Invisible Residents by Ivan T. Sanderson

Author:Ivan T. Sanderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-11-10T23:00:00+00:00

8. AN EIGHTH MYSTERY The 'Bermuda Triangle''

We come now to a hairier one. I would have preferred to title it - with due apologies to the memory of The Bard -'The Much Vexed Bermoothes,' but that would have put us right back in a bag which I wish to avoid at almost all costs. This bit first came to the attention of the general public only about six years ago, when that very splendid writer on matters fortean, Vincent Gaddis, coined the catchy moniker 'The Bermuda Triangle' as the title for an article.177 For some reason this phrase caught on like other such misnomers as 'flying saucers', 'abominable snowmen', 'the great sea serpent', and so on.

Actually, affairs of this nature had been reported upon in that general area for centuries, as Gaddis pointed out. In 1947, however, matters became particularly acute thereabouts with the disappearance, first, of five Navy planes, and then of a large search plane which went off to look for the former. Still, the business was not put together until this article by Gaddis and his use, if not the original coining, of this catchy title. And we have to be extremely careful of catch phrases like 'Sighted sub; sank same,' which was alleged to have come from the American W.W. II effort, but which was coined by a Greek newsman in a bar and grill in Cairo! History is cluttered with these little epigrams, but there is not an iota of proof that any of them were ever uttered by those to whom they are attributed. Even items like 'Et tu. Brute' and 'Semper aliquid de novis ex Africa' can be most misleading, though probably both are perfectly valid platitudes. In the case of the 'Bermuda Triangle' we have to face the fact that it is neither a triangle nor in any particular way connected with the islands of Bermuda, much 'vexed' as they may be.

As we shall see, this turns out to be a worldwide problem and, although apparently concentrated in a comparatively few rather limited areas in widely separated parts of the seas or oceans, it also slops over on to adjacent land areas in many places. There is also now a growing suspicion that it may be just as atmospheric as it is alleged to be aquatic, and that at least part of the phenomenon can occur over land in the middle of continents (as in planes vanishing over Germany and Tunisia).178 It could, of course, also have much to do with related matters such as the disappearances of grounded solid objects like barns 179 and people (see Appendix A, p. 219). However, we will endeavor to confine ourselves to matters maritime in this department.

We got engulfed in this matter when the nuclear-powered submarine, the Scorpion, failed to make her home port en route from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic in July 1968. This was a terrible tragedy from the human point of view but, horrible as it may sound, there's nothing really unique about it.

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