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NARRATOR: Did this plane's pilot escape unknown forces
in the Devil's Triangle?
Can these submarine scientists explain
the fate of sailors and their ships that disappear there?
Five US Navy planes like these never came home.
Where they victims of some unearthly power?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
at this and other worlds.
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These fisherman land their catch
at dawn every morning near my beach villa in Sri Lanka.
They know that the Indian Ocean holds
countless dangers, for even the most experienced seafarers.
A chance wave or storm could wreck their flimsy boats
and claim them at any moment.
According to some writers, these treacherous seas
hold few dangers compared to the area of the Atlantic
between Bermuda and Florida.
This is the notorious Bermuda Triangle.
Since 1945, over 100 ships and planes
are said to have vanished there, not
only without trace, but often in mysterious circumstances.
NARRATOR: Businessman Bruce Gernon
commutes all over Florida in his private plane.
There's one flight he'll never forget.
I encountered this cloud out over the Bahama bank
and I saw this tremendous buildup of electricity
inside it.
The deeper I got, the more electricity I could see.
And they weren't lightning bolts,
they were just bright, pure white flashes.
NARRATOR: Gernon found himself flying along
a tunnel in the strange cloud.
It was just wide enough for his little plane.
It sort of had like a silver lining that you often
see on clouds, and on the other end was clear, blue sky,
with the sun shining through.
I had to concentrate very hard on the other end,
which appeared to be like 12 miles
away and narrowing rapidly.
When I came out, I couldn't see any horizon
or the ocean or the sky.
It was pure gray.
And I'd call it an electronic fog.
I tried to get a position fix.
I asked my co-pilot and he was unable to do it
and we discovered that all the electronic instruments
were malfunctioning.
Then these huge slits opened up, parallel
to the direction of the flight, showing the clear skies.
NARRATOR: At last, air traffic control made radio contact.
They told Gernon he was much closer to Miami
than he believed possible.
And I looked at my watch and the airplane clock,
and I'd only been flying for 30 minutes.
So according to my calculations, I was probably
90 miles away from Miami.
I told them they had the wrong airplane.
Then, after my eyes started to focus,
I could see directly below me was the island of Miami Beach.
I think that when I entered that tunnel vortex,
the aircraft was moved forward through time and space
about 100 miles, or 30 minutes, or both.
At the time, I thought I wouldn't have
made it because there appeared to be
a powerful electronic force.
It could have damaged the aircraft beyond repair
and probably crashed in the Bermuda Triangle may
have claimed another victim.
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NARRATOR: Miami is perched on the tip of the USA,
literally on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle.
Newspaper reporters of the "Miami Herald"
know that they must look to the sea
for some of their best copy.
This is [INAUDIBLE] of the "Miami Herald."
I'm just checking to see if everything's
running smoothly today.
Any distress calls or emergencies?
No?
Nothing in the Bermuda Triangle, right?
OK, thank you very much.
Goodbye.
NARRATOR: The Executive Editor of the "Miami Herald"
holds a watching brief.
Doug Clifton is a veteran of Triangle tales.
DOUG: The Bermuda Triangle has got
to be one of the longest running stories in "Herald" history,
I guess.
It started way back when a reporter was doing kind
of an update and he, for the first time,
noted that there was a confluence of these kinds
of disappearances.
NARRATOR: The reporter, EVW Jones,
said he found the losses occurred within a triangle.
Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico were at its three points.
The legend of the Bermuda Triangle was born.
DOUG: Since Mr. Jones' first piece, the stories
about the Bermuda Triangle it seem never to stop,
one events occur.
A boat missing, a boat late to report,
a plane veering off course.
It was always in the Bermuda Triangle.
The strangest and most tragic case of all
dates back to December, 1945.
Five Avenger planes, belonging to the United States Navy,
took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on a training flight.
Neither the 14 men who flew off that day nor their aircraft
were ever seen again.
And even now, the mystery they left behind them
lives on in the hearts and minds of their loved ones
and their comrades in arms.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Every year, since 1945, a commemoration service
has paid tribute to Flight 19.
The flight should've been uneventful.
Avenger planes like these were tried and tested.
The weather on takeoff was good, the forecast was clear.
The crews were experienced and the planes well maintained.
The five planes were on a routine combat
practice over the ocean.
No one expected any problems.
The commander of Flight 19 was Captain Taylor.
The first sign of trouble came when he
radioed in to say he was lost.
