Late in the evening of October 30, 1954, near the Bermuda Triangle, a US Navy aircraft mysteriously disappeared with military personnel and family members. Having taken off for the Azores, R7V-1 suddenly stopped communicating - and no one else ever saw him or the passengers. The search engines failed to find even traces of the crash. There was no wreckage: the airliner seemed to have disappeared into the unknown.
It was a huge naval airliner
65 years ago, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a Lockheed R7V-1 aircraft mysteriously disappeared, transporting the military and their families to Morocco, stopping on the Portuguese island of Terceira in the Azores archipelago. The board took off from the American base Patuxent River. The incident occurred near the northern border of the Bermuda Triangle, which aroused great interest among journalists and mysticism lovers. The wreckage of the aircraft has never been found, despite ongoing search operations. There were no official versions of the disappearance of the US Navy aircraft either. This mysterious case entered the annals of Bermudism as flight 441.
The long transatlantic flight was a big event for that time. Therefore, the crew included 21 people: they had to perform their functions in shifts. 12 soldiers flew to the Por Lyaute airbase for further service. Their stay in North Africa promised to be delayed, and therefore some took family members with them: there were four women and five children on board.
“It was a huge naval airliner,” says Lin von Paul's book, Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle. - The list of items that were on the plane remained: 111 life jackets, 46 protective suits, 660 paper cups and five life rafts.
The R7V-1 was much better protected than other aircraft."
The weather forecast encouraged the pilots. During the flight, neither storms nor severe thunderstorms were predicted. In addition, the liner had to go above the clouds. The commander was warned by the oncoming flight that there are areas with minor thunderstorms on the way, not high above the ground. Icing under those conditions is considered unlikely.
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Mysterious disappearance
On October 30, 1954, at 21:39 local time, the R7V-1 took off from a base in Maryland. The flight took place in normal mode, however, after making the last radio exchange at 23:30, the crew did not get in touch anymore. At the specified time, the pilots managed to report their whereabouts - 560 km east of Baltimore.
The exact coordinates of flight 441 were 38 degrees 06 minutes north latitude, 69 degrees 12 minutes west longitude, the approximate distance to the coast was 650 km. Lockheed did not send a distress signal. He just disappeared, as if he had dissolved in the atmosphere. Never again did a single detail remind of Flight 441: neither the remains of people, nor fragments of the fuselage.
Ships and planes set out in search of the missing R7V-1. They combed the area between the state of New Jersey and the Azores around the clock. According to experts, the contents of the airliner - such as rafts and vests - could not drown when the plane was destroyed in the air or hitting the water, and therefore had to catch the eye of rescuers. Search work was stopped on November 4 due to worsening weather. The participants were completely perplexed, because they did not get a single clue that could tell about what happened.
What do the missing plane have in common with the Dyatlovites
A check was organized into the mysterious disappearance of Flight 441. The commission of inquiry, however, was struck by the vagueness of its conclusions: in this aspect, American experts could well compare with Soviet investigators, who called the cause of the death of a tourist group led by Igor Dyatlov in the mountains of the Northern Urals in 1959 as "an irresistible spontaneous force." The official researchers came to exactly the same opinion: "the plane collided with a sudden and powerful force, which made it impossible to perform the flight."
Meanwhile, the most probable version is that the airliner hit a powerful thunderstorm front, even if the weather service did not report its presence, and the board itself, as indicated above, was equipped with a weather radar.
“Since the military department is very reluctant to admit losses in peacetime, the only thing known about the missing plane is that, immediately after the waiting time for the delayed flight expired, the search began,” wrote Lin von Pal. -
Including even the standard aircraft death indicator - an oily stain. No wonder the disappearance of flight 441 is considered one of the most mysterious in the history of the Bermuda Triangle."
Bermuda Triangle Mystery Revealed?
The mysterious Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean, bounded by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, is world famous for the disappearance of aircraft and ships. There are various hypotheses explaining these anomalies, up to the tricks of aliens and inhabitants of Atlantis. Scientists, however, adhere to more prosaic explanations - for example, they point to the abundance of shoals in this area, as well as the frequent occurrence of storms and cyclones, which causes problems with navigation.
For the first time, the press started talking about the Bermuda Triangle in 1950, and it got its name from the filing of the writer Vincent Gaddis in 1964. Since then, there have been fierce debates between skeptics and supporters of the existence of anomalous phenomena about the reasons for the disappearance of ships and aircraft in this region.
In 2018, a team of British oceanographers from the University of Southampton found a new explanation for the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle. In their opinion, the 30-meter killer waves are to blame for everything. They are very steep and tall, look like a wall of water and appear unexpectedly, experts from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added.
So, he cites the example of the disappearance of five American torpedo bombers in 1945 during a training mission - most likely, they simply ran out of fuel.
On June 6, 1965, a C-119 aircraft with ten crew members disappeared in the same area. Search and rescue operations again yielded nothing. This case is often associated with the abduction of people by aliens. Whose else could it be? Not a sea monster, supporters of this version believe.
On October 26, 2018, off the coast of South Carolina, a twin-engine Piper PA-31 Navajo aircraft went missing. The crew did not report an emergency on board.