You never hear much about 'spontaneous combustion ' anymore, where people just burst into flames while sitting in their chair

@Gangstress yeah! It probably still happens but with other distractions now, it no longer is much of a thing

@atlantic59 the comments on the spontaneous combustion are very interesting

@Gangstress I imagine there are people in some folks lives that they wish would spontaneously combust.

@atlantic59 hahaha so true lol

-like my neighbor who, unfortunately, rather inconveniently, suddely quit drinking and smoking

@Gangstress I suppose aftwer a while everyone realises the famntasy-writers who create the stories were writing only fantasies! (Similarly with Erik von Daniken.)

A few years ago a British journalist - sorry, I am not good at remembering names - set himself a spare-time task of collating the so-called "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances. He found they had all been investigated properly, but that the reports were filed away, rarely hit the headlines and for some people the truth is too mundane.

He ended by saying he offered his results to a publisher but was turned down on the grounds that "the public" is much more interested in fantasy than fact.

The threads he found? Any of, or combinations of:

- Blind faith in instruments that might be faulty but far more commonly, blind faith in one's own instincts or authority despite perfectly sound instruments saying otherwise.

- Odd delusions and disorientation (reported by people who returned home blaming non-existent, peculiar effects or weather systems for their own errors).

- Shoddy maintenance and neglect.

- Unauthorised, even illegal and unsafe modifications.

- Commercial pressure over-riding sense.

@ArishMell I thought it was a special magetic pull cause of certain geography below and it created spinning instruments and even time warps..I remember reading that from surviving pilots

@atlantic59 No. The sea there is very deep, the area is prone to many storms and fogs, and no-one knows where any lost ship or aircraft actually sank, so trying to find and retrieve wrecks is practically impossible.

It is also a very busy area for sea and air traffic, so if there really was something odd about its physics there would have been far more losses until eventually everyone started diverting round it.

Not all supposed "Triangle" losses were close to the Bermudas anyway.

One of the first was a British airliner, back in the days of piston-engined aircraft of comparatively low range and ceiling, and much more basic aircraft tracking systems. Due to land in Florida after a refuelling stop on the Azores, it never arrived. It was found a) not to have refuelled, for unknown reason, b) from meteorolgical records to have met strong Westerly head-winds, and c) the airline itself had a rather poor maintenance regime. It is likely still somewhere on the Western Atlantic floor, about three miles down.

Another, much more recently, was a "crop-duster" sold by its American owner to a Brazilian buyer. Rather than have it shipped properly he tried to fly it across the Gulf of Mexico, too far for the type. It left US air-traffic radio range with a normal farewell message, and vanished. By evidence from airfield staff, the owner had fitted extra fuel tanks without proper design, approval and scrutiny, and which would have weighed it down and affected its stability. The ground-crew also alleged seeing possible, bad fuel-leaks - though I would ask if they could have reported that in time to prevent take-off, or to have it recalled.

.....

Nothing new in all this, really. For example, there was never a ship called the Marie Celeste. There was a Mary Celeste, abandoned for reasons never determined. It was the 19th arch-"conspiracy theorist" and novellist Arthur Conan-Doyle who altered the name and started the fashion for all sorts of nonsense about her. The same novellist who having read about the "Cottingley Fairies", pushed the story so far beyond the perpetrators' control that one went to her grave never confessing the hoax, and the other did so only much later, near the end of her own life.

The ship was found under light sail, in good seaworthy and house-keeping condition, was salvaged and went back to work in new ownership - until a later captain wrecked her by deliberately running her ashore in attempted insurance fraud.

Eerily prescient, the Cottingly Fairies. That was a photographic trick... now we have digital cameras and image-editing, and Artificial Intelligence / Idiocy / Indolence.

@ArishMell love your research! Thanks!🧡

@atlantic59 Thank you - but I should add it was not my research.

I simply listened carefully to a radio documentary giving those and several other "Bermuda" incidents. I learnt of the Mary Celeste and the "Fairies"* by reading of them.

The authors had done the hard bit!

'''''
* The two girls responsible had cut out drawings of the Victorian idea of fairies, suspended them by fine thread in a tree then photographed them. The grown-up experts all examined the camera and film very carefully and found nothing there that would explain it.... so stopped thinking!

@ArishMell still, you did good reporting

@Gangstress well thats because the aliens r no longer there