Don Poole had trained Flight 19.
DON: I mean, you went to the tower
and heard Lieutenant Taylor, who was
an officer in charge of this flight,
and he thought he was in the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, good heavens.
Take a heading of 091 out of Fort Lauderdale,
you're not going to be near the Gulf of Mexico.
NARRATOR: Captain Taylor seemed to have no idea where he was.
DON: I saw that he was very confused.
And that's when I started broadcasting to him.
Please head west.
Head west, into the sun.
If your compass is out, forget it.
Head west.
You're going to hit the coast of Florida.
NARRATOR: But it appeared that Captain
Taylor wasn't listening.
DON: He was hopelessly lost because he
kept changing his headings.
Go west a while? Fine.
It thought, that's it.
Then he'd say, no, I think we're in the Gulf.
We're going to turn around, we're going to head east.
NARRATOR: Jim Ward was waiting in his rescue boat for orders.
He heard all the radio transmissions.
JIM: Finally, they said we're going
to give you a direct order.
We want you to fly directly into the sun.
And if you're over the Gulf of Mexico,
you're going to hit the coast of Texas.
If you're over the Atlantic Ocean,
you're going to the coast of Florida.
So he acknowledged the direction by the radio
and then they asked well, how much gasoline
do you think you have left?
He said I think I have about 20 minutes.
And we watched the clock tick down
and when 20 minutes went by, we knew
they must be down someplace, but we didn't know where.
NARRATOR: Those left behind still wonder what went wrong.
The bereaved families and comrades have only
the Bermuda Triangle to blame.
OFFICER: Show our respect for the members of Flight 19,
who gave their lives in the service of their country.
These men will never be forgotten.
NARRATOR: One member of the search and rescue team
was Dave White.
DAVE: We couldn't believe it.
One plane going down, engine failure or something.
OK. But five of our planes missing?
Impossible.
At 6:00, we took off.
They had drawn up a grid for us and each one of us
instructors took five or six people with us.
And we flew out about 150 or 200 miles from here.
My first run was up near Palm Beach
and we went up there and then went out
over the ocean for about 200 miles, turn around,
came back, nothing.
JIM: We searched on the boat end of it for at least two weeks.
We had patterns that we followed,
trying to find cover the whole ocean,
while there were many, many planes out,
searching all over the place.
B19s and all the planes they could get into the air,
but never found a bit of wreckage,
no gasoline slip, no pillows floating or anything.
There was nothing found.
NARRATOR: An exhaustive official investigation was conducted
by Captain Richard Roberts.
RICHARD: Well, it's still a mystery because we
have not found an airplane.
Digging into all facts we could get at the time,
we can only go so far and our conclusion was
we didn't know where they went.
They just vanished.
So we might as well just say they flew
off into the wild blue yonder.
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ARTHUR: Believers in the Bermuda Triangle
have inflated their case by compiling lists of ships
and planes that have come to grief in the area and anywhere
near it.
NARRATOR: This commercial passenger plane was on route
from Puerto Rico to Miami.
It disappeared and no wreckage was ever found.
A millionaire sailing yacht, the "Revinauk"
set off on a short pleasure trip to Miami from Key West.
She never returned.
This Naval submarine was equipped with radar and sonar,
but while patrolling the Bermuda Triangle,
the "USS Tigrone" went mysteriously off course
and collided with a reef.
Joshua Slocum owned the "Spray."
One of the world's most experienced sailors,
why did he vanish off the Miami Coast?
But the facts tell a different story.
Experts claim the airliner ran out of fuel
over the Gulf of Mexico.
The "Revinauk" sailed into a hurricane,
according to Coast Guards.
The Tigrone's accident was not unheard of in the Navy.
Sailors didn't think it at all mysterious.
And even Slocum's own son believed
his father simply failed to weather his last storm.
Lloyd's of London are the world's foremost insurers
of ships and planes.
If there's something out of the ordinary
about the Bermuda Triangle, the experts
there are certain to know.
NARRATOR: At Lloyd's of London, records of the shipping losses
are kept for decades.
At Lloyd's Maritime, Norman Hooke sifts fact from fiction.
NORMAN: Quite a number of the inquiries we receive relate
to vessels which are reportedly lost in the so-called Bermuda
Triangle.
NARRATOR: The "Marine Sulphur Queen"
is a classic case for Bermuda Triangle supporters.
