A Compass starts to move its own here and there
when a flight reaches Bermuda Triangle.
According to the Triangle authors, Christopher Columbus was the first person to document
something strange in the Triangle, reporting that he and his crew
observed "strange dancing lights on the
horizon", flames in the sky, and at another point he wrote in his log
about bizarre compass bearings in the area. From his log book, dated October
11, 1492 he wrote:
"The
land was first seen by a sailor (Rodrigo de Triana),
although the Admiral at ten o'clock that evening standing on the
quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be
land; calling to Pero Gutiérrez, groom of the King's wardrobe, he told him he
saw a light, and bid him look that way, which he did and saw it; he did the
same to Rodrigo Sánchez of Segovia, whom the King and Queen had sent with the
squadron as comptroller, but he was unable to see it from his situation. The
Admiral again perceived it once or twice, appearing like the light of a wax
candle moving up and down, which some thought an indication of land. But the
Admiral held it for certain that land was near..."
Modern scholars checking the original log books
have surmised that the lights he saw were the cooking fires
of Taino natives in their canoes or on the beach; the compass problems
were the result of a false reading based on the movement of a star. The flames
in the sky were undoubtedly falling meteors, which are easily seen while at
sea.
The first article of any kind in which
the legend of the Triangle began appeared in newspapers by E.V.W. Jones on
September 16, 1950, through the Associated Press. Two years later, Fate
magazine published "Sea Mystery At Our Back Door", a short article by
George X. Sand in the October 1952 issue covering the loss of several planes
and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger
bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the
now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would
be covered in the April 1962 issue of American Legion Magazine. The
article was titled "The Lost Patrol", by Allen W. Eckert, and in his
story it was claimed that the flight leader had been heard saying "We are
entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the
water is green, no white." It was also claimed that officials at the Navy
board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars." "The
Lost Patrol" was the first to connect the supernatural to Flight 19, but
it would take another author, Vincent Gaddis, writing in the February 1964 Argosy
Magazine to take Flight 19 together with other mysterious disappearances and
place it under the umbrella of a new catchy name: "The Deadly Bermuda
Triangle"; he would build on that article with a more detailed book, Invisible
Horizons, the next year. Others would follow with their own works: John
Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969); Charles Berlitz (The
Bermuda Triangle, 1974); Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974),
and many others, all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined
by Eckert.