Pursuing the Truth Behind the World’s Greatest Mystery
Gian J Quasar
To that vast horizon, whose approaching will solve many riddles . . .
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Book Details
Price
|
3.00 |
|---|---|
Pages
| 322 p |
File Size
|
3,894 KB |
File Type
|
PDF format |
ISBN
| 0-07-145217-6 |
Copyright©
| 2004, 2005 by Gian J. Quasar |
A Riddle at a Nearby Shore
WITHIN THE WESTERN North Atlantic Ocean there exists what might be
called a triangle of sea extending southwest from the island of Bermuda to
Miami and through southern Florida to Key West; then, encompassing the
Bahamas, it extends southeast through Puerto Rico to as far as 15° North
latitude, and then from there northward back to Bermuda. This is the
area commonly called the Bermuda Triangle. For all intents and purposes
it appears like any other temperate sea. Yet in the annals of sea mysteries
there is no other place that challenges mankind with so many extraordinary
and incredible events, for this is where far more aircraft and ships have
disappeared throughout recorded maritime history than in any other region
of the world’s oceans. With few exceptions the disappearances have
been in fair weather, sending out no distress messages and leaving no
wreckage or bodies. In the last twenty-five years alone, some seventy-five
aircraft and hundreds of pleasure yachts have inexplicably vanished despite
the fact that GPS is now extensively used, that communication systems are
powerful and reliable, and that searches are immediately launched.
Disturbing as these numbers may seem, the circumstances surrounding
many of the disappearances are what really give rise to the greatest
alarm. From the files of several federal investigating bureaus, eye-opening
details emerge that continue to present difficult questions that as yet have
no answers within the scope of our present knowledge of the sea, aeronautics,
and navigation. One such disappearance illustrates this point.
It was Halloween 1991. Radar controllers checked and rechecked what
they had just seen. The scope was blank in one spot now. Everywhere else
within the scope seemed normal, and routine traffic was proceeding undisturbed,
in their vectors, tracked and uninterrupted. But moments earlier
radar had been tracking a Grumman Cougar jet. The pilot was John Verdi.
He and trained copilot, Paul Lukaris, were heading toward Tallahassee,
Florida. Just moments before, with a crackle of the mike, Verdi’s voice had
come over the receiver at the flight center.
He requested a higher altitude. Permission was quickly granted and the
turbo jet was observed ascending from 25,000 feet to its new altitude of
29,000 feet. All seemed normal. Some thunderstorms had drifted into the
path of the jet, and satellite imagery confirmed the area was overcast.
But that was no concern for Verdi. They were above the weather. At
their present altitude they were just breaking out of the cloud cover,
emerging into the brilliant sunlight.
The clouds must have been their typical breathtaking sight, billowing
below in glowing white hills and arroyos.
They were still ascending. Verdi had not yet “rogered” that he had
reached his prescribed flight level.
Radar continued to track the Cougar. Until, for some unknown reason,
while ascending, it simply faded away. Verdi and Lukaris answered no
more calls to respond. Furthermore, they had sent no SOS to indicate
they had encountered any hint of a problem. Readouts of the radar observations
confirmed the unusual. The Grumman had not been captured
on the scope at all as descending or as falling to the sea; there had been
no sudden loss of altitude. It just disappeared from the scope while climbing.
One sweep they were there. The next—raised brows on traffic controllers:
it was blank.
The ocean, sitting under convective thunderstorm activity, was naturally
not conducive to a search. No trace, if there was any left to find,
was ever sifted out of the Gulf. When it was all over, the whole incident
was chalked under a familiar and terse assumption: “aircraft damage and
injury index presumed.”
So far, very few disappearances have ever been reported by the press and,
if they are, they’re reported with little attention to detail, or the reports studiously
avoid any reference to the unusual. In 1978 and 1979 alone, eighteen
aircraft mysteriously vanished, yet only two or three rated any space
in newspapers. Among these missing planes was a DC-3 airliner; a large
twin-engine charter on approach; and several private aircraft in the narrow
corridor between Bimini Island and Miami, which are in view of each
other from aircraft altitudes. Yet, nevertheless, all vanished as if surgically
extracted by a hand being careful not to affect the surrounding heavy
traffic on that route, which reported no signs of wreckage or unusual
weather. Even apart from the strangeness of the events preceding and surrounding
some disappearances, it appears fairly obvious by the number
that something is very wrong.
