Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved

by Albert Jack

  The Bermuda Triangle is also known to be an area of magnetic anomalies, or unusual variations in the earth's magnetic field. Indeed, this area of ocean was once one of the two places on earth where a magnetic compass pointed to true north (determined by the North Star) rather than magnetic north (located near Prince of Wales Island in Canada). The only other place where true north lines up with magnetic north is directly on the other side of the planet, just off the east coast of Japan, an area known by Japanese and Filipino seamen as the Devil's Sea. In both these areas, navigators not allowing for the usual compass variation between true and magnetic north would become hopelessly lost, and mysterious disappearances are equally common in the Devil's Sea. But locals there do not blame UFOs or sea monsters; they blame human error. Christopher Columbus, the famous fifteenth-century navigator credited with “discovering” the Americas, was one of the first people to recognize the difference between true and magnetic north; and he wasn't at all fazed by the odd compass readings he seemed to be getting as he sailed between Bermuda and Florida more than five hundred years ago.

  Magnetic anomalies are also thought to be responsible for the fog that appears to cling to aircraft and boats in the Bermuda Triangle and Devil's Sea. In such cases, the fog gives the strange illusion that it is traveling along with the craft rather than that the vessel is traveling through it, creating a “tunneling” effect for the passengers on board. Many reports have been made of the disorienting effect of this curious fog. In one of the most celebrated instances, the captain of a tug towing a large barge reported that the sea was “coming in from all directions” (because of methane hydrates, no doubt) and that the rope attached to the barge plus the barge itself, only a few yards behind the tug, appeared to have completely vanished, presumably shrouded in magnetic fog.

  Another natural phenomenon that might be held responsible for the strange disappearances in the region are hurricanes, notorious in that area of the ocean. These must take their fair share of the blame in bringing down small aircraft and swallowing boats, sending the wreckage to the floor of the Atlantic in minutes and leaving no trace of the craft on the surface.

  So what really happened in the case of Flight 19, the USS Cyclops, and the Marine Sulphur Queen? Let's examine the first of these disappearances in a bit more detail. The squadron leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, although an experienced pilot, had recently been transferred to the air station at Fort Lauderdale and was new to the area. Added to which, he was a known party animal and had been out drinking the evening before the fateful day.

  A very hungover Taylor tried to find someone else to take over as leader of the training flight—the only point of which was to increase the flying hours of the four apparent novices—but no other pilot would agree to stand in at such short notice. Shortly into the flight, Taylor's compass malfunctioned, and, unfamiliar with the area, he had to rely on landmarks alone. After nothing but open sea, the aircraft eventually flew over a small group of islands Taylor thought he recognized as his home—the Florida Keys.

  Flight 19 was in constant touch with flight control and was told to head directly north, which, Taylor thought, would take him straight back to base. But Flight 19 was not in fact over the Florida Keys; it was over the Bahamas—exactly where it should have been. Heading north simply sent the stricken aircraft out into the open Atlantic. Crew members were heard to suggest to each other that they should immediately head west, as their compasses were actually working, but none of the trainees dared to contradict their leader.

  With a storm gathering and the sun not visible through the clouds, Taylor refused to listen to his subordinates, accepting the instruction from flight control instead. But when told to switch to the emergency radio channel, Taylor declined, stating that one of his pilots could not tune in to that particular channel and that he did not want to lose contact with him. As a result of this, contact between Flight 19 and Fort Lauderdale became increasingly intermittent.

  After an hour of flying due north, and with no land in sight, Taylor reasoned he must be over the Gulf of Mexico, and with that made the right-hand turn, due east, that he thought would bring his team back to the west coast of Florida. But instead, an hour north of the Bahamas and flying over the Atlantic with flight control believing them to be close to the Gulf, this maneuver only served to take them farther out to sea.

  Flight 19, miles away from where anybody believed them to be, would then have run out of fuel, ditched into the sea beyond the continental shelf, and been broken within minutes by the storm. The Mariner sent to look for them was, in fact, one of two that were sent to assist. The first arrived back at base safely, but the second exploded shortly after takeoff. (The Mariners, notorious for fuel leaks, were nicknamed “flying gas tanks.”) Radio contact had been lost twenty-five minutes into the flight, and debris floating in a slick of spilled oil was found in the exact location where the plane was thought to have come down.

  In short, there was nothing mysterious about the accident after all. The official report at first stated that flight leader error was to blame for the loss of Flight 19, but this was then changed to “cause unknown,” giving rise to the mystery. Contrary to the fictitious version of events, nobody has ever stated, in an official capacity, that the aircraft simply vanished “as if they had flown off to planet Mars.”

