We are talking about a place that is traditionally (deservedly or not?) Is considered the most terrible, the most terrible place on the planet.
"… Here many ships and planes disappeared without a trace - most of them after 45. More than a thousand people have died here over the past 26 years. However, not a single corpse or wreck was found during the search …"
With these words begins the description of the mysterious Bermuda Triangle by the American writer Charles Berlitz, now this phrase is happily quoted by both opponents and supporters of the hypothesis of the existence between Florida, Cuba and Bermuda of some strange mysterious place, in other words, an anomalous zone. The zone certainly exists, but is it really as bloodthirsty as it is portrayed in newspapers and magazines?
A thousand dead in a quarter of a century is a lot. But imagine that on a piece of land of the same area in Russia during the same time, 15 times more people died only on highways. Comparison with highways is quite legitimate, because a huge number of air and sea routes pass through the indicated area of the Atlantic, and in terms of the number of passenger kilometers it will not yield to the whole network of highways. It is clear that not every ship goes to the bottom, to be more precise - only a tiny fraction sinks, a small part of the fleet located in this area disappears. Where does such terrible glory come from?
… It really started after the Second World War. The phenomenon of the psychological state of the American nation of that period is still waiting for its researchers, while we try to just touch it in passing. From 1945 to 1949, the United States had the strongest army, possessing a monopoly of formidable atomic weapons. It would seem that the Americans should have felt like a nation that ruled over the rest of the world. They really played with the atomic "club for the Russian guy", not seeing a worthy opponent for their heroic strength. Theosophists would have commented on what had happened: in revenge for the increased national pride, God sent great fear to America. In just 4 years, she experienced several shock injections at once; Americans felt themselves defenseless against the threat of even more powerful forces: Martians, aliens from other worlds, just ghosts and ghosts. In 1947, after the usual, ordinary UFO sighting, "alien phobia" arose, at the same time many new extraordinary sciences such as ufology appeared. But it all started two years earlier - with fear of the "all-consuming ocean."
… December 5, 1945 was an ordinary day for the US Air Force based in Florida. At that time, there were a large number of pilots in service there, who had received rich combat flying experience, therefore, accidents in the air were relatively rare. Lieutenant Charles K. Taylor was an experienced commander with more than 2,500 flight hours, and the rest of the pilots in his 19th flight could well be relied on, many of whom were older than Taylor in rank. Yes, and this time they received a task that was not too difficult: to take a direct course to Chicken Shoal, located north of Bimini Island. [Voitov B. "Science refutes fiction" Moscow, 1988]. Before the usual training exercises, the combat pilots joked and had fun, only one of them felt that something was wrong in his soul and remained on the ground at his own peril and risk. It saved his life … The weather was great,five three-seater Avenger (Avengers) torpedo bombers took off and headed east with 5.5 hours of fuel on board (remember this figure!) …
Nobody else saw them what happened to them later - only God knows. There have been plenty of various hypotheses (most often far-fetched) and versions on this matter. All of them remained unsaid for only one reason - the missing aircraft were not found. But just recently … However, let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, we must try to restore the picture of the tragedy. We warn you in advance that the details are taken from the materials of investigations and publications of the official chronicle in Florida, so many of the details are very different from what you may have read …
At 14.10 the planes with 14 pilots (instead of 15) took off, reached the target, at about 15.30-15.40 lay on the return course to the south-west. A few minutes later at 15.45 at the command post of the Fort Lauderdale air base received the first strange message: - We have an emergency situation. Obviously off course. We do not see the earth, I repeat, we do not see the earth. The dispatcher made a request for their coordinates. The answer greatly puzzled all the officers present: - We cannot determine our location. We don't know where we are now. We seem to be lost. As if it was not a former pilot who spoke into the microphone, but a confused newcomer who had no idea about navigating over the sea! In this situation, the representatives of the air base made the only correct decision: "Keep heading west!"
Promotional video:
Airplanes will never slip past the long coast of Florida. But…
- We don't know where the west is. Nothing works … Strange … We cannot determine the direction. Even the ocean does not look as usual!.. They are trying to give the squadron target designation from the ground, however, due to the dramatically increased atmospheric interference, these advice, most likely, were not heard. The dispatchers themselves had difficulty catching snatches of radio communications between the pilots: - We do not know where we are. It must be 225 miles northeast of the base … It looks like we …
At 4:45 pm, a strange report comes from Taylor:
"We are over the Gulf of Mexico"
Ground dispatcher Don Poole decided that the pilots were either embarrassed or crazy, the indicated location was on the completely opposite side of the horizon! At 17.00 it became clear that the pilots had a nervous breakdown, one of them was shouting over the air:
"Damn it, if we flew west, we would get home!"