Although it is often publicly recited that the Bermuda Triangle’s reputation
is based on twenty planes and fifty vessels posted missing over the
last hundred years, official records vividly show that such a number can be
and has been easily exceeded in any given two-year period. On an average,
however, four aircraft and about twenty yachts vanish each year.
The frequency of those two years is alarming enough. But out of all
the alarming elements in the statistics, it is not the isolated surges of
losses that are the most intriguing. Dossiers on all aircraft accidents,
which include missing planes, are still maintained, and behind-the-scenes
they monotonously document the startling repetition. A “Brief Format,”
usually just called a Brief, is available for perusal from civil investigating
authorities, particularly the National Transportation Safety Board in
Washington, D.C. These handy and mostly terse one- or two-page chits
preserve the known facts. Considering the brevity of the information, the
nickname Brief is not a misnomer, especially prior to 1982 before the
Board enlarged the scope of information contained on the sheets. Their
pages, though, quietly testify to the actual number of missing planes in
the Bermuda Triangle.
Computer searches of the database files of the NTSB for several time
brackets reveal some sobering statistics. It is quite surprising to examine the
Briefs and notice what is not in newspapers. For instance, between 1964 (the
oldest dates for the “Brief ” records) and 1974 thirty-seven planes vanished.
The period from 1974 to 1984 show that forty-one aircraft have mysteriously
disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. The pattern was the same—mostly
over the Bahamas; it continued: from 1984 to 1994 thirty-two vanished.
And from 1994 to the present twenty aircraft have disappeared. Although it
may appear that the number is on the decrease, this decrease mirrors the
economic downturn of the late 1990s, and dropped sharply after September
11, 2001, when traffic was severely curtailed for a number of reasons.
There is no evidence, however, that the circumstances for disappearances
are any less unusual than before. Mystery continues to strike. On
Christmas Eve 1994, a Piper aircraft vanished over West Boca Raton,
Florida—one of the few instances of a plane ostensibly disappearing
over land. Although radar operators could never find a trace of it in their
tracking readouts, a witness below clearly saw the navigation lights of
the Piper. Investigation proved it must have belonged to Laurent Abecassis,
who had taken the plane out earlier in the day for some practice flying.
On May 12, 1999, an Aero Commander, while approaching Nassau,
disappeared from radar for thirty minutes, then miraculously reappeared,
though the pilot seemed unaware anything had happened, be-
fore the plane and the pilot vanished again, this time permanently. On
February 1, 2001, Casey Purvis was in his Cherokee Six playing radar tag
with a Coast Guard aircraft as a practice maneuver. Suddenly he reported
himself in a fog, then vanished. Wreckage from the aircraft was
later found near Marathon, Florida Keys, where he last reported himself.
Weather from both the nearby Coast Guard aircraft and Marathon reporting
station confirmed visibility was clear for 12 miles. On July 20,
2002, a Piper Lance mysteriously crashed after taking off from Freeport,
Grand Bahama. After having been in flight long enough to have been
halfway to Florida, its fuselage was found only 15 miles from its point
of departure. Radar tracking cannot explain it. The phenomenon of
the bizarre is not abating.
Factual aviation accident reports are available from General Microfilm,
the National Transportation Safety Board’s documents contractor, from
1978 onward. Those prior have been destroyed. Carefully sifting through
these accident reports brings to light a pattern interwoven with tragedy
and mystery. Together they create a sobering picture of sudden and many
times bizarre disappearances at sea in a confined area. Quite often, when
faced with the facts, the curious have come away badly jolted. The pages
they read bare some recurrent themes in the losses and these, in turn,
open the door to some potentially explosive issues.
Everybody involved in one particular case—tower and radar controllers
and listening pilots alike—was dramatically affected by some frantic last
words. Uttered in a desperate voice, they introduced other elements, stark
and frightening, in the mystery of missing planes. While in flight near the
coast of Puerto Rico, on June 28, 1980, about 35 miles out, José Torres,
the pilot of an Ercoupe, signaled that a “weird object” in his flight path was
forcing him to change course. Despite all his evasive maneuvers, the object
continued to cut him off. That’s not all—he reported his equipment was
on the fritz, and he was now lost.
