Bermuda Triangle

Howell Thompson was a bored 24-year-old Marine when he sat down to write home to Chicago. "We aren't doing any thing now days,'' he began.But, he wrote from Florida, "Tomorrow, we're supposed to make a three-hour hop . . . navigation, low-level bombing and strafing. This hop will give us enough time to draw flight pay for this month,'' he wrote. He hoped to be home for Christmas. Howell Thompson never made it.Sixty years later, people are still interested in his "hop'' -- Flight 19, the so-called Bermuda Triangle trip on Dec. 5, 1945, that ended with five Navy planes and 14 aviators, including Thompson, beingmysteriously swallowed.

A rescue mission involving 13 other men also disappeared in the stretch of ocean between Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Miami. Just this week, a three-night television drama about the Triangle ran on cable, as have a couple of documentaries featuring the story of how the Lost Flight vanished without a trace. Books and the Internet brim with tales of the supernatural, including suggestions of alien abduction. Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), who sponsored a House resolution honoring the men of Flight 19 in connection with the 60th anniversary, talks of "so many weird things'' about the training mission. "Something happened out there,'' said Shaw.

'Proud to be a Marine' But for one northwest suburban family, the Bermuda Triangleisn't sci-fi: It's where they lost Howell Thompson -- their son, their brother, their uncle. "My family doesn't believe in the mystique of the Bermuda Triangle. It could have been the wind, it could have been a water spout. I just don't think it was anything creepy or weird,'' said Joan Pietrucha, a niece of Thompson. Pietrucha, 61, attended a memorial service this week in Florida for the 27 men who disappeared. In a speech there, the Schaumburg resident described her uncle as a Cubs fan with a dry sense of humor who liked bowling and roller skating. He graduated from Lane Tech. "Most of all, he was proud to be a Marine,'' said Pietrucha, whose knowledge of Thompson mostly comes from reading about 300 letters her uncle sent to his family's home in the 4100 block of North Hamlin. HowellThomps......

Charles Berlitz popularized the myth of the Bermuda Triangle in his 1974 book on the topic. He and others described a triangular area with vertices loosely defined by Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Florida as a place of countless mysterious disappearances.Speculation about why so many vessels and planes have vanished in the area has ranged from the mundane such as the release of methane bubbles from the ocean floor to the more bizarre such as alien abductions.One of the more famous disappearances associated with the triangle was that of theFlight 19 air squadron.

Five planes on a training exercise in 1945 were lost at sea, and still have not been found. Berlitz and others suggested that the flight was a routine training exercise in near-perfect weather. According to Larry Kushe's more critical analysis of that flight, the weather was less than perfect and the planes were not equipped with very sophisticated navigational tools. Officials speculated that they likely were lost and ran out of fuel. Further, Berlitz seemed to have embellished this story with unsubstantiated details, as he appeared to have done with many of the other accounts offered as evidence of the dangers of the triangle. The Berlitz book and other accounts are at bestpoorly researched stories of vessels lost without a trace. The region of the ocean clearly holds its dangers, but it does not seem to be any more perilous than other parts of the ocean. Stories about the disappearances in the triangle, like Amityville's haunting and Area 51's UFOs, will live on and become more elaborate. Our mental processes effectively detect patterns and lead us to believe in what we think we perceive. Sometimes the patterns we extract are not real. Unfortunately, even with overwhelming contradictory evidence, the beliefs we develop from those misperceptions are difficult to dismiss. Article Source

The disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy mission that began the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, is still unexplained but not forgotten 60 years later.The 27 Navy airmen who disappeared somewhere off Florida's coast on Dec. 5, 1945, were honored in a House resolution Thursday. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., said he hoped the gesture would help bring closure for surviving families.What happened is the question that has befuddled, entertained and tormented both skeptics and believers in the Bermuda Triangle, a stretch of ocean between Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Miami that many believe is an area of supernatural phenomena. "There's just so many weird things herethat experienced pilots would have not acted this way," Shaw said.

"Something happened out there." Five U.S. Navy Avenger airplanes left the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine training mission over the Bahamas. The five pilots and nine crewmen, led by instructor Lt. Charles Taylor, were to practice bombing and low-level strafing on small coral shoals 60 miles east of the naval station. They were then to turn north to practice mapping and then southwest to home. The entire flight, which Air Station pilots took three or four times a day, should have lasted three hours. From radio reports overheard by ground control and other airplanes, the compasses on Taylor's plane apparently malfunctioned 90 minutes into the mission. With no instruments to guide him over the open ocean, Taylorthought the flight had drifted off-course and was actually south over the Florida Keys. As a result, he directed the planes to fly due north to hit land. "He was not in the Keys, he was out in the end of the Bahama chain," said David White, who at the time was a flight instructor stationed at Fort Lauderdale. "When he went north, he was going out to the wide ocean." Just about the time the squadron was to have landed back at Fort Lauderdale, a last radio message from Taylor was received: They would keep flying "until we hit the beach or run out of gas." Due to weakening radio signals, no reading could be made on the direct location of the planes. Radio messages show that some of the students wanted to fly east, said Allan McElhiney, president of the Naval Air Station Fort LauderdaleHistorical A......

The Bermuda Triangle has long been a source of international mystery, with planes and ships disappearing without trace into the ocean.Now the north has its own version of the legendary site - The Yorkshire Triangle.Researchers have identified a 221 square mile area between York, Harrogate and Leeds as the second most haunted place in Britain. It was also named as the country's top location for seeing UFOs. Yorkshire was only beaten by Cornwall in the findings, which were collected by a team of paranormal researchers commissioned by television channel Sky Travel to publicise the start of its Mysterious Britainseason. The team was led by paranormal expert Lionel Fanthorpe and spent months collecting documented cases of UFO and ghost sightings, crop circles and mysterious creatures. They then plotted them on a map and came up with three obvious triangles where paranormal activity was at its strongest in Cornwall, Yorkshire and Norfolk. The York area is no stranger to hitting the headlines for its ghostly happenings.

Two years ago it was named as the most haunted city in Europe. One of the most famous stories associated with York dates back to 1953 when apprentice plumber Harry Martindale was installing a new central heating system in the cellars of the Treasurer's House, near the Minster. He heard the distant sound of a horn, which became gradually louder. A great carthorse then emerged through the brick wall, ridden by a dishevelled Roman soldier. He was followed by several more soldiers, dressedin green tunics and plumed helmets. It looked as though they were walking on their knees as their lower legs and feet were nowhere to be seen. Tthe ghostly crew then moved into a recently excavated area, and it became clear that they were walking on an old Roman road. Mr Fanthorpe, who is president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, said: "The three affected areas have all experienced battles, plagues, trauma and tragedy over the centuries - factors which may stimulate increased paranormal activity. "But the presence of ley-line intersections, irregularities in the Earth's magnetic and gravitational fields, or even extra terrestrial activity could all play a part in forming these mysterious triangles." Article Source