On that cloudy afternoon of 5 December 1945, at ten minutes past two, when five light torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale Air Force Base in Florida and, under the command of Lieutenant Charles Taylor, headed east towards the scattered Chicken Islands, none of the pilots suspected that they would not be returning from school flight No. Fifty minutes after the last bomb had been dropped in a low overflight over the uninhabited islands, Taylor radioed for them to head north.
They flew north for the next forty minutes. At least that’s what their compasses said. Each of them had two in his cockpit. After forty minutes of flight, Edward Powers, one of the pilots in formation training, radioed for someone to read his compass for the direction of flight. He received no reply, but a few minutes later, one of the instructors on another flight, who had intercepted his request, asked Taylor, the flight leader of No 19, to explain the problem of his five aircraft. Taylor replied, “Our compasses have failed. We are trying to find a way back to Fort Lauderdale. We are flying over an island that is very rugged. I am sure we are over the Florida Keys, but I don’t know where and how to find our way back to Lauderdale.”
Lost over the sea
Flight Director Taylor knew that if Flight 19 was on course, the archipelago should have appeared directly in front of them, not to their right as it did. But it should have been the Bahamas, not the Florida Keys. The weather, and with it visibility, was getting worse and worse. This confused and disoriented both him and the other four pilots in the formation. They no longer knew where they were. They only knew what it might mean. They had been in the air for an hour and a half, with three hours of fuel left in their tanks. The weather continued to deteriorate.
Instructor Cox, who was in command of the second flight that day, informed the base that Taylor and his formation were lost and could not find the right direction. Taylor, in the next hour of flight, came to the wrong conclusion that they were lost somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, so he adjusted the course of the flight to point them northeast. He expected them to be over Florida soon, but in fact they were flying out to sea. The base was becoming increasingly concerned because the base control tower was not receiving signals from his transmitter, which would have triangulated his position. Of particular concern was the fact that it was becoming increasingly difficult to establish radio contact with Flight 19.
When, after another 45 minutes of flight, Taylor and his aircraft still had not made landfall, it became clear to everyone in the formation that something was very wrong. But their commander was still convinced they were somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. He ordered them to head east for ten minutes. Sixty years later, when military archives were opened and radio recordings were listened to, an investigation showed that one of the pilots had tried to resist. “Damn it, if we had flown back west, we would have found our way home. Fly back west, damn it!”
But Taylor, who swore by military discipline, insisted, and they continued to fly out to sea. In exactly the opposite direction to Fort Lauderdale, which was to the west. At 17.24, Taylor realised his mistake, turned the planes 180 degrees and hoped to see land before the tanks of one of them ran out of fuel. They had been in the air for more than three hours, with enough fuel for two more, radio contact with the base was disrupted and visibility was non-existent.
At 17:50, several receivers in Florida started receiving the signal from his navigation transmitter and calculations showed that the planes were within 190 kilometres of Fort Lauderdale. But it was too late. Thirty minutes later, and with the sun still setting, Taylor radioed one last time: “Let’s stick together … hold on, if there’s no landing … when the first one drops below ten gallons, we’re going down together.”
After this last radio message, five aircraft of Flight 19 disappeared. Along with them, every trace of the five pilots and nine other crew members was lost.
Fifteen minutes later, a PBM Mariner rescue aircraft flew from another air base in Florida. Three minutes after take-off, radio contact was lost and the PBM Mariner disappeared with its 13 crew members. An hour and a half later, the captain of the US tanker USS Gaines Milles, who was in the vicinity, reported that his crew had come across the burning remains of the wreck and a large oil slick. What went wrong has remained a mystery to this day.
Following the disappearance of the five aircraft in Flight 19, the US Navy launched a major search operation to try to locate the remains of any wreckage in an area where it was believed the aircraft had attempted to land at sea. Nothing was found.
In 2006, when US military documents classified as secret became public after sixty years, the English air crash expert Phil Jones launched a new investigation into this event, which attracted much attention in the US in the 1950s and became a myth about dark and mysterious forces in the Bermuda Triangle, where a double tragedy took place.
Jones’ investigation showed that after a low bombing exercise, the aircraft flew further east than planned in the first hour of the flight due to strong winds. When they encountered a broken archipelago after the next hour of flight, Taylor was convinced that they were over the Florida Keys in the Gulf of Mexico due to inoperative compasses, when in fact they were over the Bahamas. When he ordered the other four pilots to head east again, they flew out to open sea. And when he realised his mistake, it was too late, because their planes had run out of fuel.
