Today In Pop Culture: The Bermuda Triangle Is Not A Waxing Style

By Jeffery X Martin

The USS Cyclops was a Navy ship during the First World War. She set sail from Rio de Janeiro in February of 1918, carrying a load of manganese ore, crucial for the manufacture of munitions. The ship and her crew set sail for Baltimore on March 4.

They never reached their destination.

What happened to the USS Cyclops?

The Bermuda Triangle, that’s what.

In the 1970s, America was swept up in an amazing resurgence of interest in the supernatural. One of the things people focused on intently was the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the North Atlantic Ocean. Planes and boats that traveled through the Triangle were known to vanish without a trace. Not even wreckage could be found. It was like the vessels, and the people aboard them simply disappeared.

The first big story about the Triangle was published in American Legion Magazine. Their tale of the Triangle involved a group of five Navy bombers on a training mission. Before they vanished into the oblivion, the flight leader was reported as saying, “We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white.”

This story relied heavily on another smaller one, published two years previously, which delineated the borders of the Triangle. It also gave a brief overview of disappearances in that area.

Why so many, and why in that specific place? Theories and rumors ran rampant. It was aliens from above, zapping the planes with a tractor beam in order to abduct the people aboard for experimentation. Maybe it was aliens who lived under the surface of the ocean, dragging boats down to their watery base, in order to abduct the people aboard for experimentation. Some people believed it was the long lost continent of Atlantis, using some kind of energy ray to get rid of intruders. Others thought it was the centerpoint for weather anomalies, where unusually strong storms would gather, confusing pilots and instruments alike, causing crashes.

There were naysayers to the theories. Some of the common complaints, besides that it was all bullshit, were that there weren’t any more disappearances in that part of the ocean than there were in any other spot. Bad research was also faulted. Some ships were reported as disappearing in calm seas, when the weather records indicated there was a storm occuring at the time of the vanishing.

There was also the fact that the Triangle lies within one of the most heavily used shipping lanes in the sea. If the Bermuda Triangle really were an accursed place, overrun with extra-terrestrials and sudden storms, it would certainly happen more often than not.

There are two sides to every story, and people will always believe what they want to believe. Nonetheless, the USS Cyclops did vanish in the Bermuda Triangle. So did those five Navy bombers. So have hundreds of other ships and airplanes. It’s just not enough activity to warrant a lot of attention anymore.

Maybe, like a boogeyman, the Bermuda Triangle stopped existing once we stopped believing in it, taking its victims with it, into the murky waters of faded memories.

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