Where Is The Bermuda Triangle.

Where Is The Bermuda Triangle?

Where Is the Bermuda Triangle? On a beautiful sunny afternoon in 1945, five airplanes took off from a runway in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The planes were US Navy bombers, but they weren't going to drop bombs. They were just out on a training run. The pilots were supposed to fly east, over the ocean, and then go north for a while before heading back home The whole flight was supposed to last only two hours. The trip was called Flight 19. But somehow, the pilots got lost and confused. They didn't know which way to go. The officer in charge had two compasses to show him directions. But both stopped working. He tried to contact the control tower for help, but his radio wasn't working well. Then another pilot flying nearby heard they were lost. He offered to come help. but the officer told him not to. Before the day was over, all five planes had disappeared without a trace! The navy quickly sent another plane out to search for them-and it vanished, too! How could this possibly happen? How could six planes and twenty-seven men vanish into thin air, never having sent an emergency signal? All the planes had life rafts on board. If the pilots had to land their planes in the ocean, wouldn't at least some of the pilots have survived? For weeks, the navy searched a wide area of the sea. They never found a single thing-not even a piece of a broken plane floating in the water. Even now, more than seventy years later, the story makes people wonder whether there is something and unusual about the area the planes strange were flying through. In fact, it is just one of the stories about the Bermuda Triangle-the name given to a triangular area in the ocean, off the coast of Florida, where dozens of ships and planes have disappeared. Some stories say the Bermuda Triangle sucks ships into the sea. Others say that planes can enter the Bermuda Triangle but never escape. Over the years, ships have been found floating in the water-abandoned ships in perfect condition, with food still cooking on the stove, but no people on board! Huge ocean-going ships have been said to break in half in the treacherous seas. One year, at Christmastime, two men went out on a boat only a mile from the Florida coast. They wanted to gaze at the Christmas lights back onshore. They hit something in the water and called the Coast Guard for help. But when the Coast Guard arrived twenty minutes later, they had vanished. They were never seen or heard from again. To add to the spookiness of this story, their boat was called the Witchcraft. This is the story of the mysterious area known as the Bermuda Triangle-who vanished, how they disappeared, and why. Air Traffic Control Towers How do airplane pilots avoid running into ea other in the sky? How do they know when it's their turn to take off or land at an airport? Who can help when a pilot gets lost during a flight? The air traffic control tower is in charge. Every airport has a control tower with people inside who talk to pilots as they fly. The control tower tells each pilot how high above the ground they may fly that day-their altitude. The tower creates invisible "layers" of planes, like roads in the sky. This system keeps planes from crashing into each other by never flying in the same place or at the same altitude. As a plane flies across the United States, it is always in radio contact with the nearest tower. But when Flight 19 got lost, their radio signals were poor. They couldn't always hear what the tower was saying. 

The Deadly Triangle:

