Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [28]
Kusche reviewed another Berlitz book, Without a Trace, which purports to refute Kusche's revelations in his own book but fails miserably. In the review, Kusche wrote, "His [Berlitz's] credibility is so low that it is virtually nonexistent. If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty. He says things that simply are untrue. He leaves out material that contradicts his 'mystery.' A real estate salesman who operated that way would end up in jail." Amen.
As I sit typing this book, I wonder, as I often do, why I have to trouble with such transparent hoaxes as the Bermuda Triangle. It is the product of mass exposure, repeated lies, large profits from book sales, irresponsible publishers, a gullible public, and the current taste for the ridiculous. Men like Berlitz must be highly amused to see their pseudoscientific notions accepted so widely. There are no laws that protect the consumer from these misrepresentations as in the case of other products. That's what it boils down to: Literature about these subjects is a consumer product and should be regulated by the same laws that ensure the quality of other products. The consumer should have the right to return the product for a refund if it is faulty. The Berlitz books about the Bermuda Triangle are, in my opinion, in this category of unsatisfactory goods.
Unconvinced? Read on. The loss of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 is a good example of Berlitz's hyperbole and evasive writing. He tells us that the Eastern plane "suffered a loss by disintegration." Sounds scary, doesn't it? The image that arises in one's mind is of an aircraft peacefully humming through the sky and then suddenly beginning to break into pieces in midair for no reason at all. How strange. But not quite so strange when we discover that the crew of the plane had switched off the autopilot in the black of night over the Florida Everglades (where there are no ground lights for reference), worked on a flight problem in the cockpit, and failed to notice the loss of altitude until they Hew into the ground—and disintegrated!
But Berlitz goes even further back into history: to 1492, and Christopher Columbus. He writes that Columbus reported "what appeared to be a fireball which circled his flagship." Really? Kusche, referring to the same source used by Berlitz, Columbus's own logbook, finds a reference by Columbus to a "great flame of fire" that he observed one night falling into the sea. A rational person would conclude, as would the great navigator, that the fireball was a bright meteor. There was no reported panic among the crew, as there would have been had the object "circled his flagship," a phenomenon invented by Berlitz. If it had indeed circled, and particularly if it had chosen the flagship to revolve around, there would be a mystery. But it was a perfectly explainable occurrence, noteworthy only because of its spectacular nature and the fact that it is rarely seen.
I could go on and on with more debunking of The Legend as Created by Berlitz, but I will leave you to Kusche's book after one more shot at the Triangle. I refer to the case of Flight 19, comprised of the Navy Avengers that started the controversy when they were lost at sea.
The Bermuda Triangle enthusiasts would have us believe that on December 5, 1945, five fully equipped Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a scheduled two-hour flight into the Bermuda Triangle and back. At 3:45 that afternoon, about the time he would have called in for landing instructions, the flight leader reported that they were lost, that the crews didn't know which way was which,