Most sailors keep off these mysterious waters if they can!

Seas have usually been regarded as mysterious, inconceivably large and deep places that could hide unknown beasts and unpredictable dangers. Although we explore more and more of the depths of the oceans, there are some waters that still discourage the sailors who wander by...

Although we explore more and more of the depth of the oceans, there are some waters that still discourage the sailors who wonder by (Photo: pixabay.com / Roland Mey)

There are quite a few fearful waters in the world, but the Bermuda Triangle - situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, between Puerto Rico, Bermuda and Florida - is perhaps the most famous of them all. Sinister and suspicious stories started to emerge, and one thing was in common in all of them: nobody could give a proper explanation of why dozens of ships, boats and even planes disappeared in the area.

As in most cases with inexplicable disappearings, people started to make various assumptions of why, and how the ships vanished near the Bermuda Triangle, which assumptions, for example include a theory that there's a gate that leads into another dimension, while others believe it may has to do something with aliens.

The area first got into spotlight in the December of 1945, when five planes of the US navy disappeared for unknown reasons while taking part in a military drill. Immediately before the disappearing of the planes the flight leader reportedly said, "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white". Soon after this, the contact with the planes was lost.

All 14 crew members lost without a trace that day and were never found, and not long after this incident other planes - with 13 people on board - suffered a very similar fate. None of the planes, nor the lost crew members or any debris were found after the disappearings.

The incidents mentioned above are quite suspicious in themselves, but other similar events happened afterwards, which just made the Bermuda Triangle more frightening and mysterious in the eyes of many. Among the other strange cases, the vanishing of the SS Marine Sulphur Queen - which carried 39 people on board in the time of the incident - in 1963, and also the disappearing of the USS Cyclops, with its 309 passengers and crew members in 1918 is worth mentioning.

The Sargasso Sea - located in the North Atlantic Ocean - is the only "sea" on the world that has no shores - it's bounded by four currents forming an ocean gyre. Because of the currents, various kinds of drifts gather in the region, and the conditions are just ideal for a brown algae called Sargassum to appear in huge numbers in the Sargasso Sea.

Though the ocean here seems calm at the first glimpse, those who have to travel across the region are sure a lot less calm - which is mostly because of the stories that describe strange and spooky cases of people going missing on the Sargasso Sea. What more, so-called "ghost ships" were seen roaming the waters without any passengers or crew members - at least without any of them still alive. In 1840, for example, a merchant ship passed through the Sargasso Sea with its sails down, and according to the reports, it had no crew at all.

Reports from the 19th century assume that a kind of "predatory" plant lives in the Sargasso Sea, that had eaten the sailors alive and left the ships untouched. This, however, is really unlikely to be true.

The Devil's Sea, also known as the Dragon's Triangle or the Pacific Bermuda Triangle is about 60 miles south of Tokyo, and it surrounds the Miyake Island. Two of the mentioned names reflect on the eerie stories of vanishing ships, while the name Dragon's Triangle was given because ancient legends mention dragons that live near the shores of Japan.

At the end of the 1980ths, Charles Berlitz dedicated his book to the mysteries of the Dragon's Triangle, where he and others seemingly encountered paranormal events. Before the book was written and published, five Japanese military ships disappeared with 700 sailors on board, and the fact that this all happened between 1952 and 1954 - when there was no war - makes it even more peculiar. In the wake of the incidents the region was classified as a danger zone.

Later it was found out, however, that not war ships, but fishing boats were the ones that disappeared, many of them not even at the Devil's Sea, but outside of it. It's also true that ships quite frequently disappeared near Japan due to the usually bad weather and the pirates.

Anita Diós

May 2018