Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

Devil’s Triangle 71
Bermuda triangle: Were the missing ships sucked into a giant whirlpool (Dezsö Sternoczky/SUFOI/Fortean Picture
Library)
Bermuda. A Fate piece in 1952 was the first to
advance the notion of a triangle. Throughout the
1950s writers such as M. K. Jessup, Frank Edwards,
and Donald E. Keyhoe speculated that extraterrestrial
spacecraft were snatching planes and ships
(or their crews). In the February 1964 issue of the
men’s magazine Argosy, Vincent H. Gaddis
invented the term “Bermuda triangle” and popularized
it further when he incorporated the article
into a chapter of his book Invisible Horizons
(1965). The 1970s saw the legend peak with the
best-selling The Bermuda Triangle (1974), by
Charles Berlitz with J. Manson Valentine. The
most famous Devil’s triangle story concerned the
disappearances of five Navy Avenger torpedo
boats on the afternoon of December 5, 1945, off
the coast of Florida. (In the climactic scene of
Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, the missing crew is returned to
earth in an alien spacecraft.) A rescue aircraft sent
after it also vanished. According to triangle literature,
all of this occurred in perfect weather. Other
cases went back to the nineteenth century. In each
instance, triangle writers insisted, no conventional
explanation could be found. They then went on to
propose their own unconventional explanations.
For example, in his 1970 book Invisible Residents,
Ivan T. Sanderson theorized that an undetected
advanced civilization lives under the earth’s
oceans; one of its major bases is in the Devil’s
triangle. Other theorists held that the triangle is a
gateway to another dimension. Some have speculated
that the lost continent of Atlantis lies under
the Devil’s triangle and Atlantean superscience is
responsible for the mysterious events there.
If so, it is not the only one, according to some.
There is also the Devil’s sea, southeast of Japan.
Sanderson expanded the concept, claiming that
there are ten v lie vortices, as he called them,
stretched in parallel bands at equal distances
above and below the equator, 72 degrees apart. In
these lozenge-shaped regions OINTS—Other
Intelligences—operate freely, grabbing ships and
aircraft, moving freely through space and time in
machines we call UFOs. Sanderson did hold these
entities in high regard: The OINTS, he claimed