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 and on Wednesday we explored the Triangle’s connection to aliens.

It only seems appropriate that our hatch-battened voyage through the Bermuda Triangle should take us from the star-gazing visions of Steven Spielberg to the subaqueous dreams of James Cameron. Sure, “The Abyss” has nothing to do with Atlantis, but given the number of Triangle enthusiasts whose necks are cramped in all the opposite places of the upward-looking UFO seekers, the film seems like a good place to start. USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), like the one that Ed Harris’ character hangs out in while assuring the aliens that humans do, in fact, remember how to love, make frequent appearances in Atlantean-themed conspiracy manifestos.

While you can find various reports from around the world of actual submarine crafts sighted tearing through the waves of this or that ocean (Japan’s Dragon’s Triangle, another of the certified-vile vortices, boasts a panty vending machine’s worth) most USO sightings seem to involve mysterious lights shining up from deep below the surface of the water. Over the years, tons of sea-faring busybodies have reported seeing these bizarre illuminations, both in motion and stationary, within the increasingly non-specific bounds of the Bermuda Triangle. Many sightings have come with the speculation that, below the Triangle’s waters, lay the ruined spires and crumbling streets of Atlantis, a long dead city where, prior to its cataclysmic destruction, a bunch of forgetful mermen left the lights on.

Of course, I’m joking –Atlantis obviously didn’t use the wasteful electric lights on which we primitive humans so desperately rely. They used giant crystals. Or so said Edgar Cayce, the late 19th/early 20th century American psychic who used his cosmic extra-sensory brain power to chug down a trough load of Atlantean revelation, which he then spat back out during a number of his “readings.” These “readings,” which began in 1901 and continued on for 40 years, always started with Cayce entering a dozy trance state, and ended in mystical predictions about everything from politics and business to ancient history and fallen empires, of which Atlantis seemed to be Cayce’s favorite.

A background on Atlantis and the one piece of hard proof that might have proved the whole theory correct… (more…)

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!
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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. Make sure you come back to read all about the Bermuda Triangle Wednesday and Friday.

If certain versions of events are to be believed, Flight 19 – and the 14 skilled airmen who were desperately trying to navigate 5 TBM Avengers back to the safety and dry land of the Floridian coast – disappeared with their compasses inexplicably spinning and the crewmen babbling incoherently across a static-drenched radio connection. We know the planes took off from Fort Lauderdale’s Naval base on December 5, 1945, with instructions to perform a standard training exercise dubbed “Navigation problem No. 1.” We also know that navigation soon became the mission’s no. 1 problem. To quote flight leader Charles Taylor, “I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” We also know that Flight 19 pulled an impressive aerial abracadabra – five planes and 14 people, poof, gone, forever.

19 years later, “Argosy” magazine, a classic American pulp publication specializing in adventure stories, published a feature article written by Vincent H. Gaddis. The piece was entitled “The
Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and introduced America to a new and dangerous menace whose insidious machinations were as wily and mysterious as its three-sided geometry was certain. While past articles in various other publications had laundry listed notable boat and plane disappearances in the southern Atlantic, including a 1962 piece in America Legion magazine
– “The Lost Patrol” – that directly implicated supernatural forces in the vanishing of Flight 19, no one had previously assigned such a snappy, sensational title to the area, much less such a handily imagined shape.

Gaddis’ version of the triangle’s wily super powers read like something out of a Dharma Initiative file folder: “[The] aberration might be called ‘a hole in the sky’… It is obvious that it occurs only occasionally in the well-traveled triangle area, without warning, but frequently enough to be alarming.” The article goes on to talk about the possibility of severe, but highly localized, magnetic storms and gravitational anomalies. Gaddis never addresses the possibility
of designing a simple button that could be pressed to control these phenomena, but does make several cryptic Slusho! references.

Find out why the factual basis for the Bermuda Triangle is shoddy even by urban legend standards AFTER THE JUMP…
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Logic dictates that if Kansas can have a city called Manhattan and Eurasia get its own Georgia, there’s no reason why the Great Lakes can’t cop a little of Bermuda’s thunder and enjoy their own mysterious, supernatural Triangle. Sometimes referred to as the Michigan Triangle, this ookity, spookity polygon is attributed solely to Lake Michigan, but the events it aims to explain – freak storms, odd disappearances and unexplainable tragedies – are similar to the misdeeds attributed to Lake Erie’s Storm Hag. Unlike the Storm Hag, the triangle (its corners are situated at Ludington, Manitowoc and Benton Harbor) is even blamed for attracting UFOs, as well as for an historic sea monster sighting reported by a Catholic priest. To give you an idea of the multifarious weirdness ascribed to the invisible danger zone, here are two of its best-known tales:

In April of 1937, the O. M. Mcfarland, its holds packed to capacity with coal, was on its way back to Michigan from Erie, Pennsylvania. A few hours out of Port Washington, the exhausted captain put his first mate on alarm clock duty and then retired to his cabin. Upon nearing the harbor, Officer Snooze Button went to rouse his sleeping commander, only to find the captain’s quarters empty… and locked from the inside. “It’s as if [he] evaporated straight through the walls,” explains Ben Kingsley in the unrelated “Shutter Island” trailer.

Then! June! 1950! Northwest Airlines flight 2501 left New York and flew west toward Minneapolis. As the pilot changed the plane’s course in order to avoid a storm outside Chi-Town, giving his last radio update from 20,000 above Battle Creek, Michigan, the flight’s 55 passengers munched peanuts and whispered presciently about the recent birth of Stevie Wonder. Later, rescue crews searching Lake Michigan salvaged fragments of the travelers and the interior fixtures, but the body of the aircraft was never recovered. The crash remains unexplained. (My film adaptation of the disaster ends with a long shot of floating debris that slowly zooms in on a drifting five dollar bill. As the shot gets closer, we see that the bill was minted in 1997 and has a picture of Hitler on it. The movie is called “Cold Hypotenuse.”)

Many Triangle enthusiasts believe that Lake Michigan is host to a dimensional vortex that can stretch and compress time, and perhaps even allow passage through to another dimension. UFO fanatics have even gone as far as to say that areas like the Great Lakes and Bermuda Triangles are commuter portals created by the same race of intergalactic proctologists whose seemingly bottomless research grant has allowed them to abduct us for centuries. Meanwhile, disbelievers are all, “Seriously? It’s a huge lake with correspondingly giant weather, massive cold and treacherous geological formations… saying that the largest of the lakes is afflicted by sinister geometry makes as much sense as saying that the smallest of the lakes is haunted by some mythic weather elemental!” To which the enthusiasts reply, “Uh, yeah… we know… the Storm Hag. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you!”

A missing Maltese-flagged freighter has sparked the curiosity of maritime law enforcement as well as those how theorize that the vanishing vessel could be evidence of paranormal phenomenon.

Weird Things contacted Bermuda Triangle expert Gian Quasar (author of Into the Bermuda Triangle) to get his opinion on the case. Although he is quick to point out that we don’t have near enough evidence to conclusively prove something paranormal has occurred, some of the more mundane explanations for ship disappearances don’t seem to apply in this case. For example, the region is not necessarily known for piracy, the vessel did not contain a highly valuable or coveted cargo and the waterways are relatively thick with law enforcement from multiple countries and Interpol.

So what is the answer? Quasar says we just won’t know until the boat is found. And if that never happens, we just might never know.