BERMUDA TRIANGLE

It was Halloween, 1991. Radar controllers checked and rechecked what they had just seen. The scope was blank in a spot now. Everywhere else all seemed normal. Routine traffic was proceeding undisturbed, in their vectors, tracked and uninterrupted. But just moments earlier they had been tracking a Grumman Cougar jet. The pilot was John Verdi. He and trained co-pilot, Paul Lukaris, were on a flight toward Tallahassee
Moments before Verdi’s voice had crackled over the receiver at the flight center: “Uh, this is November two four Whiskey Juliet (N24WJ). I am at, uh, two five three zero zero. Request ascent two niner zero. Over.”

Permission was quickly granted. The turbo jet was then seen ascending from 25,300 feet to its cruising altitude of 29,000. All seemed normal.
They were still ascending. Verdi had not yet rogered reaching his new altitude. Radar continued to track the Cougar until, for some unknown reason, it simply faded away. Verdi and Lukaris answered no more calls to respond. They had sent no MAYDAY to indicate a problem. Read-outs of the radar observations confirmed the unusual: The Cougar had not been captured at all descending or falling to the sea. Frankly, it had just vanished while climbing; it simply faded away. One sweep they were there . . . the next?

One well known case in 1962 vividly brings home the need for careful behind-the-scenes probing. Once again, it involves an aircraft.
The date was January 8, 1962. A huge 4 engine KB-50 aerial tanker was en route from the east coast to Lajes in the Azores. The captain, Major Bob Tawney, reported in at the expected time. All was normal, routine. But he, his 8 crew and big tanker, never made the Azores. Apparently, the last word from the flight had been that routine report, a report which had placed them a few hundred miles off the east coast.
FLASH! the media broadcasted, fed by a sincere Coast Guard issued press statement, that a large oil slick was sighted 300 miles off Norfolk, Virginia, in the plane’s proposed route. The mystery could be breaking. . . .
But that was the only clue ever found. Although never proved it was from the plane, publicly the suspicions were obvious: the tanker and its qualified crew met a horrid and sudden death by crashing headlong into the sea.
However, the report-- finished months later-- confirmed no such thing. Tawney had been clearly overheard by a Navy transport hours after his last message. This placed him north of Bermuda, hundreds of miles past the spot of the oil slick. There is no evidence, therefore, that the plane and its crew ever met any known fate.
The contradiction was hardly the press’s fault. Nor was it totally the blame of the Coast Guard. As soon as scratchy information came in, it was directed to the by-standing media. But this had misleading effects, as the KB-50 case demonstrated.

With almost every case the same thing has happened. By the time concrete information is obtained, the story has lost its appeal, and no follow-ups ever find their way into the papers. I have tried to stay away, therefore, from relying on any newspaper accounts. These, unfortunately, have almost always been the exclusive source for any popular account of an incident, whether in a magazine or book, previous to this web site.