The Bermuda Triangle is not the only place where ships seem to disappear with alarming regularity. An area in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of central Japan has inexplicably swallowed up so many vessels that the Japanese government has officially designated it a danger zone.

The perilous spot has been known as the Devil’s Sea, or the Demon Sea, ever since nine ships disappeared there in 1955, a government expedition ship sent to find them vanished after about ten days. Over the next fifteen years, more than a dozen boats were lost in the Devil’s Sea.

Japanese researchers suggest that suggest that severe winter weather conditions and huge waves could be the cause of some of the disappearances. They also point out the Demon Sea has a peculiar trait, true north and magnetic north are aligned there, making it impossible to get an accurate compass reading in the area.

In hopes of unravelling the mystery of the treacherous waters, the Japanese Transport Ministry has launched another on-site investigation of the area. But instead of risking a crew of men, the government is installing a robot-buoy in the Devil’s Sea, where for several years it will analyse the wind, weather and wave conditions in the Japanese equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

|  Back to the Top  |

The village which disappeared was located near Lake Angikuni, about five hundred miles northwest of the Royal Candian Mounted Police base at Churchill, Canada. Although it was an isolated spot, the Eskimos who lived there were frequently visited by trappers who swapped furs and joined them for meals of caribou. French-Canadian trapper Joe LaBelle, who had travelled through that part of the Canadian wilderness for about forty years, considered the folk who lived on Lake Angikuni old friends.

But in November 1930, when Joe decided to stop by the village for a visit, he immediately knew something was wrong. First of all, the dogs did not bark. He shouted a greeting but no one answered. Finally he opened the doors to several of the low sod huts and yelled for his friends. No one replied.

An hour-long search of the village showed that every inhabitant had disappeared. There were no signs of a struggle – pots of food sat over fires that had been cold for weeks. A needle was still in some clothing that a woman had been mending. Kayaks had been left unattended for so long that waves battered them. Rifles stood gathering dust. The Eskimo’s dogs were found dead from starvation, tied to stumps.

The mystery deepened when LaBelle searched his friends’ cemetery where bodies were customarily covered with rocks. One grave had been opened and the body exhumed. Stealing a body, LaBelle knew, was taboo for an Eskimo. Whoever had done it had stacked the grave stones in two piles – ruling out any possibility that an animal had uncovered the body.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigated the case, and never came up a with an explanation of what happened.

|  Back to the Top  |

Both temperatures and tempers were blazing in the summer of 1924, in the Middle Eastern desert. In the area then known as Mesopotamia, the Arabs were fighting and the British were trying to keep a hand on the situation. On July 24, Flight Lieutenant W.T. Day and Pilot Officer D.R. Stewart took off in their single-engine plane for a routine, four-hour-long reconnaissance flight over the area.

When the fliers failed to return, a search party was sent out after them. The next day their plane was found – in perfect condition. The craft had not been shot down. Moreover, gasoline was in the tank and the engine turned over as soon as it was started. But where were Day and Stewart? And why did they land in an area of barren desert?

Looking for clues, the search party noted boot marks where the officers had jumped out of the plane. Their footprints showed that the men had left the plane and walked along, side by side, for about 120 feet. Then, while still standing next to each other, the men simply stopped – and vanished.

A half dozen of desert tribesmen, soldiers in armoured trucks, and search planes never turned up a trace of the pilots, who seemed to have walked off the surface of the earth.

|  Back to the Top  |

| Back to the Previous Menu |