Bermuda Triangle Odyssey
By Rob MacGregor
FATE :: August 2005

Thirty years ago, it was the most discussed mystery of the day, a region where at any moment a mysterious fog might cling to a vessel like tight clothing, where the navigational instruments might fail, where ships, planes, and people simply vanished, where the occupants of an aircraft might experience a time distortion. Although you may not hear much about the Bermuda Triangle these days, mysterious events still transpire in the infamous region. Take this case:

It should have been an uneventful trip, a short flight from the Freeport International Airport in the Bahamas to West Palm Beach. The six-seat Piper Lance II took off at 5:35 a.m. on July 29, 2002. Within a few minutes, the craft reached 4,700 feet and the pilot switched radio contact from Freeport to the Miami air traffic control.

But the plane fell off the radar 25 minutes after take-off and crashed 15 miles off the north coast of Grand Bahama Island. The weather was fair; there were no dangerous thunderstorms in the area. Dawn was approaching at the time of the crash and the sky should have been light enough to see. The rented Piper was 24 years old, but it had recently undergone a major overhaul that cost $60,000 and included a new engine and new electronics. “There was nothing wrong with that plane,” Michael Callegio, owner of the Piper, said after the accident.

The pilot, Craig Huber, an Air Force veteran, had 280 hours of flying time and had spent four hours in the air with a flight trainer at the Palm Beach Flight Training School before the school rented the plane to him. “It was clear he knew what he was doing,” Tara Palmer, the school’s office manager, told a Palm Beach Post reporter.

Since there were no survivors, it will never be known whether or not the Piper’s electronic instruments suddenly failed or acted oddly or if the plane entered a strange fog. However, the location of the crash raises interesting questions. Why was the plane 15 miles north of the island, 90 degrees off course, when it should’ve been flying due west toward West Palm Beach?  Also, where did the plane go during the flight? The Piper should have traveled at least 45 miles during its 25 minutes in the air. At a minimal climbing rate of 500 feet per minute, it would take just over nine minutes to reach 4,700 feet. During that time the Piper would travel about 15 miles. That leaves another 15 minutes of flying time and at least 30 miles unaccounted for prior to the crash.

Confusion and disorientation could account for the location of the plane at the time of the crash. If the plane was engulfed in fog and the instruments failed, the pilot might have made repeated turns that accounted for the missing miles.

Here’s an even stranger possibility: the craft encountered a time distortion caused by mysterious fog. If the plane moved ahead 15 minutes, that would explain the lack of distance traveled. It’s speculation, of course; like most stories from the Triangle, there are no survivors to explain what happened.

However, there is one case that stands out from all the others. It’s the story of a pilot who experienced a close encounter with mysterious forces and survived to tell about it. Bruce Gernon, in fact, is one of the only known survivors of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon.

In 1970, Gernon and his father, a developer, were searching the Bahamas for an island on which to build a resort. They decided on Andros Island, and had made a dozen flights when on December 4 they encountered something they would never forget ....

Read the rest of this article in the August 2005 issue of FATE

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