It is not so unusual that, despite an extensive search operation, no wreckage of Flight 19 was found in the following days. Even in bad weather and strong currents in this area of the otherwise infamous Bermuda Triangle, it is difficult to find aircraft wreckage. One of the exploratory expeditions led by Graham Hawkes came across one of the same type of aircraft in 1991 in his deep-sea submarine, but the video footage later proved that it was not Flight 19. He tried again in 2003 and found another similar aircraft, but this time it turned out to be a different plane, which had already sunk in the sea in October 1943, but whose crew had escaped.
The fact that 95 military pilots and crew members lost their lives during flight training at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, between 1942 and 1945 alone, shows that this is an area in the Bermuda Triangle where a significant number of aircraft, as well as ships, have disappeared in sometimes very unusual circumstances, which have been reported by witnesses for at least three centuries. This does not take into account the number of larger and smaller ships that also disappeared without a trace, or that were encountered by fishermen and found to be intact, but whose crews disappeared without a trace.
Bermuda Triangle
Flight 19 was by no means the only disappearance of an aircraft, ship or crew in the Bermuda Triangle. It stretches between Florida and the Bahamas to the west, Puerto Rico to the south-east and Bermuda in the North Atlantic. Long before then, native fishermen in the surrounding areas had been telling stories of huge waves and other strange phenomena, as well as the disappearance of a fisherman every week in the area. It was not uncommon for their boats to be found later, but there was no sign of the crew on board.
Most of these cases were never officially recorded, as the fishermen and their families treated the disappearances as part of their island life. Disappearances of small fishing boats in an area of at least 1.5 million square kilometres have always been commonplace. This is also because it is an open sea, where strong currents mix and hurricanes are frequent, and strong seismic and volcanic activity has always been detectable beneath the deep tectonic trenches in the seabed. Off the coast of Bermuda alone, more than three hundred shipwrecks are thought to still lie on the seabed.
Several large ships have also disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the past, and these disappearances have raised a lot more dust. One of these large cargo ships was the USS Cyclops. Fully loaded with 11,000 tonnes of manganese ore and with a captain and 308 people on board, it left the port of Barbados in early March 1918, never arriving in Baltimore, where it was bound for. After leaving Barbados with only one engine running, all trace of her was lost, and she sailed during the days when a violent storm was brewing in the Bermuda Triangle. No remains ever surfaced, and Cyclops’ wreckage was never even found on the seabed.
As sonar mapping of the seabed around Bermuda has shown, the archipelago was formed in geological prehistory by very active volcanoes in the area. This has also resulted in deep underwater canyons whose walls, hundreds of metres high, can trigger the sudden formation of huge waves measuring ten to twenty metres in height during major storms, which have been reported by seafarers since time immemorial. Did one of these waves sink Cyclops?
Quite possible. Simulations have shown that a wave fifteen metres high would easily have capsized a relatively unstable ship like the Cyclops, which was also weighed down by a heavy load of manganese ore.
In the area where the ship disappeared, oceanographers have also discovered that the seabed is covered with a strange white substance that looks like wax. It was not wax, of course, but methane hydrate, which is formed from the organic remains of dead animals and plants. It is often deposited in layers on the seabed or compressed in pockets on the bottom.
In 1981, a ship in the South China Sea used a drilling rig to penetrate one of these pockets. Methane hydrate, which began to leak out rapidly in the form of gas bubbles, diluted the density of the water so much that the ship began to list dangerously to one side or the other on the surface, before quickly capsizing and sinking.
Any major change in the seabed, such as an underwater landslide, could puncture one of these pockets of methane hydrate. This is another explanation for Cyclops’ disappearance. It is calculated that the Cyclops probably sank somewhere off the north-west coast of Puerto Rico. As this is an area of the deep Puerto Rico Trench, the bottom of which lies more than eight kilometres below the surface, it is unlikely that the wreck of the Cyclops will be found any time in the near future.
