Every year dozens of craft are lost at sea. In the coastal waters of the United States alone, the toll of disappearing ships hovers around 25 a year. Some are the victims of navigational error of mechanical failure. Others are destroyed by turbulent weather conditions. But once in a whole a ship or plane vanishes in mysterious circumstances, often without leaving a trace of wreckage. It is these sorts of inexplicable events that stir our imagination and become the material from which legends are born.

Researchers into bizarre and incredible phenomena have identified a number of places in the world where a disturbing number of mysterious events have occurred. They refer to these regions as ‘flap’ zones, for it is as if a flap, or tear, in the normal fabric of the universe occurs here from time to time, causing the ordinary laws of time and space to be flouted. In Flap zones, strange electrical storms are encountered while compasses whirl crazily as if trapped in swirling magnetic fields. Here too, UFOs are sighted, while physical objects vanish and time seems to stand still.

The most famous flap zone of them all is the Bermuda Triangle. Vincent Gaddis, the writer who first coined the name in 1963, described the region as a place that has far more than its statistically fair share of mysterious events. The Bermuda Triangle describes a vast area of the Atlantic Ocean whose corners are in Bermuda, Puerto Rico and the southern tip of Florida. However, some people use the name much more loosely to mean the region of ocean that extends east to the Azores and south as far as Trinidad.

Ever since the 16^th century the Bermuda Triangle has been a place of heavy traffic. It lay across the main routes of the Spanish bullion fleets, of slave traders and of the rum merchants who roamed the Caribbean. Today, the US Coast Guard estimates that about 150000 ships of all descriptions pass through the region every year as well as thousands of commercial and private planes. Although one would expect a fair share of accidents amid such a volume of traffic, the outstanding thing about the Bermuda Triangle is that so many of the accidents defy logical explanation.

After thirty years as a told pilot in the Ford Motor Company’s fleet, having flown such officials as Henry Ford and Lee Iacocca, Dick Yerex retired in 1986. He and his wife left their Gibraltar, Michigan, home and moved to North Palm Beach, Florida, where Yerex took a job with a local commuter service.

On May 27, 1987, Yerex was on a routine commuter flight en route to pick up passengers on Abaco Island in Bermuda. His twin-engine Cessna was in excellent condition, with no history of mechanical problems. The weather was clear except for occasional light rain. And Yerex had an outstanding record as a pilot.

Just forty minutes after takeoff, however, Yerex radioed another pilot to inform him of a location of a government satellite balloon. He was last seen heading into the Bermuda Triangle.

After an extensive but fruitless search, Yerex was listed as missing and presumed dead, and his twin-engine Cessna, presumed destroyed.

Tom Gary, author of Adventures of an Amateur Psychic, claims that the Bermuda Triangle’s destructive force comes from an energy emanating from beneath the sea. "there is speculation that a power structure is still underwater in the Bermuda area," Gary says. The structure, he adds, rests atop a large core that extends down through the crust of the earth. "When conditions are right the power structure works intermittently, causing ship and plane captains to lose control of their crafts."

According to Gary, streaming ions from an electric current that produces a magnetic field and this causes instrument failure in craft in the vicinity. Magnetic compasses, fuel gauges, altitude indicators, and all electrically operated instruments are affected. Adds Gary, pilots who have survived such activity have reported battery drainage as well.

Many theories have been given for the mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. They include:

--- Sudden giant seiche waves or eruptions of underwater volcanoes. If wreckage surfaces, they are carried up the coast and farther out in the ocean by the Gulf Stream.

--- Human error, compounded by the known frequent failure of electromagnetic equipment, including that used for radio communication and motor power.

--- Whirlpools and "holes in the ocean" that swallow ships and planes.

--- Hijackings by modern pirates or drug traffickers.

--- Small, dense, compact fogs on the surface or in the sky, where craft enter but do not exit.

--- selection of human beings and their artefacts by collectors from outer space entering the Triangle, an area which perhaps allows easy electromagnetic access, functioning as a "hole" in the sky.

--- Sudden release of subsurface gas deposits through seismic action causing temporary lack of buoyancy on the sea and whiteouts and loss of horizon by aircraft, which results in their plunging into the ocean.

--- Giant sunken pyramids, built by Atlanteans as power sources, that may still function sporadically and interrupt the controls and communication systems of planes and ships.

Besides disappearances, there have been a number of very unusual appearances, also without any logical explanation:

--- An oceanic investigative party on the yacht New Freedom, in July 1975, passed through an intense but rainless electromagnetic storm. During one tremendous burst of energy, Dr. Jim Thorpe photographed the exploding sky. The photograph when developed showed the burst in the sky, but showed too, a square-rigged ship on the sea about one hundred feet away from the New Freedom, although a moment before the sea had been empty.

--- John Sander, a steward on the QE-1 saw a small plane silently flying alongside his ship at deck level. He alerted another steward and the officer of the watch while the plane silently splashed into the ocean seventy-five yards away from the ship. The QE-1 turned around and sent a boat over, but no indication of anything was found.

--- Another phantom plane silently crashed into the ocean at Daytona Beach on February 17, 1935, in front of hundreds of witnesses, but an immediate search revealed nothing at all in the shallow water by the beach.

--- a Cessna 172, piloted by Helen Cascio, took off for Turks Island, Bahamas, with a single passenger. About the time she should have arrived, a Cessna 172 was seen by the tower circling the island but not landing. Voices from the plane could be heard by the tower, but landing instructions from the tower evidently could not be heard by the pilot. A woman’s voice was heard saying "I must have made a wrong turn. That should be Turks but there’s nothing down there, no airports, no houses." In the meantime, the tower was frantically giving landing instructions. Finally the woman’s voice said "Is there no way out of this?" and the Cessna, watched by hundreds of people, flew away from Turks into a cloud bank from which it never exited since the plane, the pilot and the passenger were never found.

The plane had been visible to the people on Turks, but when the pilot looked down, apparently she saw only an undeveloped island. Had she been seeing the island at a point in time before the airport and the houses were built? And where did she finally go?

Finally, there appeared to be a break in the mysterious case of the five navy TBM-3 Aztec Avenger planes and the Martin Flying Boat that all disappeared without a trace after leaving Fort Launderdale on December 5, 1945, and heading into the so-called Bermuda Triangle. Treasure hunter Mel Fisher’s crew discovered what seemed to be one of the missing planes partially covered by mud. It was sitting on the ocean bottom about 20 miles wets of Key West.

Although UFO enthusiasts have long suspected that aliens captured the missing planes, the wreckage of the Grumman Avenger found by Fisher’s men showed no sign of extraterrestrial contact. It simply looked, said a member of the salvage crew, "like it had got lost and run out of fuel."

However, it turned out that the Avenger was not one of the famous 5 planes. Instead, it was lost from Key West nearly 3 months prior to those planes’ disappearance, and a survivor who bailed out was able to identify the plane absolutely.

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