“Mayday, Mayday,” he continued to call. Then, as astounded controllers
watched, the plane vanished from the radarscope, with Torres
and his passenger, José Pagan. Minutes later an object reappeared on the
scope and then flitted away. In what manner it fled the scope the report
would not comment.
A search that night cast beams of light on a dark ocean. It was the typical
nothing: a bland ocean surface crisscrossed with streaming beams of
Civil Air Patrol spotlights. The crests and swells were devoid of any trace
of an accident.
Many of the other planes have simply vanished while in sight of land,
while coming in for a landing, or after having just departed, occurring, it
should be emphasized, between a single sweep of the radarscope (less than
40 seconds). Others have vanished over shallow waters, less than 10 feet
deep, yet with equal lack of trace or silhouette to mark their position, as if
magically they just faded away, while others have vanished during radio
contact, as in the case above, blurting such words like: “Is there any way
out of this?”; “Stand by, we have a problem right now”; “Oh, Jesus
Christ . . . ! ”; “What’s happening to me?”; or reporting that their compass
or directional gyro is going berserk.
The missing boats are not just specks lost on a big ocean. Many have
vanished just at the edge of the harbor, others while cruising around a
peninsula, and others have been found drifting shipshape, lifeless, the
occupants gone without leaving any clue behind as to what happened.
In no search undertaken by the Seventh Coast Guard district (which
has jurisdiction over the area of the Bermuda Triangle), for any airplane
or vessel posted overdue and then eventually declared missing, has a body
ever been recovered. Even when the vessel may later be found, it is always
found deserted or, in the case of aircraft, it is found ditched in shallow
water, the ignition key removed, the doors tightly closed, but no sign of
the pilots or passengers.
The disappearances have not been limited to small craft. A whole
squadron of five Navy torpedo bombers, the famous Flight 19, vanished
on a routine training flight off Florida on December 5, 1945, after the
flight leader radioed, among other things, that both his compasses were
no longer working. Although the airplanes had the latest navigational
devices and sea survival equipment, the patrol never found their way
back, nor was any trace found. Passenger aircraft have included DC-3
and DC-4 airliners, plus several other four-engine models. Military aircraft
have even included an eight-engine B-52 bomber. Large ships have included
the 504-foot tanker Marine Sulphur Queen, the 520-foot Poet, and the
590-foot Sylvia L. Ossa. In the case of the Ossa, before she vanished she had
just signaled she was near Bermuda—a dramatic reminder of the boundaries
of the Triangle. Most of these vessels were carrying cargoes that
are fairly safe to ship, such as coal and corn; some have even been in ballast—
that is, empty and shipping no cargoes at all. None of these are as inexplicable
as “reappearances,” where a pilot’s radio messages are captured
receding hundreds of miles beyond where he vanished and hours after
fuel exhaustion. In the case of the Grumman Cougar jet that vanished
from radar while ascending to 29,000 feet, the summation of one observer
that “there is just no logical explanation” seems to fit all these incidents.
There is a growing belief that there is something very different out in
the Triangle as opposed to other seas. Since ships and planes disappear in
like manner, there seems to be little possibility that ordinary mishaps such
as pilot error, vertigo, fuel exhaustion, getting lost, disorientation, or natural
disasters like tidal waves, cyclones, or whirlpools can be the sole culprit.
While some of the above can be deadly to planes, they are not to
ships and vice versa.
....
Table of Contents
1 The Bermuda Triangle: A Riddle at a Nearby Shore 1
2 The Riddle of Missing Planes 14
3 The Riddle of Vanished Ships 51
4 Can It Be That Simple? 83
5 Those Who Lived to Tell 97
6 Space-Time Vortices, Zero-Point, and Sunken Worlds 118
7 Clues from a Shifting Paradigm 144
8 Atyantica 168
9 The Warnings of Lunar and Martian Anomalies 189
10 Interest from a Past World? 209
11 Let the Oceans Speak 230
12 A Vast Horizon: An Answer from Without,
Within, and All Around Us 249
Notes 262
Bibliography 269
Acknowledgments 283
Index 285
Screenbook
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