"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot"

—Lewis Carroll "The Walrus and the Carpenter"

  It is careless of a man to fail to sufficiently research a subject on which he claims to be an authority. It is irresponsible for him to resist telling the facts when he discovers them. And it is irresponsible and callous for him to continue to misrepresent matters about which he has been informed to the contrary. J’accuse Charles Berlitz of these failings.

  Berlitz is the author of The Bermuda Triangle, Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds, and Without a Trace, all of which contain such demonstrable errors and misstatements that the simplest investigation of the claims made easily shows that these books should have been classed as fiction rather than fact. I am told that Berlitz speaks some thirty languages, eleven of them fluently. Perhaps he is able to state his spurious claims in all thirty tongues, since he is heir to the creation of his grandfather, who founded the famous Berlitz language schools. Posterity would have been better served if he had stuck to that calling instead of becoming a very bad amateur scientist and espouser of pseudoscholarly theories.

  Early in 1979 Berlitz took a group of fifteen archaeologists, explorers, and divers into the so-called Bermuda Triangle to study the "Lost Civilization of Atlantis." A brief chat with members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (notably Larry Kusche, author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved) would have saved these men the trip. But I suppose that if Berlitz was paying for his caprices, they might as well have had a holiday in the dreaded triangle. They were never safer.

  The Bermuda Triangle is an expanse of ocean bounded at its three corners by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami. In 1945, when five Navy Avenger aircraft flew into the area and reportedly vanished mysteriously, the legend began to be manufactured. Within a few years the public was believing that some unknown force was snatching planes, boats, and people out of the Triangle and whisking them to some limbo or other. Berlitz was soaking up and writing down every reported incident, embellishing the tales and preparing them for publication. The result was the sale to credulous people of over 5 million copies of his first book, published in twenty languages, and more than $1 million in royalties.

  When Larry Kusche set out to research the Bermuda Triangle, he had before him a formidable task. It is one thing for Berlitz to claim that something has occurred; it is another to try to prove that it did not. Meanwhile, the believers sit back smugly, hands folded, grinning widely. It is apparent that it is a matter of blind belief, rather than actual proof, where such issues are concerned. For as Kusche points out so very well, a large percentage of the so-called wonders of the Triangle were nothing but outright fabrications, with no evidence whatsoever to support them. We read about ships that are not listed in any registry, planes for which there are no records to show they ever flew, and shadowy crews and other people who in many instances were well accounted for and did not vanish into the Never-Never Land that authors like Berlitz would have us believe holds sway in the Caribbean. The Bermuda Triangle idea is nonsense, as we shall see.

  I will not attempt to deal with the numerous other areas of the world that are claimed to harbor mysterious dangers. It seems that other nations, wanting to share in the silliness, have clamored to have their own Triangles recognized. Wherever anyone or anything vanishes, psychic whirlpools are invented. One author, Ivan Sanderson, even postulated twelve evenly spaced "Vile Vortexes" that spanned the globe.

  Now, I admit that if there seems to be a predominance of evil forces operating in a certain locality, a cause should be sought, quite logically and properly. A particularly high incidence of traffic accidents at a certain intersection will prompt an investigation of the site by the authorities, and if indeed there seems to be more than a fair share of accidents or anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle, by all means let us look into it. But first let's get our definitions correct.

  Look at the accompanying map of the area. On it you will see designated the locations of the major events that the writers would have us accept as proof of the Triangle mystery. Bear in mind that a number of these reported disappearances are represented here by the "found abandoned" markings, and that of these a good number have been explained—crews rescued and cause determined.

  These "disappearances" are the ones writers such as Berlitz have listed, and therefore the truth or falsity of the mystery depends on these cases.

  Excuse the rhetorical question, but how many of these alleged disappearances occurred within the Bermuda Triangle? One that is gleefully offered up by the believers actually happened in the Pacific! Others are not included here because the scale of the map would not allow me to show them—they were as far away as Ireland and the coast of Portugal.

 

The "mysterious" Bermuda Triangle.

 

The point is that, if it exists at all, this is certainly a most diffuse phenomenon, and it appears that it only proves, as the old saw tells us, that "accidents will happen." I must mention that I refused to include on the map those alleged accidents that never took place at all or involved nonexistent craft or people. Also, you will not find here those "vanishments" that took place somewhere along a thousand to three-thousand-mile-long plotted voyage that might have led the travelers through the Triangle. In some cases a ship left port and failed to show up on the other side of the world. I cannot allow the creators of the legend to include these incidents in their evidence.

  One example described in Larry Kusche's book serves to illustrate how careful one has to be in accepting what is asserted as evidence. According to the claimed version of an incident discussed in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved, "Thirty-nine persons vanished north of the Triangle on a flight to Jamaica on February 2, 1953. An SOS, which ended abruptly without explanation, was sent by the British York Transport just before it disappeared. No trace was ever found." Now let's look at the facts.