NORMAN: The "Marine Sulphur Queen" was on voyage from Texas
through the Gulf of Mexico through the Florida straits
and then out into the Atlantic.
She was last reported off Key West.
NARRATOR: Search and rescue teams found no wreckage
and declared the loss of the "Marine Sulphur Queen"
a mystery.
But later, some flotsam did surface, carried
north on the Gulf Stream.
NORMAN: The "Marine Sulphur Queen" is
regarded as a marine casualty.
There's nothing mysterious about her loss,
really, because wreckage has been found
and obviously the wreck does lie at the bottom of the sea bed,
probably southeast of Key West.
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The "Anita" was last reported, I believe, about 150
miles southeast of Cape May.
Nothing ever was found of that vessel,
nor were any survivors ever found,
nor any bodies ever located.
By coincidence, another Norwegian boat carrier,
the "Norse Variant," was in a very, very similar location
when she was overwhelmed by such severe weather conditions
that she sank, with the loss of all her crew
except for one seaman, Stein Gabrielsen.
NARRATOR: Gabrielsen was lucky to survive.
He spent three days on a life raft, before being picked up.
His testimony shed light on the fate of the Norse
Variant's sister ship.
No supernatural forces had been at work on the Anita.
NORMAN: His story was that the vessel he was on
was overwhelmed by such severe weather conditions,
the vessel sank very, very quickly.
So it's presumed that the Anita suffered the same fate.
Some people may have thought that the Bermuda Triangle, as
such, may have claimed these vessels but, for us, looking
through the records, it was obviously
weather conditions which determined
the fate of these two vessels.
There are no more losses in that particular area,
the Bermuda Triangle area than the Atlantic
or anywhere else in the world.
NARRATOR: Even the most famous Bermuda Triangle case of all,
Flight 19, yields to meticulous investigation.
John Myhre believes he knows how Flight 19 came to grief.
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In 1992, searchers thought they might have found the answer.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But these five Avengers were not Flight 19.
Another ditched plane was raised from elsewhere on the sea bed.
Again, hopes were dashed.
The planes are still missing but Meyer believes his diligent
research could update the official reports
drawn up by Captain Roberts.
JOHN: I estimate the winds were coming out of a 220 degree
heading.
NARRATOR: Myhre has spent 13 years plotting every aspect
of Flight 19's fateful trip.
The wind speed, ocean currents, and weather conditions all
played their part.
JOHN: When we got to this point, they climbed.
NARRATOR: He can now say with confidence exactly
where the planes went and when.
JOHN: With no other land in sight, as you can see.
There are several things.
The wind was coming from a different direction
and a different speed than they had flight planned.
They had a leader that was confused, for whatever reason.
Then we had the kids flying into a bad storm system,
and then we had night time on top of that.
In spite of that, the flight would have come back
and hit the mainland, based on this track here,
had not the first airplane run out of gas at 6:04.
Robbie, this is essentially the way I figured that the planes--
NARRATOR: Myhre thinks he knows the point
where the first plane ditched.
He believes the other planes flew off
in different directions, in the desperate hope
that one might make it home.
Each now lies alone on the Atlantic sea bed.
JOHN: The mystery is being able to prove,
which I think I can on paper, what happened to Flight 19--
where they went, why they went where they went,
why the pilots thought what they did,
and where the aircraft finally came
to rest on the ocean floor.
NARRATOR: The US Coast Guard cutters
ply the seas off the Florida coast, day and night.
Their crews know every stretch of sea
and the oceans every mood.
Coast Guard Jim How is skeptical of the Bermuda Triangle.
JIM: Well, we don't know if there is a Bermuda Triangle
or not.
What we know is that a lot of folks that we go out to rescue
get in trouble either because of bad weather
or because of bad judgment on their part.
We've never really seen anything paranormal in these waters,
but we do see a lot of people who get in trouble because
of natural phenomenon, such as high winds, heavy seas,
or because of the currents of the Gulf Stream,
which can whisk someone into trouble pretty
far away from where they initially start out.
One of the things that happens in the southeast US off
of Miami, off of Florida is the weather
is usually pretty pleasant and you get a lot of boaters
down here.
It's basically the boating capital of America.
You can boat year around.
The problem is that, in the summer,
for example, you can get a lot of thunderstorms
that come through and they can often crop up on short notice.
NARRATOR: Hundreds of shipwrecked mariners
are rescued every year but the Coast Guard videos show
only natural forces at work.
