a risky sport, and he may have finally had an accident the likes of which he had been successfully avoiding all the time until then.

On pp. 76 he says: “The story of the Carroll A. Deering is unique in maritime history, and it can truly be said that the more that is learned about it, the more mysterious it becomes.”

“The disappearance of the Star Tiger thwarts all explanation as each of the suggested solutions seems too unlikely to have occurred. It is truly a modern mystery of the air. [. . .] In any case, whatever happened to the Star Tiger will forever remain a mystery.” (P. 132.)

Another case that remains a mystery is the disappearance of a Super Constellation plane belonging to the U.S. Navy, with 42 people on board, in 1954. Kusche includes two newspaper articles, but neither he nor the Navy seems to have formed any concrete idea as to what exactly happened to the plane (p. 158). The disappearance of a C-119 plane in 1965 is likewise unexplained (p. 193).

Kusche mentions the yacht Connemara IV., found abandoned in 1954, but doesn't provide any explanation what exactly happened to its crew. However, he says that a hurricane passed through the area.

The nuclear submarine Scorpion disappeared in 1968; it was later found, but the cause of its sinking was not ascertained. Kusche mentions two other disappeared submarines on p. 206. But admittedly these are hardly Triangle-type incidents; there's no reason to assume that anything else than accidents are involved here.

The disappearance of a the 338-foot freighter El Caribe in 1971 does not seem to have been adequately explained either.

There are also some cases, especially older ones, where he wasn't able to find first-hand reports about an accident, usually because the mentions of that accident in the pro-Triangle books are so brief and don't contain enough details. See e.g. pp. 54 (the Lotta, the Viego and the Miramon), 83 (the Stavenger), 216 (the Elizabeth — this one is fairly recent, in 1971). The disappearance of a Piper Apache airplane over Nassau in 1962 seems to have been invented out of whole cloth, as Kusche found when he wrote the director of civil aviation at Nassau Airport (p. 173).

Criticism of pro-Triangle authors

An interesting example of how the pro-Triangle authors copy from one another is the story of a drifter found by another ship, the Ellen Austin. Kusche found that all mentions of this event can be traced back to a 1944 book, The Stargazer Talks by Rupert Gould (p. 52). Kusche wasn't able to found any earlier information about the ship, and Gould doesn't report where he got his information either. So this event remains a mystery, but at least the reader can have a better perspective of the current state of our knowledge about it.

In several cases it turns out that the weather was worse than one would imagine after reading about those cases in the pro-Triangle books. See e.g. pp. 80 (the Cotopaxi), 81 (the Suduffco), 135 (the disappearance of Al Snider), 154 (the Sandra), 169 (the Revonoc), 201 (the Witchcraft).

Some interesting ship-related cases

The chapter on the Cyclops is very interesting. Kusche proposes a possible mundane explanation for the ship's fate: there exist reports of a heavy storm near Norfolk, the Cyclops' destination, just around the time when the ship would have been nearing that port. This might very well explain the ship's disappearance (pp. 66–7). Regarding its sister ships, the Proteus and Nereus, which disappeared in 1941, the most likely explanation seems to be that they were sunk by German submarines (p. 95).

There's an interesting if very short section on the Japanese ship, Raifuku Maru, which is often said to have sent a very weird request for help by radio, something along the lines of “It's like a dagger! Come quick!” (P. 77.) Kusche cites a more sober report: the ship was battered and sunk by a heavy storm; its mayday message turns out to have been “Now very danger. Come quick.”; the ship that heard the message reached the Raifuku Maru before the latter had sunk completely; however, it wasn't possible to rescue any of its crew. At any rate there doesn't seem to be much of a mystery left in this story. See also this page for more details. Incidentally, even if the “dagger” version of the text is real, it isn't necessary to resort to any paranormal explanations for it — it may be simply an error in translation. If serious Japanese companies after sober reflection come up with the stuff that you see on engrish.com, surely we can excuse a distressed and overwhelmed radio operator on board a sinking ship for producing a slightly garbled message.

There's an interesting chapter about La Dahama, which was supposedly found drifting and crewless by another ship (the Aztec), towed into port, whereupon the finders learned that several days earlier, yet another ship (the Rex) saw La Dahama sink and had even rescued its crew. Well, the newspaper reports found by Kusche explain this mystery in a much more mundane way: “The passengers on the Rex did not watch the yacht sink, they left it in a ‘sinking condition’ in a calm sea. The captain said the boat would not float more than two days, but the water was so still that it lasted at least five days, when it was discovered by the Aztec.” (Pp. 88–9.) But I wish that La Dahama's captain had left a note somewhere in his cabin, before transferring to the Rex; just a couple of lines saying “we're all moving to the Rex, bound for such and such a port” — surely he had enough time for that, and then there would never have been any mystery about it at all.