  The flight plan specified Jamaica as a destination, it's true, and this would seem to connect it with the Triangle. But the plane, when it was lost, was on a flight from the Azores to Newfoundland, in Canada, a flight that took it along a northwesterly path away from the dreaded area! The plan called for a stop in Newfoundland, then a flight to Jamaica. Since its terminal destination was Jamaica, the promulgators of the Legend called it "a flight to Jamaica" without further explanation. Moreover, the plane admittedly was lost "north of the Triangle"—nine hundred miles north of it! There is no mention of the weather, but the New York Times that day reported an "icy, gale-swept North Atlantic... strong winds and torrential rains... winds up to seventy-five miles an hour."

  Then there is the mysterious SOS signal "which ended abruptly without explanation." This sounds logical enough. An aircraft, lashed by a severe storm in the middle of the Atlantic in winter, gets into trouble, radios the standard international distress call, and crashes without further "explanation." A tragedy, but one that has occurred hundreds of times around the world, and not at all strange or unexplainable. But it would have been, had not someone like Larry Kusche scrutinized the information that the promoters of this nonsense have offered the public to make their point.

  The media are largely to blame for the Bermuda Triangle deception. Initially, they gave Berlitz the raw material he needed. Uncritical publishers regularly turn out books and periodicals without checking the accuracy of their contents. They call such trash "nonfiction," and the public assumes that "nonfiction" is synonymous with "truth." Some publishers even claim that the works they publish are researched thoroughly to ensure factual content, although this is not the case.

  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, and that nothing seemed to be what it should be. They could not even see the sun to get their bearings, and after a final call at 4:25 they vanished, we are told, never to be seen again. A rescue plane sent to find them disappeared abruptly in the same way. Other rescue planes—three hundred of them, aided by twenty-one ships crisscrossing the area the next day—failed to find a trace of either flight. Six aircraft and twenty-seven men had disappeared in the Triangle!

  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 were needed. Shipping records show that such ballast was frequently carried by merchants for this purpose. But on such ordinary evidence are great idiocies founded.

  The "road" itself is quite impressive, and I can see why it would be misunderstood at first. It is a pair of semiregular strips running parallel to the shore, separated by some seventy feet and consisting of roughly rectangular blocks of highly varied sizes measuring from five to twenty feet on a side. Unless a geologist were consulted, one might easily believe them to be man-made. Actually, the "road" is made up of what is known to geology as "beach rock," and it is typical of such formations in many parts of the world. Beach rock is found as far away from Bimini as Australia and as close by as the Dry Tortugas. In fact, the south shore of Bimini itself is "paved" with such rocks.

 

Beach rock on the coast of Australia. Did Atlantis extend this far?

 

Beach rock is formed by a cementing process of nature. Grains of sand, washed by the tides over a period of as little as a few decades, can pick up calcium carbonate from the sea, mostly from the remains of shelled inhabitants. This substance is deposited between the grains like a cement. The resulting rock mass is quite hard (limestone and marble are composed of calcium carbonate) but it fractures readily. The shore of Bimini once extended to the "road," and beach rock that bordered that shore went through a process which is happening to the fresh beach rock on the present-day shoreline. Exposed to the sun, and undermined by slipping sand that is washed away from beneath the rock slabs, the mass cracks in rather straight lines, first in one direction parallel to the shore, then at right angles. The result is long strips of brick-like rocks weighing from one to ten tons each. Later the strips are submerged as the actual shoreline changes.

  But, we hear the believers saying, beach rock would have been the most readily available material to build with. True, but it would have been an inferior material, and it would be quite strange to find that it parallels the shore, but is not found inland, leading to other wonders. And why are no other artifacts but barrels made of cement found near such a structure?

  But we need not pursue that line of reasoning, no matter how productive, for a geology student, John Gifford, has conducted a series of tests and observations that have proved the "Bimini Road" to be perfectly natural and not at all man-made, and subsequent tests done by E. A. Shinn at a lab in Miami have clinched the case.

  If the Atlanteans had chosen to construct the "road" with beach rock, they would of course have chosen the blocks that best fit together, and thus there would be no continuous consistency in the layering of adjacent blocks. Core samples taken from adjacent blocks by Gifford and Shinn and carefully analyzed show consistent layering and grain size, much as a ballistics test shows striations to be similar on bullets from the same gun. Carbon dating was used on shell material found embedded in the rock and showed it to be 2,200 years old—much too young for the mythical Atlantis, even if the rocks had been moved by man. And perhaps worst of all, though the Bimini beach rock on the present shoreline yields scraps of glass bottles, nails, and nuts that were incorporated in its formation, nary a trace of a TV set, laser tube, or any other artifact has been found in the "road" rocks. Edgar Cayce, the reputed visionary and prophet, tells us that these things were common in Atlantis.

  So the "Bimini Road" is of natural origin, formed relatively recently and in no way an artifact of any lost civilization. Who is wrong? Certainly Berlitz is, concerning this piece of evidence. And so are some real scientists—Dr. J. Manson Valentine and Dr. David D. Zink, a marine archaeologist and a historian respectively. Funded by the Edgar Cayce Foundation, they came to a wrong conclusion in Explorer's Journal. They did not do the careful, methodical work that Gifford and Shinn did, both on the site and later with samples in their lab as reported in Sea Frontiers (May-June 1978).