Where, exactly, is the dangerous area of water that-according to stories-has been the cause of so much tragedy? Draw three lines on a map connecting Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami, Florida. The lines will make a triangle in the ocean That's the location of the Bermuda Triangle. The ocean is unusually deep in the Bermuda Triangle. It's three miles deep in many places and over five miles deep in one spot. Hundreds of different species of small sea creatures live miles below the surface. The first person ever known to sail near the Bermuda Triangle was Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he sailed west from Spain, hoping to find a new route to Asia. Instead, he wound up on an island off the coast of Florida-an island called San Salvador, that's now part of the Bahamas. Christopher Columbus But before he reached the Bahamas, Columbus experienced something very strange aboard his ship, the Santa Maria. He sailed into a vast area where the ocean was covered with thick carpet water? Plants didn't grow in the middle of the ocean-only near shore. But for days and days, he couldn't find land. The crew was alarmed. They wanted Columbus to turn back and sail home to Spain. Then something else happened to frighten the crew even more. Columbus's compass wasn't pointing toward the North Star, the way it usually did. Why wasn't it working? What was happening in this strange part of the ocean? Columbus didn't know it, but he had sailed into what's now called the Sargasso Sea-a huge area of the Atlantic Ocean. It overlaps about half of the Bermuda Triangle. North Atlantic Ocean UNITED STATES running Sargasso Sea TROPIC OF CANCER CaribbeanSea For hundreds of years after that, sailors passing through these waters told tales about the Sargasso Sea. They called it the "graveyard of ships" or the "sea of doom." According to the stories, ships could sail into it, but often they couldn't escape. Ghost ships supposedly sailed there forever, with skeletons on board as crews. The Sargasso Sea The Sargasso Sea is a very strange place indeed. It is the only "sea within a sea" in the world- completely surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. It's so different from the Atlantic Ocean that it has its own name. The Atlantic Ocean has strong currents, rolling waves, and high winds. The Sargasso Sea is usually calm, still, and covered with seaweed. Without wind, sailing ships can get stuck there, sometimes for days or weeks or forever. The sea is named for the sargassum seaweed that grows on the water Stretching more than two thousand miles long and around seven hundred miles wide, it is about half the size of the United States (not counting Alaska and Hawaii). One section of the Sargasso Sea is especially calm, with little wind or rain. It's in what is called the horse latitudes. (Latitudes are imaginary horizontal lines drawn around the earth on a globe or map.) The northern horse latitude runs straight across the northern part of the Sargasso Sea. Some stories say that hundreds of years ago, ships with horses on board became stranded there. The horses died from thirst, and the crew had to throw the dead animals overboard. Some sailors say that the ghosts of the horses still haunt those waters, even today. Columbus's crew was terrified when they heard about his compass pointing the "wrong" way. They were afraid that they'd never find land. But Columbus calmed them down. He said that maybe his compass wasn't supposed to point to the North Star. Maybe it was supposed to point to something else, although he didn't know what. Was he right? Years later, scientists learned more about how compasses work and found out that Columbus was right. None of the stories about the Bermuda Triangle existed in Columbus's time. If they had, the crew would have been even more frightened on their voyage. Luckily for them, the wind picked up in the Sargasso Sea and less than a month later, Columbus found land. Many other ships that sailed into the waters of the Bermuda Triangle were not nearly so fortunate.

2. Lost At Sea:

As the years went by, many ships were lost in the Bermuda Triangle. In 1880, a huge ship called the Atalanta sailed from Bermuda toward England. Onboard were 290 men-officers and young cadets. The ship never reached England. None of the men were ever seen again. The very next year, an even stranger thing happened. A ship called the Ellen Austin was sailing in the Atlantic, north of the Sargasso Sea. All of a sudden someone on board spotted a derelict- -a ghost ship. Derelict is the word for ships that are found drifting upright on the ocean with no one on board. What had happened? Did it fall under the spell of some unknown force in that part of the ocean? The captain of the Ellen Austin watched the ghost ship drifting for two days. He wanted to make sure it was really abandoned. He didn't want to walk into a trap set by pirates! Finally, he decided it was safe. He sent some of his own men in a small rowboat to check out the drifting ship. When they boarded the ghost ship, they found the ship's log was missing and the name had been removed from the bow-the front of the ship. Other than that, though, it was in good condition-fully stocked with food. So the captain ordered his men to sail the abandoned ship back to New York, staying close to the Ellen Austin along the way. In those days, if someone found an abandoned ship, there was reward money for bringing it back to the nearest port. But the Ellen Austin and the ghost ship got separated by bad weather, fog, and A few days later, the captain finally spotted the derelict again. But it was drifting crazily-and strong winds. there was no one on board! His own men-the second crew-had vanished completely! As time went by, more unexplained things occurred in or near the Bermuda Triangle. In 1909, one of the world's greatest sailors was a man named Joshua Slocum. He was famous for being the first man to sail alone all the way around the world. On his journeys, he had survived huge storms, attacks by calling for men on pirates, and worse. But navy shi he disappeared completely on a simple solo trip that led him straight through the Bermuda Triangle. And then, in 1918, a huge US Navy ship called the Cyclops disappeared-without ever sending a single SOS. In those days, an SOS signal would be sent in Morse code whenever a ship or boat was in trouble on the seas The Cyclops had a radio. The crew could have called for help. Why didn't they? There were 309 men on board. All vanished. It was the largest navy ship ever lost without a trace. It had been sailing from Barbados in the West Indies toward the Chesapeake Bay. The route took it right through the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. orse code uses a series of dots and dashes to stand for each letter of the alphabet. It was invented by Samuel Morse, who also invented the telegraph in 1844. With the telegraph, people were able to send messages through electric signals that traveled over wires using Morse code. Later, Morse code was used to send signals over radio waves. To send an SOS signal in Morse code, a radio operator would tap out a series of dots and dashes. The code for S is three dots (or three short signals). The code for Ois three dashes (or three long signals) So the code for SOS is dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. The code can be sent as electronic sounds or even as short and long flashes of light with a flashlight or a mirror. Some people say that SOS stands for "Save Our Ship," but it was actually chosen as a distress signal because it was an easy message to send and understand, no matter what language operators were using. SOS is not used very often anymore. Today, the word "mayday" is used as the international signal for a distress-a sign that someone is in trouble "Mayday" comes from a French phrase, m'aider, which means "help me." It is a crime to send a false SOS or mayday when nothing is wrong. The Cyclops wasn't the last ship to run into strange troubles in those dangerous waters. Only a few years later, another ghost ship was found adrift. And this time, the story was filled with a 0 many twists and turns, it could have been spy movie.