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: J. W. Spencer, "No Earthly Explanation"

John Wallace Spencer: No Earthly Explanation. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. (First ed.: Phillips Publishing Co., 1974.) x + 179 pp.

Introduction

A few weeks ago I read Spencer's Limbo of the Lost, a book about the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle (see my post about it). I thought it was a fairly good book, as far as pro-Triangle books go; Spencer wrote quite soberly, always emphasized the facts and didn't waste much time on discussing silly paranormal theories (unlike e.g. Berlitz in his Bermuda Triangle).

However, Spencer also left no doubt of the fact that he believed that the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle are connected to UFOs. His main idea was that aliens must be regarding humankind as a kind of subject of a scientific study, one that they want to observe but otherwise leave it unaffected. This is why they make no clear and official contact with governments, but on the other hand they do occassionally kidnap a few people and a ship or an airplane for their research purposes.

Of course all of this is perfectly bizarre, but in Limbo of the Lost Spencer mentions it just briefly and very matter-of-factly, as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Anyway, I saw that he later wrote another book, No Earthly Explanation, in which he discusses these UFO theories of his at greater length. After the good experience with Limbo of the Lost, I didn't hesitate to give this other book a try as well.

Unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing what sort of yarn he would spin to justify his claims about UFOs and the alien activity, but in this book I found nothing of the kind. It's little more than a mixture of dogma, unsubstantiated claims and irrelevant scientific facts.

One of the strengths of Limbo of the Lost was its emphasis on facts and details about the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle; I was hoping that here he would present notable UFO-related incidents in a similar way, but in fact only the first chapter (pp. 1–38) focuses on these things. And even here I found that the bare relation of facts was just barely enough to keep me interested.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage...

Things take a turn for the worse in the next chapter, where Spencer turns out to be a staunch creationist. He bluntly rejects the theory of evolution in just a few sentences (pp. 40–1), using the sort of half-baked ‘arguments’ that were undoubtedly already laughed at during Darwin's lifetime, let alone now. He describes his position as ‘divine evolution’: “through special creation each species or organism was originally created independently by God. Through the process of evolution, at a specific, proper moment in time, every basic life-form was specially created.” (P. 40.)

“The entire theory [of evolution] is composed mainly of gaps loosely woven by broken sequences. Most scientists are aware [i.e. Spencer is implying that most scientists disagree with the theory of evolution!] that new species of life and nearly all new categories suddenly appear without any lead-up by known gradual evolution.” (P. 40.) “Changes to certain life forms do occur but they never produce new structures such as feathers or horns. Mutations like color, length, and shape have been noted but extra legs, wings, or other structural changes have never been observed. To the best of my knowledge, not one scientist has come forward with fish eggs about to hatch into amphibians; a reptile growing even one feather; an ape or monkey that gave birth to a primitive-type man.” (Pp. 40–1.)

Really, this is so silly, so unsophisticated; I don't really care much for the creationism-vs-evolution debates, but I don't doubt that these things have progressed considerably since e.g. Darwin's time. A kind of evolution works in the sphere of ideas too, after all; under the pressure of the defenders of evolutionary theory, the creationists have been obliged to resort to ever more intricate and subtle (though undoubtedly still just as wrong as ever) arguments. But anyway, what I'm trying to stress is that in Spencer's book there is none of that sophistication; his creationism is just creationism 101, and I do not see how it can hold any interest whatsoever for a present-day reader. But this is not the main reason why this part of the book disappointed me; if I wanted to read good evolution-vs-creationism debates, I would pick up some other book anyway, or maybe I should have gone and read the talk.origins newsgroup; the big disappointment for me here was the fact that Spencer was a creationist at all. In Limbo of the Lost, as well as in many parts of No Earthly Explanation, he gives the impression of being a reasonable, science-minded person, but here in this chapter he writes like a dogmatic with a downright medievally closed mind.

