Among the ships often listed among the mysteriously disappeared are the Mary Celeste (1872), the Marine tanker ship Sulphur Queen with 39 men aboard (1963), and the nuclear-powered submarine Scorpion with a crew of 99 (1968). The Mary Celeste entered the list of supposed Bermuda Triangle mysteries many decades after its odd tragedy. The ship set sail from New York to Genoa, Italy, but was found sailing unmanned some 400 miles off course, off the coast of Africa. Personal articles of the crew were found and food storage areas showed no sign of disturbances. A tattered sail and a missing lifeboat suggested the boat had encountered a storm, but the ship’s log, in which information was recorded as late as nine days before the ship was found, made no mention of any kind of catastrophe. There is no evidence, however, that the Mary Celeste ever entered the area of the Bermuda Triangle. But the unanswered questions concerning its fate are often cited by those who attribute a spiteful energy as being responsible for strange and disastrous events of the triangle.Another theory has evolved to give explanation to this vagueness. Two leading exorcists believe that the strange happenings in that region are caused by tormented souls from the spirit world and that the ‘spirits’ in the area are from ten million negroes who were dumped or thrown overboard during the slave trade period. Their troubled souls can ‘take over’ the minds of pilots and sailors, just as people on land are said to be possessed by spirits.
A special prayer was held in the area by exorcist Donald Omand, a retired Church of England vicar and expert on the occult. The aim is to lay at peace these tormented souls who supposedly haunt the Atlantic graveyard of over 1,000 people who over the years have disappeared without traces.
Backing this extraordinary theory is British surgeon and psychiatrist Dr Kenneth McCall. He said, “Just as in our world here, one or two people can cause torment or haunting disturbances. This can happen with the crew of a ship or plane-and on a very large scale in the Bermuda Triangle. It seems the spirits are trying to draw attention to their state. They are not concerned with destroying the other people”.
Dr McCall at the age of 67 wrote a special service to be said over the troubled waters and this included the Requiem Mass and the Anglican Eucharist of Remembrance. He said, “I think this will lessen the number of planes and ships that disappear there”.
The spirit theory had been current among the seamen for many years before the world heard of the Triangle. The greatest disaster had taken place 27 years earlier, in March 1918. The month in which the US supply vessel Cyclops vanished from the face of the earth without making a single distress call. No wreckage or any of the crew of 309 was ever found.
Theories about why so many air and water ships disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle involve strange magnetic fields, time warps, the lost continent of Atlantis, and alien abduction. Other proposed explanations include physical forces unknown to science, a “hole in the sky,” and an unusual chemical component in the region’s seawater. Several books have suggested that an intelligent, technologically advanced race living in space or under the sea has been responsible for jamming equipment and leading ships and planes to disaster.
More than 1,000 lives were claimed by the Bermuda Triangle during the twentieth century. That averages to about 10 per year, a figure similar to other areas of high water traffic or volatile natural conditions. A conclusion was made by scientific theories; they said that the number of disappearances in the region is normal and that most of the disappearances have obvious explanations. Paranormal links with the Bermuda Triangle still remain, however, in the common imagination of the mind.