The Puerto Rico Trench is the deepest trench in the Atlantic Ocean, where the North American tectonic plate burrows beneath the Caribbean plate. If an earthquake of magnitude nine on the Richter scale or greater were to strike the area, there is a high probability that a tsunami similar to the one that struck the Asian and East African coasts in December 2004 as a result of an earthquake in a similar tectonic trench near Sumatra, Indonesia, would strike both the east coast of the USA and the Atlantic coasts of western Europe. The tsunami could be fatal for towns on the east coast of the USA where nuclear power plants are located, and could be generated by a weaker earthquake that could trigger underwater landslides.
Ellen Austin and the disappearance of sailors
Vincent Gadys was the first to mention the occasional strange disappearances along the otherwise busy shipping lanes that run through the Bermuda Triangle, in his 1964 article in Argosy magazine. Soon afterwards, in keeping with the spirit of the times, a number of explanations appeared in the USA, not least those attributing the disappearances to supposed visitors from outer space. This was to be expected, given the fact that testimonies of sightings of unidentified flying objects also proliferated at the same time.
Other explanations have sometimes attributed the sometimes really strange behaviour of ship and aircraft compasses in the area to the magnetic forces of the seabed rocks that confuse the compasses. There were also those who were convinced that the Bermuda Triangle was in fact the site of the mythical submerged Atlantis. But on the other hand, it was also true that many ship captains and airplane pilots who flew over the area did not notice anything unusual.
Be that as it may, one of the crew disappearances described by Gadys in his article concerned the seventy-metre American ocean liner Ellen Austin, which sailed between New York and London in the 1880s. On one of her voyages, she came across an abandoned, unmanned ship in the Bermuda Triangle. The captain sent some of his crew on board and the two ships sailed together for some time. Two days later, a strong wind blew and visibility deteriorated for several hours. When the fog lifted again, the captain of the ship, Ellen Austin, was surprised to find that the ship he had found had disappeared with part of his crew. They searched for her for a few days before giving up and sailing on to London.
According to one version of the story, which has never been clarified and which has also been attempted to be clarified with the help of the Loyd’s insurance archives, Ellen Austin was supposed to have stumbled upon the lost ship a few days after the first disappearance, but this time the crew mysteriously disappeared from the ship. The captain is said to have sent some of his men on board a third time, but this time they disappeared with the strange ship.
There have been many cases of ship and aircraft disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle in the 20th century. In early September 1920, the four-masted Caroll A. Deering, carrying a cargo of coal, sailed from the port of Lewes, Delaware, heading for Rio de Janeiro. She arrived there safely and delivered her cargo, then set sail again in early December, bound for the coast of North Carolina. Less than two months later, the ship, which had run aground on the rocks, was spotted by other ships in the vicinity. Abandoned. There was no captain and no crew of ten. There was no life jacket, and in the galley they came across a meal that looked as if someone had just prepared it. Although a fairly extensive investigation was launched, it never yielded any tangible answers as to where the captain and the eleven sailors had gone.
On 30 January 1948, a British Airlines Tudor Star Tiger with 25 passengers on board took off from Santa Maria Airport in the Azores. It was bound for Bermuda across the Atlantic and the radio operator at the airport received a message from the captain saying that they were due to land in Bermuda at five in the afternoon. The radio then went dead and, as the pilot was no longer responding to the control tower, a search operation was launched. Twenty-six aircraft searched for possible wreckage over the next five days, but found nothing.
In the last days of December of that year, a DC-3 Dakota with 26 people on board flew from Puerto Rico to Miami, Florida. When it was 80 kilometres as the crow flies from the airport where it was due to land, the coordinates of its location were read out one last time via radio signal. It was due to land twenty minutes later, but by then it was gone. The wreckage was never found either. In the same area of the Bermuda Triangle, two other aircraft disappeared in a similar manner.
In 1954, a US military aircraft on Flight 441 disappeared 400 kilometres off the coast within the Triangle. It was carrying 42 passengers, most of them naval officers and their families. It simply disappeared from radar and never appeared on radar again. This disappearance – partly to protect military reports – remains one of the most mysterious in a series of similar disappearances in the area, as there were also a large number of inflatable life jackets on board, which almost always surface in the event of an accident or a grounding at sea. In this case, none were found.