Hilarity ensues

Unlike some creationists, however, Spencer is not of the ‘young Earth’ type. He agrees that the Earth is approx. five billion years old, and includes a perfectly decent section about “dating techniques” (in geology, not in romance :); pp. 46–47) and an overview of the geological history of the Earth (pp. 48–54, interspersed with passages from the Genesis, selected and arranged so that they seem to agree with the findings of geological science) and the evolution of hominids (pp. 55–60). These last two things contain a few real gems, such as: “Some people believe an absurd story about birds evolving from reptiles, that the earliest type of primitive birds were really flying dinosaurs which throughout the centuries developed feathers./ The major flaw in that theory is that following the appearance of the first birds, the next forty-five million years in the bird's evolutionary process are lost.” (P. 52.)

And: “The highest order of life to develop so far in the animal kingdom is a different tpye of mamal, ‘primates’ that live in trees. Prior to this creature all mammals gave birth to their young through an egg-laying process. Primates are born alive through a structure called the ‘placenta’ and are cared for by the mother until the offspring are strong and wise enough to take care of themselves.” (Pp. 53–4.) In the immortal words of a famous webcomic artist: dear sweet mother of god, noooooo! *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

He cites two anthropologists who say that they have no idea where the Cro-Magnon man came from, and merrily concludes that “with the foregoing factual information provided it is quite obvious that man, alone and unaided, could not have undergone such a transformation, that is, to jump the evolutionary span from late Homo erectus and Neanderthal man to Homo sapiens sapiens. Therefore, the only logical explanation is that beings from some other advanced civilization outside of this world, who had much earlier evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens, came to this planet with the sole intent to assist Earth man in compressing the evolutionary scale by millions of years, probably through interbreeding.” (P. 59.)

Oh, yeah. The super-advanced aliens popped into their saucers and travelled billions of miles just to help us lonely benighted earthlings get it on in some hot interplanetary man-on-alien action. Yup. Quite obvious. It doesn't get much more logical as that. “Honey, this is not what it looks like — this lady in my bed is an alien who's come all the way from Planet X495Z27, and we were just compressing the evolutionary scale — why are you getting so worked up over a little thing like that?”

(P.S. Diagonal copulation comes to mind... :])

Yet another ancient astronaut theory

In chapter 3 he suggests that the aliens also influenced the next big step in the progress of humankind, namely the rise of the first civilizations (p. 62). He describes the early history of Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilizations, and falls into the familiar trap of claiming that the Egyptian civilization mysteriously sprung into life fully-formed and advanced (p. 64). How little has changed since the days of Donnelly! Except that he blamed it on Atlantis, and Spencer blames it on the aliens.

Another fine example of the rigorous style of argumentation that is such a strong point of this book: “How could the ancient Chinese discover and develop a medical procedure as complex as Acupuncture without the benefit of a higher education and the research facilities of a medical university. The answer is — they could not; but we know they did... but how?” (P. 70.)

And, on the Indus valley civilization: “They communicated by writing as indicated by a small amount of written material that was found. The strange part is that twentieth century scholars are still unable to decipher their writings.” (P. 70.) Holy fucking shit! How much more obtuse can he pretend to be? He admitted in the previous sentence that the amount of material is small; besides, we know next to nothing about the language, and the closest probably related language that we do know is a distant cousin 2500 years later than the Indus valley culture. It would be strange if the Indus valley writing had been deciphered; that it hasn't been is normal. See the interesting book Lost Languages for more about the decipherment of ancient writing systems.

And the grand finale on p. 71: “Twentieth-century scholars continually uncover evidence that certain people of pre-historic times were taught a high degree of scientific information. This is the only way it could have happened because the people of the day were not capable of the kind of accurate examining and separating of ideas that educated men and women of today possess./ The instructors may have been an inter-stellar team of scientists whose assignment was to provide the necessary information so that civilization on Earth would get underway. The evidence that such information suddenly existed is very impressive and the aliens had to have exercised prehistoric man's intellectual powers beyond his natural abilities.”

It is hard to resist picturing an alien babe from planet X495Z27, curling up with Spencer's book to get a sense of how far humankind has progressed intellectually since the days when they helped us skip a few steps on the evolutionary ladder. On seeing the quality of his arguments, she would probably slap her forehead and think “I slept with Zog the caveman 10000 years ago for *this*?”

Chapter 3 ends with a table of the world's most populous countries, some projections of future population (assuming 2% growth per year: 6,4 billion in 2000, 12 billion in 2073 — IIRC it was a very popular topic in the 1970s), and some Spengleresque remarks about the rise and fall of civilizations.

To bolster his claims that aliens have been involved with humankind since ancient times, Spencer describes some of the usual ancient sites for which it is often claimed that they cannot have been built by ‘primitive’ people: Stonehenge, the Easter Island, Tiahuanaco (p. 78: “High on a plateau, 30,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains of Bolivia” — ROFLMAO!!!!), Silbury Hill.