3. Lost In The Sky.

After the five navy planes in Flight 19 vanished. more stories of disappearing airplanes began to In 1948, a plane called the Star Tiger was headed toward Bermuda. The flight had started in London with thirty-one passengers and crew on board. The weather was beautiful in Bermuda that day, and the pilot called the tower to say the plane would arrive on time. But it didn't. After that radio call, the Star Tiger was never heard from again. The US Air Force immediately sent out a search team. They searched the ocean for five solid days. Not a single piece of the airplane was ever found. The British investigated the disappearance, as the plane was British, and Bermuda is a British territory. They didn't turn up enough evidence to Explain with certainty what had happened. 

Bermuda is a small group of beautiful islands in the Atlantic Ocean. It is famous for its pink sand beaches. It's located more than six hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. The weather is always warm on the island, so men wear shorts to stay cool. Bermuda shorts are even considered fancy enough to be worn with a formal suit jacket and tie. Bermuda was settled by the British in the early 1600s when some people from England were shipwrecked on their way to start a new colony in Virginia Bermuda never became part of the United States. It's still a British territory. Just like in England, people in Bermuda drive their cars on the left side of the road. No one could ever figure out what happened to the Star Tiger. The plane had four engines they couldn't have all died at once! The investigators said it was one of the most baffling problems they'd ever dealt with-and it would forever remain a mystery. The very next year, the Star Ariel disappeared after taking off from Bermuda on a perfectly calm day. The Star Ariel was a sister to the Star Tiger-the same kind of plane. Somehow, without explanation and without ever calling for help, the sister plane vanished on the same route through the Triangle. Meanwhile, another plane had gone missing near the coast of Florida in 1948. The passengers on the DC-3 were families on their way home to Miami from a Christmas vacation in Puerto Rico. It was a perfectly clear night-no storm to worry about at all. The pilot called the Miami control tower to say they were only fifty miles away. They would be landing soon. Then the plane simply vanished forever. In November 1956, a plane just like the rescue plane from Flight 19 exploded one night in midair after leaving Bermuda. A huge ship in the water below saw the explosion in the sky. And then, on January 1962, another Air Force plane vanished near the Triangle. In August 1963, two large military jets took off together from an airfield in southern Florida Something terrible happened to both planes, but neither pilot called for help. Why not? Broken pieces of the planes were found floating in different parts of the Atlantic Ocean-both in the Bermuda Triangle. The next unexplained event happened in 1965. An Air Force plane called a C-119, or Flying Boxcar took off from Florida, headed toward the Bahamas. The pilot called into the tower when the plane was only about forty-five minutes away from its destination. Everything seemed fine-he reported no trouble. The weather was good, and the plane was expected to arrive on time. Instead, it vanished completely-no one knows why. Then, in January 1967, three planes disappeared in the same week in the Bermuda Triangle-all in good weather. On Halloween in 1991, a Grumman Cougar jet Aying near the Triangle disappeared from all radar instant. The plane was never seen again. screens in an A number of years later, another plane vanished om the radar while flying toward Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Half an hour later. ir popped back disappeared forever. up on the radar screen. And then it And the mystery continues. By some counts, more than seventy-five planes have disappeared. What's happening? Is the of the Bermuda power Triangle getting stronger? 

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