JIM: It can go from a perfectly calm day
like we have today to very, very rough weather, just
in a matter of minutes, eight, 10 foot seas, 40,
50 mile an hour winds.
And those winds can capsize a boat
or get people in trouble, swamp the boat.
We also have hurricanes that roll through here once or twice
a year and people can get caught in the real bad weather there.
And that, of course, is a much more dramatic
and often leads to ships going down.
Good fix.
I'm in at 07, hold to 400 yards to the right to track.
Recommend course 358 to regain.
Five minute 10 at speed 13 knots.
One decibel at 98.
Decibel 98, aye.
North jetty.
Miami Beach, five decibel six, six.
We don't really know where the myth of the Bermuda Triangle
came from.
What we see are natural phenomenon, like the weather
and also we see people who just don't
take proper safety precautions.
We actually came across a boat once that was lost at sea
and they called up in a panic.
They were trying to navigate from Miami to the Bahamas
using a place mat from a dinner restaurant.
And they just thought that they could just
drive it like they drive a car.
It just doesn't work that way.
It's very dangerous out here.
The elements can surprise you.
It's not like driving a car down a road.
Amidst all the hype and flim flam,
a few scientists claim to have found some real phenomena
to investigate.
NARRATOR: In America's largest wave
tank at Texas A&M University, a unique experiment
is about to begin.
Eruptions of gas on the sea bed may explain disappearances
in the Bermuda Triangle.
The man behind the idea is Doctor Richard McIver.
RICHARD: I was a scientist with one of the major oil companies
and I had been reading in one of the offshore journals
about the large number of floating drilling rigs
and drilling ships that had been sunk when they drilled
into shallow gas and gas came rushing up and either sank them
or caught them on fire.
At about the same time, I read the account of the Marine
Sulphur Queen, that 429 foot tanker that
disappeared without a trace in good weather,
out of the Florida straits.
And, at that point, I asked the question,
why couldn't naturally occurring gas blowout sink ships?
NARRATOR: The scientists are using
a scaled down tanker, carefully calibrated
to match the real thing.
Gas pipes have been installed on the wave tank floor,
to simulate spontaneous gas explosions from the seabed.
Dr. Wayne Dunlap is in charge of events.
WAYNE: Well we have a vessel.
It's a scale model of a tanker.
It's a perfect scale model and its ballasted
just like a tanker would be.
So it's floating the distance in the water that a tanker would.
What we're going to do is turn on the gas at a low pressure.
That means it will get probably smaller bubbles and not as many
of them and we'll see what's happening.
Then we're going to increase the pressure
and we'll get larger bubbles, more bubbles,
and continue to increase the pressure
and see what affect you get out of it.
If the hypothesis is correct, the ship will sink.
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Dr. McIver believes escaping gas can bring down
airplanes as well as ships.
RICHARD: Well my feeling is that the airplane would experience
tremendous turbulence, which could
cause the airplane to go down.
But more important, perhaps, is that, when the gas is diluted
five to 10 times with air, then it
becomes a combustible mixture and could ignite
on the exhaust of the airplane.
RESEARCHER: Mike, go ahead and check out the camera.
Okay, I'm going to turn it on now.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, that's about 20 PSI.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RICHARD: That's it! We did it.
We did it.
WAYNE: Well, it seems evident from what I've seen
so far that we can sink a ship.
As you saw, the ship did rotate to the side
and it took on some water.
It sank.
And we will try the same experiment
now but with solid tops on and so that it can
rotate and take up any water.
We'll see what happens to it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RICHARD: This is the first really scientific experiment
we've done, where we've had scale
models and wonderful equipment.
But to see a tanker model that was completely sealed off,
with air inside, that was swamped by the gas bubbles
shows that the buoyancy is dramatically reduced in water
when it's charged with bubbles.
NARRATOR: So does Dr. McIver now believe
in the Bermuda Triangle?
RICHARD: Well I don't think the Bermuda Triangle is so unique,
as far as gases are concerned.
I think the reason that so many ships and planes disappear
there is that the ship density and aircraft
density is so high.
We know that ships and planes disappear around the world.
It just so happens that this is a place where
we get a lot of publicity.
ARTHUR: I believe the Bermuda Triangle is
a literary hoax, invented by writers
and embroidered by interested parties.
It's also a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Amateur sailors can't resist the challenge of dangerous waters,
so they set sail defiantly and inexpertly, and learn
that the sea is unforgiving.
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