And on p. 75: “The evidence is very strong that Earth has been visited over many centuries by at least one, technically superior civilization. Engraved marks on bones, designs found in caves, paintings and prehistoric space junk tell us part of the story.” I cannot help being impressed by this casual reference to prehistoric space junk, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world :)

He claims that in a few instances, bones of anatomically modern people have been found in layers more than two million years old. “A logical theory expressed by many scientists is that the remains could be those of extraterrestrial scientific observers, some in family groups, who were stationed on Earth millions of years ago.” (P. 83.) You really can't make this shit up. However, I personally prefer the theory that they were really all just a bunch of hobbits who reached southeast Africa on the run from the witch-king of Angmar...

The Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 5 connects his UFO theories to the Bermuda Triangle, saying that the alien scientists are “sampling” people and their equipment (ships, airplanes) on an occassional basis. Well, at least he took the trouble to explicitly reject the other commonly suggested Bermuda Triangle ‘explanations’ (Cayce-style radiation from the sunken Atlantis; magnetic aberrations; space-time warps; giant waves; giant squid; etc.).

On pp. 98–9 there's an interesting description of a possible UFO sighting by Thor Heyerdahl's Ra II expedition (a bright light on the horizon, acting unusually). I read Heyerdahl's book The Ra Expeditions quite some time ago, and I don't remember whether this sighting is mentioned there or not.

Space Exploration

Much of the second half of the book (chapters 6 through 8) contains information about the universe (especially the Solar system) and about space exploration. In stark contrast to the creationist and UFO bullshit I've mentioned above, these things are quite sober and reality-based. (There are still a few weird passages here; he's quite sure that faster-than-light travel will eventually become possible, p. 114; and he promises to prove that “life on Earth is part of a tremendous universal plan and not just simply the result of a rare disease that attacked only Earth”, p. 127; as far as I can tell, he doesn't prove anything of the sort. On p. 144 he talks of a quasar “some 10-trillion light years away”, but surely if the universe is 13 billion years old, nothing can be more than 26 billion light-years away from us...)

I'm not exactly a space-exploration buff, but these chapters were nevertheless not uninteresting to read. Spencer talks about the various space missions that have been done until then (the Pioneer 10, for example, had just recently passed by Jupiter), and even discusses some of the plans for the near future; for example, the Space Shuttle was just on the drawing boards at the time when he was writing his book (p. 164). It's always interesting to see how people in the past saw the future, especially those parts of the future that have already happened by now. “Man is expected to land on the surface of Mars by 1980. However, a trip of this kind is based on the development of a reusable Space Shuttle [. . .] Between 1980 and 1990 NASA is planning over seven hundred test flights with the Orbiter.” (P. 165. Alas! as we know, the Shuttle program didn't go quite so well as it was originally planned...) Anyway, much of this part of the book is a perfectly decent example of popular-science writing about space exploration, and Spencer doesn't even plug his UFO-related theories all the time.

His sections about the Solar system are also in the same vein; the only exception perhaps is that he devotes an unusual amount of attention to discussions about whether this or that planet or satellite could support life or not. In some instances he seems unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities of life, but I'm not sure if this is because of his pro-UFO bias or because of the fact that much less was known about those planets in 1974 (when he was writing that book) than known now. See esp. p. 131 on Mars.

Still, although these chapters about the Solar system and space exploration are interesting, it isn't particularly clear whether they say anything in support of his idea that technologically advanced aliens are visiting Earth and kidnapping people and their machinery. These latter things he simply asserts (as we saw earlier) and pretends as if there was no need to prove them or even provide some additional arguments in their favour. This was really a disappointment; it's as if he was satisfied with just preaching to the already-converted, and as if he was hoping that, as long as he simply brazens it out, people won't be bothered by the lack of arguments supporting his views.