In June 2005, a Piper-PA with three passengers on board disappeared in the infamous Triangle while flying from the Bahamas to Florida. In April 2007, another such disappearance occurred nearby, but this time only the pilot was on board. The last recorded disappearance of an aircraft in the Bermuda-Puerto Rico-Florida triangle occurred on 5 December 2008. On that date, a small English aircraft, the Norman Islander, with twelve passengers, flew from Santiago to New York, and all trace of it was lost 35 minutes after take-off. The US Coast Guard launched a search operation, but the plane or its wreckage was never found.
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Sanderson’s twelve triangles
Ivan T. Sanderson was a Scottish-American who graduated in biology from Cambridge University. He worked for the British Naval Counterintelligence Service in the Caribbean during the Second World War, and later indulged his long-standing passion for investigating the mysterious and paranormal, founding the Society for Research into the Unexplained. Amongst other topics he also devoted himself to the statistical analysis of those places on the globe where the frequency of official and unofficial reports of unusual, paranormal and mysterious phenomena was highest. Although there are, of course, those who dispute his methods, he came to some interesting conclusions and published them in 1972, just a few months before his death.
The result of Sanderson’s statistical analysis, which he and his colleagues carried out, was a map of the world in which 12 triangles were drawn. These triangles have a higher-than-average frequency of unexplained natural and related phenomena compared to other parts of the Earth. Apart from the two triangles located at the South and North poles, the remaining triangles, with roughly the same area, are thought to be arranged in two bands centred on the same latitude. In addition to the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic, these include the no less infamous Dragon Triangle in the Pacific.
In addition to the Bermuda Triangle and the Dragon Triangle, which lie on opposite sides of the globe, Sanders also includes the triangle off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the desert triangle in the Sahara region of Algeria, and the one between the coast of Madagascar and the continent in southern Africa, the Indus River near Karachi in Pakistan, the high seas off the west coast of Australia, the Loyalty Islands north of New Zealand, volcanic Hawaii and, most recently, the Easter Islands in the South Pacific. Sanderson, who called the 12 triangles “the devil’s graveyards”, felt that the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle were no more unusual than those elsewhere in these areas. Shipping and air traffic between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda is simply several times more dense.
The Bermuda Triangle can easily be compared to the Dragon Triangle off the south-eastern coast of Japan in terms of the number of unusual phenomena. Sanderson attributed the frequent reports of compasses and other vessel instruments failing in the Dragon Triangle to the mixing of strong cold and warm currents in the seawater, which he believed could create strong electromagnetic fields, confusing the instruments. His theory has never been scientifically confirmed. But they have not been disproven either.
Dragon Triangle
The Dragon Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Sea by the Japanese, which lies at the same latitude as the Bermuda Triangle, is an area in the Philippine Sea between the south-eastern coast of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and the islands of Palau and Guam further south. It is known for its seabed, which is covered in many places by a whitish layer of methane hydrates, and the already seismically vibrant triangle is also home to a significant, though still unknown, number of active underwater volcanoes. The Dragon Triangle covers an area of 1,300,000 square kilometres of mostly open sea with some islands. For centuries, Japanese fishermen have reported strange disappearances of ships, as well as other far stranger phenomena, and have woven these stories into their tales and legends.
Since the end of the Second World War, more than 1 500 ships and submarines, as well as military and passenger aircraft, have disappeared in the area. The frequency of disappearances and other unusual phenomena in the Dragon Triangle is much higher than in the Bermuda Triangle. Even more bizarre are reports from captains and pilots that they and their vessels and crews have found themselves in a kind of time-space capsule, like black holes in space, in moments like their own, tens or even hundreds of nautical miles away from where – at least according to their testimonies, which cannot be objectively assessed – things started happening to them that seem more like something out of a science fiction film than real life.
In any case, one of the disappearances at the heart of the Dragon Triangle that attracted the most interest in the West was that of the famous American pilot and writer Amelia Earhart in July 1937.
Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in her small plane in 1932, forever etching her name in golden letters in aviation history. But she had new goals and, persistent as she was, she was determined to achieve them. After her first failed attempt in the spring of 1937, she made a second eastward flight on the first day of June that year. Co-pilot Fred Noonan was in the Electra with her.
Their flight went as planned. After 35,000 kilometres in the air and landing in New Guinea, they had a challenging and orientation flight across the Pacific back to the west coast of the USA. On 2 July, they took off from New Guinea with an Electro, using a radio navigation system to navigate towards Howland Island in the Dragon Triangle. But the navigation system, whose antenna they had tuned before take-off, started behaving strangely shortly after take-off.