  Is this information available to Berlitz? If I can find it, so can he. His consulting resources are greater, and his funds limitless. One conclusion to be drawn is that he knew the truth and ignored it, preferring the romantic legend and seeing another best-selling book on the horizon. Are there never any clouds on that horizon?

  Then there is that giant "pyramid" under the ocean. Berlitz says he has scientific proof of it, with measurements and all. Well, we'll see. In March 1978, Larry Kusche challenged Berlitz to provide proof of the pyramid. Kusche offered to put up $10,000 against a similar amount to be wagered by Berlitz. The money would be deposited in a Massachusetts bank, the entire amount awardable to the winning party. Berlitz only had to prove that the claimed gigantic pyramid under the ocean was real to collect the money and Kusche's admission that Berlitz was right. Berlitz refused the challenge. To see why he would not attempt a proof, we must examine his "evidence."

  When I consulted Bob Heinmiller, formerly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I was told that Captain Don Henry, who provided Berlitz with the sonar tracing that purports to show the wonderful pyramid, could have produced the tracing without any trouble. In such a representation, the vertical component is highly exaggerated for greater clarity. After all, what is needed from the chart is an idea of the depth below the boat, and this is an ideal way to portray it. In the chart shown by Berlitz, the so-called pyramid may represent a bit of underwater terrain having a gentle slope of only 2 to 3 degrees! To get some idea of the actual incline represented, imagine a twelve-inch ruler on a tabletop with eight pennies stacked under one end. That, in miniature, is what Don Henry passed over in his boat to obtain the trace he sold to Berlitz!

  The tracing submitted by Henry was not "side-scanning sonar,"as Berlitz claims. This detail was added to substantiate the profile obtained. The tracing is ordinary sonar, subject to the same interpretation as all other sonar traces. And the boat speed necessary to obtain such a tracing of a real 470-foot pyramid would have to be, at regular chart speeds, about ten inches per second! Try holding a boat at that speed to obtain such a trace. It's about half a mile per hour!

  But we are assured by Dr. J. Manson Valentine of the Miami Museum of Science that "the sonar tracings clearly show a massive, symmetrical pyramid resting on a nearly flat ocean floor." I wonder when the mermaid exhibit opens at the Miami Museum of Science? Perhaps right after the exhibit of Tooth Fairy Footprints has a run.

 

Sonar tracing of the "giant pyramid" alleged by Charles Berlitz.

 

The National Enquirer and People magazine carefully censored out a section of the sonar chart of the "pyramid" that Berlitz unwittingly left in his book Without a Trace. This deleted portion is obvious proof that the alleged pyramid is not what they'd like it to be. Examine the illustration, and you'll see what I mean. At the upper left is a line that represents the part of the tracing that preceded the "pyramid" on the right. Berlitz wisely chose to ignore this, since it shows that the tracing representing the left side of the "pyramid" is actually a continuation of the other line. You see, a sonar tracing, on reaching the top of the chart, drops to the bottom again instead of running off the top of the paper. The "pyramid" seems to begin at the bottom; actually it began somewhere way off to the left. It's a case of the truth being evident once the entire record is seen. It's a song that is sung often throughout this book, and the tune is worth learning.

  Heinmiller says that such artifacts are often found on sonar tracings. A pyramid shape can be obtained merely by encountering a small slope, then reversing the direction of the boat to get a reverse slope on the sonar. The effect is a pyramid—exactly what Berlitz is now trying to sell us, and for which he dragged all those experts into the Caribbean. The U.S. Navy says it's not there. Why would all those folks believe Berlitz? Because he can tell them about it in thirty languages? Or are they just a bit dense?

  According to Bob Heinmiller, it is impossible to tell just what Henry passed over, or where he went, to make this tracing. We do not know the speed of the boat, the speed of the tracing paper in the chart recorder, or the vertical emphasis used. But a structure such as the one claimed by Berlitz could not possibly have escaped detection by those who have been meticulously charting the area for decades. Heinmiller is well aware of the media's attitude about the matter, for he has been called on the phone several times by people of the press who ask him to comment on the claim, and he ends up having to deal with questions about UFOs and various weird beliefs. His matter-of-fact declarations on the subject send the seekers elsewhere for more sensational opinions. Facts are just not very attractive, as usual.

  There is much other evidence that contradicts this silly claim. But I tend to disagree with Larry Kusche when he says that Berlitz has perpetrated a hoax. I think Berlitz simply doesn't know any better. His accounts of other wonders give me this distinct impression. But I'll let Kusche sum up the matter himself, since it was his $10,000 that was offered in his bet with Berlitz. "Berlitz," says Kusche, "was not able to accept the challenge to prove the existence of the alleged pyramid because it is impossible to do so—since there is no pyramid. Had Berlitz accepted the challenge, it would have publicly emphasized the fact that he is prone to making sensational, erroneous, unprovable statements with regard to para-scientific subjects. Berlitz has once again misled the public with false information that he will not and cannot substantiate.