There's a crazy paragraph on p. 150: “Most all creatures on Earth, with the exception of certain insects, aquatic, amphibian, and microscopic life, are basically the same with respect to anatomy.” [Excellent, he just discarded like 90% of all species in one fell swoop, pretending that it's nothing :))] “To prove my point, allow me to select a cross section from the animal world. On one end of the spectrum take the elephant and giraffe and on the other, man and a Mexican Hairless dog.” [Great, now he implicitly discarded birds and reptiles, and even within the mammalian order he didn't exactly kill himself trying to get a maximally diverse sample...] “With the obvious exceptions all four creatures are basically the same; one head, two eyes, [etc., etc.]” [Hardly surprising after he limited himself to mammals.] “Despite the fact that the various species of earth life evolved independent of each other, the similarity apparently holds true and yet there is no logical scientific earthly explanation.” [Ah, no *earthly* explanation. Uncle Darwin must have been an alien! And Spencer gets bonus points for blithely ignoring the fact that the species he listed very much did *not* evolve independent of each other...] “There is no evidence or logical reason to believe that the inhabitants of any other planet would not resemble earth life. The only difference would be their position in the scientific and technological evolutionary scale.”

Now, don't get me wrong — I think that exobiology is a perfectly worthwhile pursuit, although it belongs perhaps more to speculation than to science; but anyway, to go about it in such a ham-fisted way is simply ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if alien life forms did indeed resemble those on the Earth in some ways. The eye, for example, is something that has evolved on Earth several times independently, so it's clearly a very useful thing that could very well evolve elsewhere as well. I'm guessing that a nerve system would be another good candidate.

Conclusion

The book doesn't have any very clear conclusion. The UFO sightings continue, space exploration will also continue, and Spencer clearly hopes that, after all his hand-waving throughout the book, he has managed to get the reader to somehow believe that these two things have got something to do with one another and that the book has managed to prove some sort of point. (But it hasn't.)

What to say at the end? I'm fairly new to the UFO genre, so I can't really judge how this book compares to others in the same genre, but I very much hope that the others are better rather than worse :) Regardless of whether you are a UFO believer or, like me, just read these things for entertainment (and as an alternative kind of science fiction), I can't really recommend you to read this book, except if you don't mind the risk of being disappointed, just like I was.

ToRead:

• We see that Spencer's theory in this book is a close relative of the ancient astronaut theory. I intend to eventually read a few books by the grand master of the AAT, von Däniken — I hope that they aren't quite as bad as this one. I know, I know — you can't prove a mistaken theory; but at least you could try to put up a decent fight...
• Spencer mentions Ralph and Judy Blum's book Beyond Earth — Man's Contact with UFOs, which also sounds potentially interesting (p. 107). Apparently it was published by the same company that also published Spencer's books, and of which he was the owner.

BOOK: J. W. Spencer, "Limbo of the Lost - Today"

John Wallace Spencer: Limbo of the Lost — Today. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. (1st ed. was Westfield, MA: Phillips Publishing Company, 1973.) xvi + 188 pp.

This is an updated and expanded edition of a book that Spencer had originally published in 1969, when it was titled simply Limbo of the Lost. The biographical note on p. 188 says that Spencer is “the owner and manager of the Phillips Publishing Company”, so I guess you could say that in a way it was self-published.

Anyway, 1969 is fairly early compared to most of the other well-known Bermuda Triangle books, which were published only in the 1970s. The phrase “Limbo of the Lost” is simply Spencer's term for the Bermuda Triangle. As he explains here on pp. 174–5, he objects to the “Bermuda Triangle” because the area he has in mind is not particularly triangular, and he suggests that the term has been adopted for marketing purposes. This makes some sense, but his own term, “Limbo of the Lost”, doesn't sound much better, and his justification for using it (p. 174) is rather strained. And he has an annoying habit of repeating it ad nauseam — at the end of almost every section, he says something along the lines of “and so this is another disappearance in the Limbo of the Lost”.

The main strength of Spencer's book, compared to the other Triangle books I've read so far, is in the large number of incidents it describes, and in the amount of detail provided about them. Berlitz, for example, spends just a couple of chapters describing the better-known disappearances of ships and airplanes, and then moves on to discussing possible explanations, which are of course just silly paranormal theories that I don't particularly care to read about. But here, Spencer dedicates almost the entire book to describing unexplained accidents and disappearances, and there are a lot more of them here than in the other Triangle books I've read; ships, airplanes, tugboats, drifters, submarines, the stories go on and on.

Unlike Adi-Kent Jeffrey, who likes to spin long yarns about each incident and include tons of made-up dialogue, Spencer focuses on telling his stories briefly and concisely, but includes plenty of factual details (if available). (This style is a result of his deliberate decision; see pp. 175–6.) Also unlike Jeffrey, who spends about half her book writing about pre-1850 disappearances where it's less obvious whether something really mysterious is going on, Spencer's book is more or less entirely about more recent events — another plus for Spencer, as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes the masses of details he provides start seeming a bit unnecessary to me; e.g. he has a tendency to include complete lists of crew and passengers on lost ships or airplanes, including their ranks and home towns and states. But I guess that for those who lost a friend or relative in these events, such details are interesting; the rest of us can easily skip them, and they aren't really annoying.

