All five planes flew aimlessly until they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea. But with his compasses apparently malfunctioning, the leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got severely lost. Then, in December 1945, five Navy bombers carrying 14 men took off from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airfield in order to conduct practice bombing runs over some nearby shoals. In 1941 two of the Cyclops’ sister ships similarly vanished without a trace along nearly the same route.Ī pattern allegedly began forming in which vessels traversing the Bermuda Triangle would either disappear or be found abandoned. “Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship,” U.S. The Cyclops never sent out an SOS distress call despite being equipped to do so, and an extensive search found no wreckage. Nonetheless, reports of unexplained disappearances did not really capture the public’s attention until the 20th century.Īn especially infamous tragedy occurred in March 1918 when the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy cargo ship with over 300 men and 10,000 tons of manganese ore onboard, sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay. William Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” which some scholars claim was based on a real-life Bermuda shipwreck, may have enhanced the area’s aura of mystery.

Though it’s unclear exactly what happened, many sources later attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle. Did you know? After gaining widespread fame as the first person to sail solo around the globe, Joshua Slocum disappeared on a 1909 voyage from Martha’s Vineyard to South America.

Naval armada bermuda triangle