At 7.42 a.m., the USS Itasca received a radio call from them near Howland, but due to interference, the radio operator could not make out their position or the message. An hour later they were able to make contact again, and in a short call Earhart said that according to their calculations they should be somewhere in the vicinity of the ship, but that they could not see it, even though they had descended to an altitude of 300 metres. She added that they were running low on fuel.
After the last report at 8.43, when they were supposed to be in the vicinity of Howland, which was obscured by low clouds that cast island-like shadows on the sea surface, operators were unable to make contact with them due to repeated radio interference.
An hour after the last call, Itasca launched a search operation in the waters around Howland, and was joined in the following days by a number of other US Navy vessels. A week after the disappearance, one of the aircraft on the nearby uninhabited island of Nikumaroro saw signs that someone was on the island, but the Navy never definitively explained exactly what the pilot had seen. The investigation that followed only pointed out that Earhart could easily have landed in the lagoon and swum or drifted to the island’s shore in a lifeboat. But that was conjecture. The fact is that the search operation lasted 17 days and no trace was ever found to prove the fate of Earhart and Noonan.
Charles Berlitz’s book The Dragon Triangle was published in 1989. In it, Berlitz described the results of his research in the Devil’s Sea in the area. In Japan, mythological legends dating back to 1000 BC have existed for millennia, describing sea monsters that are said to have risen from the sea to spew fire or devour the boats of local fishermen. Scientists who have spent the last decades studying the local volcanic activity and seabed are convinced that these were not monsters, but eruptions of underwater volcanoes and gaseous pockets of methane hydrate.
In his book, Berlitz claimed, among other things, that at least five large Japanese warships with more than 700 people on board disappeared in the Dragon Triangle between 1952 and 1954. The Japanese government officially declared this part of the sea a danger zone and, as early as the autumn of 1952, sent the Coast Guard’s special research ship Kaijo Maru No 5 to the triangle to investigate what was actually happening there.
Kaijo Maru No 5, with a captain, 21 sailors and 9 scientists on board, sailed into the Dragon Triangle on 24 September 1952 and disappeared for good shortly afterwards, without sending any radio signal or call for help. In the official report on the disappearance issued in March 1953, the Japanese Coast Guard admitted that it did not know when, where, how or why Kaijo Maru No 5 disappeared. To this day, some believe that the 500-tonne ship was the victim of an eruption of an underwater volcano or one of the unusual waves that can reach up to 20 metres in height in the Dragon Triangle. Others believe that the culprit is methane hydrate, the bubbles of which can cause the ship’s engines to fail, while reducing the density of the water beneath even a large ship to such an extent that it becomes unseaworthy and sinks virtually without warning in a matter of moments.
Official reports also show that in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Japanese ships often disappeared. On 19 April 1949, the warship Kuroshio Maru No 1, with 23 sailors on board, disappeared in the Dragon Triangle under unexplained circumstances. On 28 June 1952, the Shifoku Maru No 5 disappeared with 29 people on board. On 26 June 1955, a similar fate befell an American F-38 aircraft with a crew of two in the same area. It lost radio contact with its air base and was never found again. On 12 March 1957, eight men disappeared from the deck of a US military transport aircraft to an unknown destination. On 7 June 1963, the Japanese warship Donan Maru sank in the Dragon Triangle, its remains were found off the rocky coast of one of the islands.
Ghost ships and unidentified flying objects
The Dragon Triangle has long been famous among sailors and seafarers not only for the disappearances of vessels, but also for far more extraordinary accounts of ghost ship sightings, unidentified flying objects and cases that stir the imagination, as space and time suddenly become very relative concepts.
In the late 1950s, a pilot of an American civil aircraft described his flight over the Dragon Triangle, which almost cost him and his crew their lives. With a three-hour fuel supply, he noticed at one point in his cockpit that the vital instruments, including the compass, had failed and that the needle of the latter was swinging back and forth uncontrollably. After an hour of flight without instruments, when he was oriented only by the sun, the instruments started working again and he was still flying in the right direction, but after talking to the control tower he realised that his watch was half an hour behind the one on the ground at the time. Notwithstanding the unusual incident, they landed safely in Tokyo. But with enough fuel to last for another half-hour of flight time, the half-hour longer his flight was supposed to take, based on the ground take-off and landing times.