Most of the time, the writing is remarkably sober — much more so than I would have dared to expect in a Bermuda Triangle book. I particularly liked the fact that he usually describes the search efforts in a lot of detail; the various hypotheses that e.g. the Coast Guard considered to try explaining the accident; the progress of the search, and its final abandonment; and in quite a few cases he mentions that some wreckage was found, i.e. the ship or plane didn't disappear entirely without a trace. But he does say, in such cases, that one would expect more wreckage to be found than that.

[Here's a funny example from p. 153. A cargo plane carrying frozen beef crashed into the sea for no very obvious reason in 1971, within sight of eyewitnesses on a nearby ship. “The crew upped anchor and within a matter of just a few minutes were at the crash site. The chilling part of the story is that nothing was there, no bodies, no debris, no oil slick; just one floating side of beef.” :)]

However, on those few occasions when the discussion does come to the subject of explanations for the Bermuda Triangle accidents and disappearances, Spencer leaves us in no doubt as to his views. He is quite sure that this is all due to the activity of UFOs; he talks of this as matter-of-factly as about everything else — as if no doubt or controversy whatsoever existed about this subject! See e.g. pp. 155–6, where he says that the frequency of Triangle events and that of the UFO sightings are correlated. And on pp. 177–8 he says that aliens “clearly do not want to socialize or fraternize with earth begins” so they built “their bases and laboratory facilities deep under the ocean” (p. 177); “whenever they need someone or something for experimental purposes, all they have to do is leave their facilities, take what they want, and return to their hidden underwater laboratories” (p. 178).

The first chapters, which are about airplane disappearances, are a bit heavy on jargon; probably because of his background in the U.S. air force and NORAD (p. 188).

He mentions on p. 64 that “a large store of Phoenician coins” was discovered on the Azores.

The section on the Cyclops (pp. 80–7) is fairly detailed, although still not as extensive as the story on Gian Quasar's web site. I was interested to learn on p. 86 of the disappearances of two sister ships, Proteus and Nereus, both colliers and similar to the Cyclops; they disappeared within a few weeks of each other in November 1941, and the cases bear several similarities with that of the Cyclops (including the lack of an explanation).

All in all, this is quite a good Bermuda Triangle book. If you want a book that emphasizes facts and details about the disappearances and accidents, rather than a book that emphasizes bizarre paranormal ‘explanations’ and theories, than this is the book for you.

ToRead:

• Yet more Bermuda Triangle books, of course :) Once again, see the list in the Wikipedia article.

• Spencer also wrote a book titled No Earthly Explanation, where he discusses his theory that the Triangle events are caused by UFOs. He says here on p. 178 that the book includes the story “of how U.S. Army helicopter pilot, Captain Lawrence J. Coyne, and his crew of three were hijacked by a UFO on October 18, 1973” :)

  [Incidentally, I like the fact that he says “hijacked” rather than “abducted” — alien abduction is a big cliche now, with a whole genre of books in its own right, and his use of a different term (“hijacked”) is a nice reminder of the times when these things were recent and original and even the terminology was not yet as established as it is now.]

• There's an ad at the end of this book, listing several other delightfully kooky books published by Bantam at that time. Apart from several volumes of Däniken, the following titles sound interesting:

  • Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle
  • Ralph Blum: Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs
  • Robert Dione: God Drives a Flying Saucer
  • Peter Kolosimo: Not of This World
  • Andrew Tomas: We Are not the First

  How could one resist all this vintage 70s weirdness? :))

BOOK: Adi-Kent Jeffrey, "The Bermuda Triangle"

Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey: The Bermuda Triangle. London: Star Books / W. H. Allen & Co., 1975. (1st ed. was New Hope, PA: New Hope Publishing, 1973.) 352398280. 143 pp.

The Bermuda Triangle, as is well known, is an area in the western Atlantic that is supposedly the site of an unusually large number of unexplained ship and airplane accidents, or, to put it more accurately, disappearances. Some dispute this claim, saying either that the number of such accidents is not unusual (given the large amount of traffic in the area), or that the accidents that are often cited by Triangle supporters are in fact not really that difficult to explain. The Triangle supporters, on the other hand, of course claim that something unusual indeed is going on and cannot be explained otherwise than by this or that kooky paranormal phenomenon.