Then Taylor's voice:
"Our home is in the northeast …"
The first fright soon passed a little, some islands were noticed from the planes.
“There is land under me, a rugged country. I'm sure it's Kees …"
Ground services also tracked down the missing, and there was a hope that Taylor would restore orientation … But it was all in vain. Darkness fell. The planes that took off in search of the link returned with nothing (another plane disappeared during the search) …
Taylor's very last words are still controversial. The radio amateurs were able to hear:
"It seems that we are kind of … we are sinking into white waters … we are completely lost …"
According to the reporter and writer A. Ford, in 1974, 29 years later, one radio amateur shared the following information: Supposedly, the last words of the commander were
"Don't follow me … They look like people from the Universe …" ("Abroad" 41-1975, p.18)
In my opinion, the last phrase was probably invented or interpreted later: before 1948, people would almost certainly have used the expression "people from Mars" in such a situation. Even at a meeting of the Commission on the investigation of this incident, the phrase was subsequently dropped:
"They disappeared as irrevocably as if they flew to MARS!"
It is unlikely that Taylor would have used the little-used word "Universe", especially since even science fiction writers did not think of aliens from there …
Let's digress for a while from the Avengers. After the case of the disappearance of 5 planes "like mushrooms after rain" new stories began to emerge with a sad end. The "usual" mysterious disappearances were no longer enough for bermudologists, so postscripts, omissions and simple deception were used, as a result of which ships that sank either for quite trivial reasons (the Japanese ship "Raifuku-Maru", around which legends arose, in 1924, it crashed in front of another steamer precisely because of a severe storm; the three-masted schooner "Star of Pis" was sent to the bottom by an exploded diesel engine in the blink of an eye), or far from the Bermuda region (the German barque "Freya" in 1902 was "transferred" from the Pacific Ocean due to an accidental coincidence in the names of the area; the trimaran "Teignmouth Electron" in 1989 was actually abandoned by the crew,but - not reaching 1800 miles to the "triangle"), or even no ships at all (the erroneous alarm, for example, was raised twice because of the half-flooded buoys delivered by "Akademik Kurchatov" in 1978) …
Real, recorded cases of disappearances of ships are hardly more than 10-15% of what was reported in sensational newspaper publications. The trouble is that it is almost impossible to deal with these cases, this mysterious "something" leaves no witnesses. But you can try to "talk" the dumb witnesses of the tragedies - tape recorders, recordings of radar readings, reports of search services, etc. So, back to the disappearance of the 19th link. It is these events, in spite of the fact that there were bloodier and more numerous tragedies in Bermuda, that it is worth paying attention, at least as classics.
So, the first and indisputable conclusion that follows from listening to radio communication records is that the pilots encountered something unusual and strange in the air. This fateful meeting was the first not only for them, but, probably, they did not hear about such from their colleagues and friends. Only this can explain the strange disorientation and panic in a normal routine situation. The ocean has a strange look, “white water” has appeared, the instrument arrows are dancing - you must admit that this list can frighten anyone, but not experienced naval pilots, who have probably already found the necessary course over the sea in extreme conditions. Moreover, they had a great opportunity to return to the coast: it was enough to turn to the west, and then the planes would never have flown past the huge peninsula.
This is where we come to the main cause of panic. The squadron of bombers, in full accordance with common sense and on recommendations from the ground, searched for land only in the west for about an hour and a half, then for about an hour - alternately in the west and east. And they did not find her. The fact that an entire American state has disappeared without a trace can make even the staunchest mad.
In fairness, it must be said that at the end of their flight they saw the land, but did not dare to splash down nearby in shallow water. Visually, from the outlines of the islands, Taylor determined that it was above the Florida Keys (southwest of the southern tip of Florida) and at first even turned northeast towards Florida. But soon, under the influence of his colleagues, he doubted what he had seen and returned to the previous course, as if he were located much east of Florida, i.e. where it should be and where it was tracked by ground-based radar installations.
But where were they really? On the ground, the crew's report on the observation of Kiss was taken as nonsense by panicked pilots. The direction finders could be wrong by exactly 180 degrees and this property was taken into account, but at that moment the operators knew that the planes were somewhere in the Atlantic (30 degrees N, 79 degrees W) north of the Bahamas and they were just it could not have occurred to me that in fact the missing link was already much to the west in the Gulf of Mexico. If so, then Taylormog is really seeing the Florida Keys, not "like the Florida Keys."