A similar case was reported in an American magazine by Air Force Colonel Frank P. Hopkins. “In the spring of 1966, I was the navigator of our Air Guard Sea 79, flying from Quadralane Island to Guam. We were expecting a very normal flight of about six hours. But in the third hour of the flight, something inexplicable happened.”
When Hopkins calculated their position and compared it with the planned course, according to the standard procedure at the time, he found that the aircraft was off course by almost 500 kilometres. He frantically checked the coordinates and the calculations several more times, but the figures showed the same thing over and over again: in less than an hour, the aircraft was at coordinates where, given its speed and direction of flight, it could not have been in any conceivable explanation. It is as if someone had simply grabbed it and moved it 500 kilometres forward, but in a completely different direction. The pilot corrected course and the plane landed happily on Guam, but when Hopkins reported the incident to his superiors, they looked at him quizzically and told him to stop joking. What he was talking about was simply impossible. So Hopkins kept quiet for two years about what had happened to him.
There have also been stories from the Dragon Triangle of abandoned, unmanned ships appearing like apparitions out of the fog. There are old Japanese tales of ghost ships wandering aimlessly in the Devil’s Sea. But not only these. An encounter with one of these ghostly ships, which always stirs the imagination of seafarers, also took place in the Dragon Triangle on 11 June 1881. At about four o’clock that night, the English battleship HMS Beshante encountered such a ship of unknown name. On board HMS Bacchante was the English Prince and later King George V, and in his diary he wrote the following about this unusual night-time encounter:
“A strange shadow appeared in front of us and as we approached it, we saw that it was a large ship. It was surrounded by a strange phosphorescent light. We signalled to her, but she seemed to be abandoned and to be sailing without direction. Apart from me, the bridge officer and other sailors saw her. Then the fog lifted and when it lifted again, the ship was nowhere to be seen. Just as she had appeared out of the fog, she disappeared into it. When the sun rose an hour later and day broke, she was nowhere to be seen on the horizon, although the sea was calm and windless.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects in the Dragon Triangle were not uncommon. They were first reported by Japanese fishermen, and later by official reports and other witnesses, some of whom also showed photographs to corroborate their claims. One of the last such sightings, reported by ten witnesses, took place on 14 June 1997 near Tokyo. One witness later said: “It was evening, I was looking out to sea, and just a few miles out of Tokyo Bay I saw three luminous discs flying at high speed towards Tokyo, just over the sea.”
In the 1970s, the then Soviet Union had one of the most powerful shipping fleets in the North Atlantic. In 1977, the Russian Navy organised a special research expedition to try to get to the truth about unidentified flying objects over the Dragon Triangle. The reports of the then Soviet Navy are still considered among the most credible when it comes to the otherwise elusive subject of unidentified flying objects, where it is often difficult to separate fact from fantasy. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, many reports of this kind have remained inaccessibly stored in the Moscow archives to this day.
The Soviet research mission, which started in 1977 and lasted several years, was scientifically led by oceanographer Vladimir Ajaya. In mid-August 1980, the research ship Vladimir Volbirov, on board which he was a passenger, sailed south through the Dragon Triangle to Okinawa. A few minutes after midnight, the crew saw a luminous unidentified flying object, cylindrical in shape, which was said to have risen from the sea surface at their side and flown into the sky. The shining object then disappeared into the distance at high speed, Ajaja reported.
In April 1981, another similar sighting of an unidentified flying object occurred at almost the same longitude and latitude coordinates in the Dragon Triangle. The Japanese Navy ship Taki Maru, with 30 crew members on board, suddenly felt a vibration that first shook the ship violently in the middle of the night, and then, according to the captain’s testimony, a partially illuminated disc-shaped object rose out of the water, circled above the ship for almost 15 minutes, and then plunged back into the sea. While it was above them, all the instruments on the bridge failed. According to the captain, the waves created by the luminous disc as it plunged back into the sea were so high that the ship began to rock dangerously, but finally settled down.
Many today find these and other similar stories of unidentified flying objects, whether in the Dragon, Bermuda or other triangles, unbelievable. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the Japanese, American, Russian, British and other military secret services have apparently been much more involved in investigating these recurrent phenomena than they have ever been willing to admit. Which is why many of their reports and other documents on these events and the circumstances in which they occurred remain, in most cases, a closely guarded secret.