I personally have no opinion about whether the number of disappearances in the Triangle is unusually high or not (after all I don't have any data on this subject), and I can't accept explanations that resort to paranormal phenomena. I am, however, under the impression that at least some genuinely unusual and hard-to-explain accidents did take place, and I'm simply curious about them, although I don't doubt that if an explanation would eventually be found, it would always turn out to be fairly mundane rather than paranormal.

Anyway, the golden age of the Bermuda Triangle was, unsurprisingly, the 1970s — a decade generally noted for its fascination with the paranormal. That's when the best-known book on the subject was published, The Bermuda Triangle (1975) by Charles Berlitz. I read it quite some time ago, several times in fact, and enjoyed it tremendously. Of course you cannot take Berlitz' explanations in the least bit seriously — the Atlantis, Edgar Cayce, UFOs, the Philadelphia Experiment, time travel, nothing is too flaky for him to consider as a possible explanation for the Triangle incidents. But regardless of that, his book was a great read, and his descriptions of the airplane and ship disappearances were quite chilling and often made me afraid to go to sleep afterwards, small child that I was at the time. Anyway, after that I've read several other books in this genre: Without a Trace, Berlitz' 1977 sequel to The Bermuda Triangle; then Gian Quasar's Into the Bermuda Triangle (2003 — one of the few recent books on the subject); and now Adi-Kent Jeffrey's The Bermuda Triangle. I think this genre is best thought of as a shifty cousin of science fiction, except that it's marketed as fact :)

The main difference between Jeffrey's book and those by Berlitz and Quasar is that she spends much more time on describing the incidents and less on dreaming up ridiculous paranormal explanations. This, in principle, is a very good thing — paranormal theories are easy to come by; what makes a Triangle book really interesting for me is the descriptions of the unexplained disappearances of ships and airplanes.

However, many of the disappearances described in this book are of ships from the age of sail. Inevitably, if a ship two hundred years ago went off to the sea and was never heard of again, it's hard to convince oneself that this must be due to some unusual or unknown phenomenon. Surely a simple storm or something of that sort is quite sufficient in most cases. In an age without radio and other modern technologies, months might pass before anyone would notice that the ship is missing, and nobody would have any idea where to look for its flotsam. Jeffrey tries to connect the incidents she describes to the Triangle by saying that if the ships in question had simply perished in a storm, somebody would certainly have to have found some wreckage at some point, but I'm not quite so sure of that.

Some of these early disappearances, which she describes in considerable detail, include: the Venture (1609), a boat carrying some shipwreck survivors originally travelling to Virginia (ch. 1); three Spanish galleons, disappearing in 1750 after being separated from the rest of their convoy by a storm (ch. 2); the 1813 disappearance of the Patriot, one of its passengers being Theodosia Burr, the daughter of the former U.S. vice-president, Aaron Burr (ch. 3; in the subsequent decades, many a former pirate claimed on his deathbed that it was he that had put Theodosia to death after the capture of the Patriot); the 1814 disappearance of a U.S. Navy ship, the Wasp, led by captain Blakeley, renowned for his courage (ch. 4).

Another disappointing story where you really have to stretch things very far to make it seem mysterious is from 1973: “the huge 13,000 ton German freighter, Anita, laden with a cargo of coal, steamed out of Newport News, Virginia, headed for Germany. She never made it. The Anita, like so many before her, was swept into oblivion with her crew of 32 men.” (P. 62.) Where the heck do we have any evidence that this even happened near the Triangle (rather than e.g. halfway across the Atlantic)? Or that the explanation wasn't something more mundane? At least she should write more details if she thinks there is reason to believe that the more obvious explanations wouldn't work here.

She briefly mentions the Cyclops (p. 61), but without much detail. For a longer version of this delightful yarn, see this account on Gian Quasar's web page.

There's a nice story of the Porta Noca, a ship that sailed from the Isle of Pines in 1926 and disappeared; told by one Rad Miller who, had he not changed his mind in the last moment, would himself have been a passenger on it (pp. 63–5). There's also the story of the famous Joshua Slocum and his disappearance in 1909 (pp. 66–70). The Revonoc (1958; p. 70) and the Witchcraft (1967; p. 76) are two classic Triangle disappearances. There's also the Enchantress (1964, pp. 73–5), which I don't remember from Berlitz.

There's a nice chapter on the ‘ghost ships’ (ch. 6), the most well-known ones probably being the Mary Celeste and the Carroll A. Deering. But a far more bizarre story involves La Dahama, found in 1935 by another ship; she was in poor condition and unmanned. The bizarre thing is that another ship subsequently reported that she had encountered the Dahama during a storm, rescued its crewmembers and then saw the Dahama founder in front of their very eyes!