Perhaps the direction finder operators in Miami were unable to distinguish signals from the southwest from the signals from the northeast. The mistake cost the pilots their lives: apparently, having searched for land in the west in vain and spent all the fuel, they sat on the water and sank, while they themselves were searched in vain in the east … In 1987, it was there, on the shelf bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, that one of the Evenzherov "construction of the forties! ("Truth" 2.03.1987). It is possible that the other 4 are also somewhere nearby. The question remains: How could the planes move seven hundred kilometers to the west unnoticed by everyone?
Cases of if not instantaneous, then ultra-fast movements of aircraft are already known to aviation historians. During World War II, a Soviet bomber, returning from a mission, slipped an airfield in the Moscow region more than a thousand kilometers, and landed in the Urals … In 1934, Victor Guddard flew over Scotland in a completely incomprehensible direction, approached an unknown airfield, which in the blink of an eye " disappeared from sight "… These and many other similar cases are united by the fact that ultra-fast flights were always performed in strange clouds (white fog, strange haze, sparkling mist). It is with such terms that eyewitnesses are also rewarded with another strange phenomenon in which a rapid movement in Time occurs; For example, after walking for half an hour or an hour in the "strange white fog" on the island of Barsakelmes, the travelers returned a day later.
And in the Bermuda Triangle itself, "white fog" is not such a rare guest. After meeting with him, one day an airliner approaching Miami disappeared from the radar screens … and when 10 minutes later it reappeared, all the clocks on board were behind by the same minutes. On that flight, none of the passengers noticed anything unusual; it is not excluded that a sudden increase in speed will be just as imperceptible to the eyes due to "tricks" with Time. Although no, at the same time, apart from the notorious fog and the post-flight reconciliation of chronometers, pilots should notice the dance of arrows on some devices and even interruptions in radio communication (you have to talk to the ground, a place where the usual course of Time does not coincide with the abnormal "heavenly"). Let's rememberit was after the pilots of the Avengers mentioned that a strange fog had appeared and that five compasses had failed at once, that radio communication with them disappeared and was subsequently restored only occasionally.
Such anomalous places occasionally arise also because the course of physical Time is somewhat influenced by all bodies moving around the circumference. This effect, as follows from the experiments of Professor Nikolai Kozyrev, on a very small scale can be achieved even with the help of tiny flywheels.
What can we say about the Bermuda region in the Atlantic, where the powerful Gulf Stream swirls water vortices hundreds of kilometers in diameter! (It is these formations that sometimes become visible on the ocean surface in the form of white or even dim circles and "wheels"). Whirling vortices - time changes - gravity must also change. In the center of the vortex (where the American satellites recorded the water level 25-30 meters lower than usual), the gravity is increased, at the periphery it is low. Could it be that the reason for many ship crashes is that cargo in the hold suddenly increases in weight? With non-uniform loading and exceeding the safety margin of the hull, a disaster is almost inevitable! To complete the tragic picture, one must add to this the unreliability of radio communications in such places …
Of course, after the first reports of Bermuda "tricks" with Time, new chilling, but not always true, details began to appear in print … Not so long ago, the American weekly News reported about an amazing incident with an American submarine sailing in the "triangle" at a depth of 200 feet (70 m). One day the sailors heard a strange noise overboard and felt a vibration that lasted for about a minute. Following this, it was noticed that the people in the team supposedly aged very quickly. And after surfacing with the help of a satellite navigation system, it turned out that the submarine is located in … the Indian Ocean, 300 miles from the east coast of Africa and 10 thousand miles from Bermuda! Why not repetition with the movement of technical devices, just not in the air, but in the water? True,It is too early to draw conclusions in this story: the US Navy, as before in such cases, does not confirm, but does not refute this information either.
But some conclusions can be drawn in the case of the loss of 5 aircraft. Most likely, in the sky over the Bermuda Triangle, this link collided with a non-stationary nomadic anomalous zone, in which their instruments failed and radio communication went bad. Then the planes, being in the "strange fog", moved at a very high speed to the Gulf of Mexico, where the pilots learned with surprise the local ridge of islands …
Let's clarify what “very fast” means. So, an hour and a half after takeoff, the planes find themselves in a strange fog, where all their instruments, including watches, fail.
At 4.45 pm the planes leave the clouds and restore their orientation (from the reports it is heard that they already trust the compasses). According to the aerodrome ground clock, 2.5 hours of flight passed, and there was still 3 hours of fuel left. How much time has passed according to the aircraft clock (out of order) - it's hard to say. It is unlikely that this question could be answered correctly by pilots, in extreme situations, the time perception differs sharply from usual. Only one mechanism can give us an answer - these are aircraft engines, they were the only ones that continued to work normally in the anomalous zone!
