Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [29]
Larry Kusche, after examining over four hundred pages of an official report, came to a saner conclusion. Contrary to the claims of Triangle buffs, the Navy Board of Investigation called in to examine the matter was not at all baffled by the tragedy. The Avengers had been on a training flight, a simple, common exercise to put new pilots through their paces. The bad weather conditions at the time were not dangerous unless "ditching" had to be accomplished; then the nature of the sea, described as "rough and unfavorable" in the Navy report, would be critical. The compass on the flight leader's plane failed, and the others were dependent upon his guidance. It was too late by the time he turned over leadership to another pilot, since fuel was low and they were still at sea. Strange statements attributed to the pilots by Berlitz do not appear in the report, though all information was available to the investigators. The pilots were understandably lost, flew around in confusion until out of fuel, ditched, and sank in rough seas. The search plane, known to be dangerous because of the frequent presence of gas fumes in the crew area, could easily have exploded and gone down in a perfectly explainable accident, especially in view of the conditions at the time. In fact, it was seen to explode by personnel on a ship in the area, and thus its real fate is known.
The Navy report listed fifty-six facts and fifty-six opinions concerning the mishap. To those who produced the report, there was no mystery. Invented radio transmissions, exaggerations, and pure fiction turned the tragedy into a supernatural event and got the entire Bermuda Triangle Mystery started off in great style. In addition, the facts were ignored by the media, and the delusion continued until Kusche, in twenty-six pages of facts and maps, demolished the "mystery" of Flight 19 in his book.
Those intrepid adventurers who set out with Berlitz to find Atlantis never issued a report. If they didn't at least dunk him in the Caribbean Sea for his presumption, they get no credit for spirit. Any red-blooded crew would do that to a captain who hung such an albatross around their necks.
Another idea espoused by Berlitz is his Pyramid Theory, which is based on two heavy bits of data. One is a supposed 470-foot-high pyramid under the ocean (in the National Enquirer tabloid it became 780 feet high!) that he says he hopes will provide proof of the existence of Atlantis and which "seems to be a repository for some strange electronic activity." The other is a 1,000-foot-long and apparently man-made mosaic resembling a road, located underwater less than half a mle off Bimini's west coast. Both, says this scholar, prove the presence of Atlantis.
The underwater "road" one half mile off the west coast of Bimini.
Let us consider the "Bimini Road" first. To get rid of two nuisance elements that are dragged in joyfully by believers in this perfectly explainable phenomenon, I turn to the pages of Nature, the British science journal, where a Mr. W. Harrison reports that "columns" found two miles from the "road" site are actually cement, cast in the shape of the barrels in which the raw product was contained when it was dumped overboard during some unspecified calamity in the past. The wooden staves having rotted away, the castings were left there to be misinterpreted by the Atlantis cult. Two fluted lengths of marble found nearby are very probably of similar origin. It is not uncommon to find such junk in the area, due to the probability of groundings so close to shore and the resulting emergency measures that