The chapter 7 on airplane incidents mentions all the well-known ones: the Flight 19, the Martin Mariner and the Star Tiger and Star Ariel. However, it also mentions an interesting disappearance that I don't remember reading about yet: in the summer of 1945, two out of a squadron of twelve bombers failed to return from a training flight, for reasons unknown (pp. 91–3).

There's also chapter 8 about the Devil's Sea, an area near Japan supposedly noted for disappearances similar to those in the Bermuda Triangle. It also mentions Ivan Sanderson's well-known theory that there are ten or twelve such areas around the world (pp. 116–17, including “one unique region of ‘land-deadliness’ — Afghanistan”), but curiously it doesn't mention Sanderson's own impressively silly term for these areas — Vile Vortices :))

Ch. 9 is particularly interesting — it's about submarines, which tend to be somewhat neglected in the Triangle lore. A large nuclear sub, the Scorpion, disappeared in 1968. However, unlike in many such ‘disappearances’, the sub was later found — the U.S. Navy took pictures of it on the bottom of the ocean, but they were unable to determine what caused it to sink (p. 126).

Ch. 10 briefly describes various more or less wacky explanations that have been suggested for the Triangle disappearances: “atmospheric ‘sleeves’ ” and other curious quirks in the fabric of space-time; magnetic aberrations; time travel; UFOs. There's an excellent story on pp. 138–40 of an airplane who had, in 1961, a brush with an antique-looking WW1-style biplane. Soon afterwards, just such a biplane was found in a nearby barn, scratched just where it should have been given the above-mentioned near-collision; and, as an added bonus, it contained an old logbook with an entry, dated sometime in the 1910s, in which the horrified pilot described his near-collision with an unusually futuristic and metallic airplane. Any yet those spoilsports at the Civil Aeronautics Board had the guts to say that it was all a hoax!

The author has to be commended, however: she cites, in this chapter, a number of articles with very scientific-sounding titles. She even includes the names of the authors (but not the names of the journals). Anyway, of course if one took the trouble to follow these articles up, it might turn out that they are either wacky or that they are sober but don't say anything that supports the wacky theories mentioned in this book; but at least she cites something — which is much more than you can say for most books on this subject.

So, what to say at the end? On the plus side, the proportion of the book dedicated to describing incidents rather than offering silly ‘explanations’ and theories is much higher than in the case of Berlitz (and Quasar). Jeffrey describes many incidents not mentioned in those other two authors. Another plus: she manages to affect, much of the time, a tone more sober and reasonable than I would have dared to expect in the average Bermuda Triangle book. I don't mean to say that the succeeds in resisting the lure of paranormal explanations — far from that, but at least much of the time she keeps them decently in the background.

On the downside, many of her incidents are ships from the age of sail and as such not very convincing. Additionally, the book is very short (143 pages, easily read in a single sitting) and contains lots of typos. And, ridiculously, the back cover says “16-page section of exclusive photographs” — and then most of them are from Culver Pictures and UPI... :)

One more thing, which can be either a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it: she often describes the incidents in a way that would be more appropriate in a work of fiction, i.e. she includes the details of what the people involved did or said even in cases where it's quite clear that she can have no firm proof that this is really how it happened — i.e. she's just making it up based on what seems the most likely to have happened. On the one hand, this is a tad dishonest; on the other hand, it makes for a better read, the whole thing's just hokum anyway, and besides, if it was OK for Thucydides, why not for Jeffrey?

Anyway, I don't regret reading this book, and if you are also a Triangle enthusiast like me, you'll probably enjoy it too. And I'm looking forward to reading still more books on the Triangle.

ToRead:

• Other classic books about the Bermuda Triangle — see the Wikipedia page for a list.

• Larry Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved (1975), a debunking of many well-known Triangle incidents. However, see also this page by Gian Quasar, which, if true, suggests that there are many serious errors in Kusche's book.

• amazon.com mentions several other books by Adi-Kent Jeffrey, also on paranormal subjects: Witches and Wizards; They dared the Devil's Triangle; and Ghosts in the Valley: True Hauntings In the Delaware Valley (this last one even has a sequel, both published in 2007, so apparently she is still alive and kicking).

• See also this interesting web site with a compilation of data about the various disappearances often associated with the Bermuda Triangle. Among other things, it lists exactly which books mention which disappearance.