So at 5:22 pm, Taylor announced:
"Whenever someone has 10 gallons (38 liters of fuel) left, then we will splash!"
Judging by the phrase, the fuel was really coming to an end. Apparently, soon the planes splashed down because at 18.02 on the ground they heard the phrase:
"… He can drown at any minute …"
This means that the fuel in the torpedo bombers ran out between 17.22 and 18.02, while it should have been enough until 19.40, and taking into account the emergency reserve - up to 19.50. Such a sharp discrepancy can only be explained by one thing: the engines burned fuel for 2 hours more than previously thought!
Here it is, the missing link in the chain of clues! While only one hour passed on the ground, about three flew in the white fog !!! The speed of the planes was normal all this time, but for a hypothetical outside observer it would seem 3 times faster! Probably, during these 3 hours of their own time, the torpedo bombers, alas, slipped through the Florida ledge with their home base and ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. The pilots had not yet fully emerged from the tenacious paws of a very thinning fog when a ridge of islands appeared under their wings …
You know the rest. Taylor, of course, managed to recognize the islands, over which he flew dozens of times. But … I did not believe their "miraculous" appearance and at the insistence of the air base again took the western course. (Now the "strange fog" had passed, and the flight took place at the usual time.) He believed an hour later and turned back, however, the inexperienced advice of the dispatchers who kept repeating "You are just approaching Florida" completely confused him … Ultimately The link was ruined by the lieutenant's uncertainty: he frantically changed the direction of movement several times, following either northeast with a course of 30 degrees, then east (90), then, at the request of the dispatchers, to the west (270). The shortage of fuel prompted to make the final choice. Taylor played a "toss" and … Death won. Bombers, once again almost reaching the saving mainland,made their last U-turn and headed off at 270 degrees … Off land …
… Friends of the missing pilots still cannot understand why Lieutenant Taylor gave the order, and his subordinates (among whom were more senior in rank) landed on a rough sea, while they could still search for land for two whole hours !. The high-wave flooding left almost no chance of escape, and nevertheless, Taylor's subordinates undoubtedly obey this order, although they had just loudly swore and argued with their commander about the course. The pilots could make a suicidal landing only knowing that the fuel was really running out.
Presumably, at about 19:00, the lieutenant's plane was already at the bottom, radio operators recorded snatches of conversations between other crews, someone, through the obvious noise of the waves, tried to call Taylor and did not receive an answer. Then the rest of the voices fell silent … On earth, the hope of their return was still preserved, as no one could believe in the fact of splashdown. Another hour passed, according to the estimates of the aerodrome personnel, the pilots were only now running out of emergency fuel supply, and everyone was waiting for a miracle … Finally, it was 8:00 pm, it became clear that the expectations were in vain … Bright lights on the runway, which could be seen for tens of miles, were burning for a while.
Finally, at 21:00, someone in the control room silently turned the switch … The pilots, of course, were still alive at that moment. Most likely, after the planes went to the bottom, they were in the water in their life jackets. But the night storm was guaranteed to do its job. The rich experience of sea disasters suggests that most likely the pilots that were not found by anyone were able to withstand the cold waves until about midnight …
At midnight, 2500 kilometers from this place in Mount Vernon, New York, as if from a sudden blow, Joan Powers and her 18-month-old daughter woke up at the same time. Joan immediately understood the cause of her nightmare and decided to do something she had never done before - call her husband at the airbase. It took about 2 hours to find out the phone number and to connect. At exactly 2.00 am the bell rang in Fort Lauderdale. The officer on duty, who answered the phone, turned purple and stammered: “Don't worry, but we can't call your husband, Captain Edward Powers, he's in flight now …” The man who turned off the lights on the runway 5 hours ago did not dare pronounce the sentence aloud. Joan only found out the truth about her husband in the morning from a special radio news …
Perhaps with the same anomalous zone that confused Taylor, Powers, and everyone else, the twin-engine flying boat Marine Mariner, the one that fearlessly went in search of the Avengers, did not miss without a trace. The last words of the seaplane radio operator were about "strong wind at an altitude of 1800 meters" … Although the reason may be more prosaic, someone in the area of this boat's flight saw a bright flash in the sky. An explosion?.. Together with the crew of the boat, the number of victims of the "triangle" that evening was 27 people …
… When the hypothesis described above more or less took shape, I decided to introduce it to one of the direct participants in those events. The already mentioned Don Poole, now an 82-year-old retired lieutenant colonel, lives to this day in Florida. I expected any answer, but this …
“All this may be interesting, but according to you it turns out that the planes fell in the Gulf of Mexico, in fact, they were recently found in the Atlantic, just 10 miles from their home base of Fort Lauderdale! The relatives of the victims say that it would be better not to find it, it is bitter to know that the pilots died literally on the doorstep of the house, in one minute of flight! So the topic is closed. First they found 4 planes together, then the fifth one showed up - with number 28, It was Taylor's number! Yes, they flew like that: "twenty-eighth" Taylor in front, behind him - four wingmen …"
What a news! True, I did not understand at all why the 19th link fell to the input in that area, why in this case it was hard to hear them on the radio, 10 miles (18 km) they should have been heard as from the next room … Something is wrong there was enough in a new answer to the mystery, and I decided to find out the details …
Everything coincided. With the help of the Russian-American Press Center, it was possible to find out all the details of this, without a doubt, the greatest find. In 1991, the Deep Sea search vessel of the Scientific Soach Project northeast of Fort Lauderdale searched for a sunken Spanish galleon with gold. The crew on deck joked about the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, someone giggled, recalling various stories, including those with missing torpedo bombers. Therefore, when the message "There are torpedo bombers under us" came, everyone took it as a joke. These were 4 Avengers lying in formation at a depth of 250 meters, the fifth with number 28 was a mile from the rest. The four, as it were, slightly lagged behind the leading "28th" aircraft (I involuntarily recall the version that Taylor's last words were: "Do not approach, they look like …").
