Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history.

It might be lost forever, but Flight 19 will never be forgotten. And not because generations to come will delight in the hootenanny that is the history of military training disasters. It’s because of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which Flight 19 is discovered (minus its directionally challenged flight leader and 13 aerial lemmings) in the Arizona desert. Spielberg’s implication was, of course, that the Brian Eno-wannabe aliens, who later blasted their astro-synths at a potato-sculpting Richard Dreyfus, were somehow responsible for the group’s disappearance and, it would seem, at least some of the Bermuda Triangle’s alleged spooky weirdness.

When Spielberg suggested that aliens are cherry-picking human subjects out of the Atlantic Ocean, he was merely creating a broad historically based fiction in order to bolster the plot of a narrative film. When writer Ivan Sanderson proposed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of 12 “Vile Vortices” – lozenge-shaped areas of ocean where the Earth’s energy fields host slammin’ electromagnetic parties – he was stating a scientific hypothesis. Sanderson’s ideas were subsequently absorbed into the New Age movement, which used them to create the World Grid theory. Essentially, according to pony-tailed acolytes of energy fields, Earth is a giant, resonating crystal with equidistant harmonic power areas, both positive (Sedona, AZ; Easter Island, etc.) and negative (the Bermuda Triangle, etc.). New Agers use these principles to explain stuff like crystal healing and energy centers and how pan flue music shields your soul from psychical tumors or whatever. UFO groupies apply them to abduction theories.

One theory states that the Triangle’s electromagnetic disturbances represent the opening and closing of transdimensional portals – the 12 Vile Vortices serve as doggie doors for daytripping extraterrestrials looking to sightsee and butt probe without all the cumbersome intergalactic schlepping. This notion hinges on the assumption that the alien races visiting Earth have mastered a means of transportation that involves the bending of electromagnetic fields and gravity. The vortices, then, operate sort of like naturally existing station platforms to which the intrepid space kidnappers can easily navigate. Or else the aliens earmarked a few selected areas of the planet for inter-spatial teleportation. You get to decide. At a certain point, the craziness just sort of plateaus off into a flat surface perfect for use as a bughouse buffet table of competing insanities.

Government tests! Alien joy riding! Abduction! AFTER THE JUMP!

Take the Philadelphia Experiment, for example. This classic conspiracy theory states that, in 1943, the Navy conducted a series of invisibility/teleportation experiments on a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge. The government, it’s said, was using the principles of Einstein’s unified field theory to bend light, thereby, making the ship invisible. Supposedly, the first test got it right, but also managed to nauseate the crewmen, who, as a result, were none too excited when it was announced that there was gonna be an even lengthier second take. The next time around, the Eldridge vanished AND instantly teleported over 200 miles away, where it was discovered that several crew members were both nauseated and molecularly fused to portions of the ship.

Do you see where this is going? The field bending? The teleportation? Yup. Some folks think that the government was employing the same experimental propulsion tactics used by the Triangle-frequenting UFOs, whose repeated jaunts over the restless mid-Atlantic waters either account for, or confirm, the area’s deadly and mysterious physics. (For a great pop cultural example of this type of government testing, see the fantastic X-Files two-parter “Dreamland” in which electromagnetic experimentation finds David Duchovny swapping bodies with a randy, wise-cracking Man in Black played by Michael McKean.)

The other theory? Aliens have nothing to do with the forces that find folks getting lost, confused and turned around in the Triangle, but they do take advantage of them. Historically, whatever time the space-hopping weekend warriors weren’t spending helping humans build pyramids and teaching guerilla armies to guard their crystal skeletons, they were watching boatloads of people tread tiring circles through the tidal currents and magnet storms of the Bermuda Triangle. When the time came to start grabbing up human test subjects for microchip installations and dentistry practice, they knew where to find some easy pickins who – bonus! – would be assumed to have simply fallen victim to a wholly terrestrial threat. Basically, in the oil-black eyes of a fat-headed alien, a person in the Bermuda Triangle is like the cross-eyed Korean-made teddy bear sitting on the tippy-top of the crane game prize pile.
And if the combined threat of electromagnetic storms raging all around you while space aliens attack from above wasn’t enough, wait until you hear what’s lurking beneath the frothing waters of the Bremuda Triangle.

Friday: The Triangle and Atlantis

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