Episode 19: The Bermuda Triangle
In 1950 the Sandra departed from Savannah Georgia with 300 tons of insecticide on board.
The Sandra’s destination was Venezuala, but she never completed her journey.
As the ship passed the Florida coast the ship lost complete radio contact and disappeared without trace.
No one ever heard from the Sandra again.
SHOW NOTES:
:40 Flight 19
Of particular note was Flight 19, which was a training flight of five torpedo bombers. The flight became lost and disappeared.
Fearing something horrible, a rescue aircraft was sent after them, but this too disappeared. The reasons were unexplainable.
1:00 SS Cotopaxi
And before flight 19, in November of 1925 The SS Cotopaxi left Charleston, South Carolina, but never finished her voyage. As the Cold War set in in America the level of tension, paranoia and fascination for unexplained phenomena grew. Unexplained sightings became Unidentified Flying Objects . The early 1950s saw a UFO craze sweep across America.
But what gripped Americans was not only UFOs and aliens. By the 1970s the world was bewitched by the phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle.
2:10 The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is an area in the Atlantic Ocean roughly marked out between Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico. Superstitious folk claim large numbers of planes and ships disappeared in an unexplained and mysterious way. Many of the early rumblings of the Bermuda Triangle linked the disappearances to extra-terrestrial activity.
2:35 Vincent Gaddis
The mysterious area gained renewed traction in 1964 when Vincent Gaddis wrote an article called "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" in Argosy magazine. This was the first time someone bequeathed the area an unofficial name, which we all now know it by. The unexplained fascinated Gaddis, the author of this article.
He previously published numerous stories in magazines such as Weird Tales and True Mystic Science. Gaddis believed in the theory that there existed a secret history of the world. This theory claimed past races took refuge in subterranean caves and then used rays to manipulate human activity.
His beliefs surrounded the occult, along with strange things like mysterious giant races and malevolent robots.
4:30 Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle
Ten years after Gaddis’s article, in 1974 the breakthrough into the mainstream came. Charles Berlitz’s published his book The Bermuda Triangle. The timing provided for a perfect conglomeration of events and Berlitz saw the opportunity presented to him. You see Berlitz previously published some other books, including “Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds” and “The Mystery of Atlantis”.
His timing could not have been more perfect for his next book, because America was in the grip of the disaster movie craze.
Airport in 1970 and The Poseidon Adventure of 1972 led to 1974 as the year of the disaster movie, with Earthquake, Towering Inferno and Airport 1975 all appearing as lavish big-budget blockbusters.
The idea of the Bermuda Triangle as the scene of so many disasters was ripe for mass public appeal.
9:10 The Reality of the Bermuda Triangle
The reality is that the Sandra was a 185-foot ship that sailed from Savanah on 6 April. It had been built in Germany as the luxury motor yacht Queen Anne but was converted for US naval use in the Second World War, and then subsequently converted into a cargo ship.
Far from disappearing mysteriously in the flat calm of summer, the sandra sailed directly into a hurricane. Its wreck has recently been discovered off the north coast of Florida and shows no sign of anything other than a ship which foundered in a normal way. The wreck of another ship associated with the mystery has also recently been identified.
The SS Cotopaxi told a story not that different. A storm wiped out the ship, and none of the 32 people onboard were ever seen or heard from again. The ship famously appeared in Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where it was mysteriously washed up in the Gobi Desert intact and completely empty.
The reality is far more mundane. It was poorly maintained and when it sailed into stormy weather its hatch covers gave way and it became swamped.
Its remains lie not in the Gobi Desert but 40 miles off the coast of Florida, not even technically within the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle. The loss of life is sadly just another example of a ship owner’s penny-pinching disregard for its sailors’ lives. Subsequent research in the area proves that there is no greater concentration of wrecks or disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else.
This is confirmed in the cold hard world of marine insurance.
Luckily for ship owners there have never been any additional premiums to sail in the Bermuda Triangle.