The archives were immediately brought up. It turned out that during all the time in the Atlantic Ocean 139 Avenger-class aircraft fell into the water, however, a group of five aircraft went missing only once in December 1945. Skeptics also decided to check if the planes in this area could fall into the water from an aircraft carrier? Such records were also not found in the archives, but soon the need for their search disappeared, a more detailed photographing of the finds proved that the planes were landing on the water: their propeller blades were bent and the cockpit lights were open. No bodies were found in the cabins. No one had any doubts that this was the missing 19th link, especially since on two sides there were lettering images "FT", as the aircraft based at Fort Lauderdale were designated. US government,The Navy and the SSP firm immediately began a legal battle between themselves over the ownership of the find, while the relatives of the victims demanded that the planes be left alone. Hawkes, the discoverer of the Avengers, said in one of his last interviews:
“We will swim closer in an underwater vehicle in order to read the numbers. I'm sure they are! We have solved the greatest mystery! But if it turns out that this is not the 19th link, it means that we have created a new great riddle, because 5 planes cannot so easily gather on the ocean floor!.."
But the secret did not give in … A month later, in the summer of 1995, Andrei Kasyanenko from the Press Center called me again and made me happy: “Fresh material has come to your request …” A long, multi-page article describing the misadventures of the Deep Sea ship, about how hard it is for researchers had to be under water, how long they had been getting to the numbers, and how … disappointed: two numbers were clearly visible FT-241, FT-87 and two only partially - 120 and 28. The missing link had numbers: FT-3, FT- 28 (Taylor), FT-36, FT-81, FT-117. Only one number came together, and that one - without a letter designation. The numbers found at the bottom of the planes have not yet been identified, they are not listed among the missing. Most of the archival records only show the serial number of the cars, but since these numbers were written on the Avenger's plywood keel, there is no hope,so that the number on the planes remains for such a long time.
In short, the riddles remain open. What planes are lying on the ocean floor near Fort Lauderdale, what or who made them come together? And where did the “those” planes go? After the failure in the Atlantic, the captain of the Deep Sea vessel categorically refused to go to the Gulf of Mexico in order to read the number of the Avenger found there earlier: “I didn't give a damn about the planes,” he said.
Do you think that a submarine immediately went to the crash site on the instructions of the government ?! No, the government "suddenly" was speechless, probably because it turned out that it would not receive money for the 19th link, but would only receive a new painful problem. It is necessary to explain with a clever expression on your face what is almost impossible to explain, but oh, how you don’t want to spend money on the investigation!
In 1996, however, an explanation was found, the official commission found that:
At the bottom there are not airplanes at all, but airplane models.
They were specially placed there in order to practice bombing from the air.
Only the most gullible believed this official nonsense. The scuba divers must have laughed until they dropped. Really none of the government agencies read their readings, where they described numbers, open lanterns, propeller blades bent when landing. None of this could have been on the target models. If these are mock-ups, then those that themselves flew here "in formation." And the pilots were probably laughing because making bombing targets at a depth of … 250 meters is the same as aiming a pistol at a target located behind the Great Wall of China!
Judging by how stupid the version was put forward by the official bodies, there, above, they feel indifference to this problem … Let us draw a careful conclusion that the secret you just read about will remain a Secret for a long time.
Vadim CHERNOBROV