  The disappearance of the USS Cyclops does remain a mystery, however, although heavy seas and hurricanes were reported in the area at the time. It is now thought that a sudden shift in its ten-thousand-ton metal cargo was to blame, causing the ship to capsize with all hands on deck and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

  In the case of the SS Marine Sulphur Queen, something Triangle enthusiasts rarely mention is that the cargo was made up of fifteen thousand tons of molten sulfur sealed in four giant tanks and kept at a heat of 275 degrees Fahrenheit by two vast boilers connected to the tanks via a complex network of coils and wiring. They also do not tell us that T-2 tankers such as the Marine Sulphur Queen had a terrible record for safety during the Second World War and that within the space of just a few years three of them had previously broken in half and sunk. Indeed, a similar sulfur-carrying ship had vanished in 1954 under less mysterious circumstances, having spontaneously exploded before any distress call could be made.

  But what clinches it for me is one particular detail: the fact that officers on a banana boat fifteen miles off the coast of Cuba reported a strong acrid odor in the vicinity. The conclusion at the time, but overlooked later by Triangle enthusiasts, was either that leaking sulfur must have quickly overcome the entire crew and a spark then ignited the sulfur cloud, causing a fire that the unconscious crew were unable to put out, or that an explosion had torn through the boat, depositing the crew in the shark-and barracuda-infested waters. Either way, investigators decided the ship must have gone down just over the horizon from the banana boat whose crew had detected the sulfurous odor.

  In addition to natural phenomena, there are man-made ones to consider too when it comes to the Bermuda Triangle. The Caribbean and southern Florida have long been a favorite haunt for pirates, and it's not exactly in their interests to report the ships they've sunk after looting their cargo or the crew they've murdered in the process. Many unexplained disappearances would be far better explained by pirate activity than by extraterrestrial abduction or sea monsters lurking in the deep. The pirates of the Caribbean were not heroes but vicious murderers who took no prisoners and left no evidence of their piracy, and don't let Johnny Depp or Keira Knightley seduce you into thinking otherwise.

  The main explanation for the mysterious events of the Bermuda Triangle is sheer invention. There are many examples of writers bending facts to suit their stories (notably in the case of the Loch Ness Monster and the Mary Celeste—see pages 121 and 138—or indeed pretty much every story I've covered in this book), which is hardly surprising, since mysterious and ghostly goings-on can be very profitable (as I hope to find out): everyone loves a good mystery.

 
One of my favorite examples of this is the story of the incident in 1972 of the appropriately named tanker V. A. Fogg, which was said to have been found drifting in the Triangle without a single crew member aboard. Everybody had vanished apart from the captain, whose body was found sitting at his desk with a steaming mug of tea in front of him and a haunted look on his face. He had died from shock—or so the story goes.

  The truth is rather different, although not lacking in drama. The V. A. Fogg had just delivered a cargo of benzene at the Phillips Petroleum depot at Freeport, Texas. As it returned through the Gulf of Mexico with its skeleton crew (and I mean that metaphorically, in case you've still got those Caribbean fellows on your mind) cleaning out the fuel tanks, the ship suddenly exploded and sank. The blast created a ten-thousand-foot-high pall of smoke and, on further investigation, the U.S. Coast Guard found the vessel broken in two on the seabed, one hundred feet below the surface. Their photographic record, including the bodies recovered from the sea, is at complete odds with the story told for the benefit of the Bermuda Triangle mystery, plus, of course, the fact that the Gulf of Mexico is not even in the Bermuda Triangle. I don't mean to be a mystery buster, but we do need to get our facts straight.

  To resolve the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle once and for all, I decided to adopt my fail-safe research method of getting to the bottom of things—finding out who has the most money at stake. I don't mean documentary makers, newspapers, or television companies; I'm talking about the insurance industry. Because it is very much in their interests to carry out meticulous research into accidents at sea, we can be fairly certain that they will have looked into any so-called mysteries with considerable care.

  Starting with the largest, and oldest, shipping insurance company in the world, Lloyd's of London, we discover that they certainly did take notice of the Bermuda Triangle reports during the early 1970s and issued a statement to Fate magazine, published on April 4, 1975. The statement declared that “428 vessels have been reported missing throughout the world since 1955, and it may interest you to know that our intelligence service can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Traingle’ has more losses than elsewhere.”

  So if Lloyd's of London believes there is no mystery to be found in the Bermuda Triangle, then neither should we. But just in case people with minds immeasurably greater than ours are wrong, or even lying to us, then let's do a few calculations of our own. We could start by considering that the surface of the earth is 71 percent water, an area of 13,900,000 square miles. The Bermuda Triangle at its smallest—depending on which author you believe, as some extend the area to cram as many disappearances into their version of the Triangle as possible—is around 500,000 square miles: about 3.6 percent of the world's sea area.

  During the last century more than fifty ships, large and small, and twenty aircraft of all shapes and sizes have come to grief in the Bermuda Triangle. If we use those figures and apply the same principle across the planet, we should expect to have lost around two thousand aircraft and boats in total over the past one hundred years, which sounds a little too high. But are twenty accidents per year, small or large, around the world, unreasonable to imagine? Are the events attributed to the Bermuda Triangle any greater in number than they would be in any other section of the ocean of comparable size?

