Christopher Columbus — on his initial voyage of discovery to the New World in 1492 — is the first to have recorded anomalous activities in the seas around Bermuda.
While his ships the "Nina", "Pinta" and "Santa Maria" were passing through the Sargasso Sea, the Italian explorer said they experienced erratic compass readings. He also saw a strange light on the horizon on October 11, 1492 which remains unexplained today [in a 1979 documentary based on Charles Berlitz's popular book on the Bermuda Triangle "all the elements of cheap tabloid fiction came together to showcase this incident as a host of blue-green glowing UFOs: the compasses rocked as they darted to and from the surface of the sea," says one scholar, "and Italian actors with poorly dubbed English lines grunted and moaned."]
But the genesis of the modern Bermuda Triangle legend can be traced to a September 16, 1950 Associated Press dispatch in which reporter E. V. W. Jones noted what he described as a series of "mysterious" disappearances of ships and aircraft between the Florida coast and Bermuda beginning in the late '40s.
He cited such instances as the loss of the US Navy's Flight 19 training mission of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers flying out of Florida which vanished on December 5, 1945 and the disappearance of the commercial airliners "Star Tiger" — which disappeared on January 30, 1948 on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda — and the "Star Ariel" — which was lost on January 17, 1949, on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica.
Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968 as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, though geologists consider it to be of natural origin.
Other writers attribute the events to UFOs. This idea was used by Steven Spielberg for his science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which features the lost Flight 19 aircrews as alien abductees.
Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.
