Up to 1,000 people have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, leaving experts stumped to offer up an explanation. The 500,000 km square patch of ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda has long been associated with the vanishing of ships and aircrafts.
The biggest recorded loss was in 1945 when five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers flying from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Bimini Island never showed up after a radio call from the 14 men on board that their compasses stopped working.
Three rescue planes also disappeared.
The flight’s leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, was heard over radio control saying: “We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white.”
The conspiracy theory stemmed from there, as the US Navy put the cause of the disappearance down to ’cause unknown’, leading to some wild speculation.
But according to Shane Satterley, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, Australia, simply digging into the records could help explain the phenomenon.
Mr Satterley wrote for The Conversation: “Take the disappearance of Charles Taylor and the five planes which the US Navy investigated.
“The investigation found that as it got dark outside and the weather changed, Taylor had navigated the planes to the wrong location.
“Taylor also had a history of getting lost while flying. He had twice needed to be rescued in the Pacific Ocean.
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“What’s more, the aircraft they had been flying were known to sink in as little as 45 seconds if they landed in water.
“And once aircraft sink in the vast ocean (although this is extremely rare these days), they are often never found again.”
Mr Satterley also urged conspiracy theorists to remember “It has also been shown the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the Bermuda Triangle is not much larger, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean.”