  Other mystery makers point to the statistic of one thousand craft lost in the Bermuda Triangle since records began. But they fail to remind readers that records began many centuries ago when Christopher Columbus first sailed west in 1492, which works out to an average of less than two disappearances per year. That sounds about right to me. That, combined with the fact that coast guards have known the reason for the loss of a craft in almost every case—if people would only bother to ask them— should stop the fuss once and for all. This isn't an unusually high percentage of accidents for this area at all in comparison with other parts of the world. The only real surprise is that Lloyd's made any statement at all—if they'd kept quiet, they could have raised their premiums for shipping in that now infamous stretch of sea.

  What made the oversize tracks found in Bluff Creek,

  California, and other parts of America?

  Was it a giant ape or just a big jape?

  In 1924, a group of miners working in the Cascade Mountain Range in the state of Washing ton were startled to see a huge simian creature staring at them from behind a tree. Panic-stricken, one of the men fired at it, and although the bullet appeared to hit the giant ape in the head, the beast ran off, apparently unharmed. Soon afterward another of the miners, Fred Beck, spotted it again on the edge of a canyon and again fired, this time hitting the creature in the back. The group watched as it fell over the ridge. They scrambled at once down into the canyon below, but could find no trace of the creature's body.

  However, that evening as it grew dark, the men heard strange scratching noises outside their log cabin and saw shadowy gorilla-like faces at the window. The terrified miners barricaded the door, but soon the creatures were hammering at the roof and walls. Heavy rocks were thrown and the cabin rocked from side to side. The men began shooting through the walls in all directions but still the hammering continued, only ending as the sun rose the next morning. The miners packed up at once and left the cabin, vowing never to return.

  It was only after Eric Shipton famously photographed a giant footprint on the Menlung Glacier of Mount Everest in 1951, putting his pickax alongside to show its size, that interest in giant apes began to gather pace. During the 1953 expedition to Everest, when Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa guide Tenzing Nor-gay were the first to successfully climb the mountain, both men reported seeing oversize footprints. Although Hillary later disputed that these were yeti tracks, there was so much interest in finding out more that the Daily Mail sponsored a “Snowman” expedition in the Himalayas the following year. Keen to discover more about America's very own yeti-style legend, John Green tracked down Fred Beck in the late 1960s and interviewed him for his book On the Track of the Sasquatch, and the Bigfoot mystery took even firmer root in America.

  The word sasquatch, applied to the large, hairy hominid in its North American manifestation, was first coined much earlier— in the 1920s—by J. W. Burns. While working as a schoolteacher at the Chehalis Indian Reservation on the Harrison River, he had learned that Native Americans used the words soos-q'tal and sokqueatl to describe the various “giant men” of their legends. To simplify matters, Burns decided to invent one name to cover all such creatures, and through one of his articles—“Introducing British Columbia's Hairy Giants,” published in MacLean's Maga-zinein 1929—“Sasquatch” passed into wider use.

  As the public fascination for the giant apeman grew, the media began to report sightings on a regular basis. In 1958, road construction worker Ray Wallace was amazed when his colleague reported finding huge footprints in the dirt at Bluff Creek in northern California, the area they were working in. The local press descended and soon the story was front-page news all over America. Casts were made of the prints, which experts declared genuine. The first newspaper to carry the story, the Humboldt Times of Eureka, California, used the name “Bigfoot” in their headline, and the word has since become synonymous with America's favorite mystery creature. When more tracks were found, Sasquatch hunters flocked to the now famous Bluff Creek area to see what else they could discover.

  It wasn't until Ray Wallace's death, in December 2002, that the mystery was revealed. Members of Ray's family requested that his obituary should announce that, with his passing, Bigfoot had also died. Ray Wallace immediately became one of the most controversial characters in Bigfoot history when it was revealed that he (along with a handful of his close friends and co-workers) had made the tracks. Investigators soon found out that all of the tracks appeared in areas Ray had worked in. In the early days, that was in Washington State, where the first footprints had been found, while more than twenty years later, discoveries were being made farther south, in California. Bigfoot had not bee
n on the move, Ray Wallace had. Family members produced dozens of different oversize foot molds made out of wood or clay that Ray must have spent weeks crafting and honing.

  His buddies, by then rather elderly pranksters, showed in television documentaries how they had created the vast footsteps: holding on to a rope tied to the back of a logger's truck being driven very slowly had enabled them to take the giant steps that had so fooled expert analysis. In much the same way as crop-circle makers simply enjoy confounding the experts (see page 66), so did Ray and his pals.

  However, despite The New York Times's running the news as a headline story, many Bigfoot researchers have discounted the revelation (not altogether surprising, cynics might say, when their credibility was on the line) and even tried to discredit the Wallace family, threatening them with legal action. One poor haunted soul who spent his adult life in search of Bigfoot evidence wondered why anybody would put so much time into “messing with people's heads.” The answer, of course, is because it is fun. Fun, and surprisingly easy.