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Such incidents can be traced back as far as 1846. Ivan Sanderson, who has made a study of this phenomenon, believes there are at least six of these vile vortices, as he calls them, spaced evenly around the world. The Devil's Sea off the o coast of Japan, for example, has swallowed up so many aa wood eu ”" The Navy took the disappearance of Flight 19 very seriously. In January 1946, a group of Naval Intelligence officers were ordered by President Truman to form an investigative body called the Central Intelligence Group. This was the forerunner to the CIA. In the spring of 1946 the CIG participated in a series of secret hearings in Washington. The wives and relatives of tie missing men were flown to Washington to attend the meetings. Since then most of these people have refused to discuss the subject at all. But one mother of a missing man did confide to a researcher Art Ford, the famous disc jockey who has made a hobby of investigating the Flight 19 case, that she believed her son was still alive 'somewhere... maybe in space*. During 1965-6 the National Bureau of Standards mounted special microphones and instruments along the coastline facing the Bermuda Triangle to try to pick up sounds that might lie above the range of human hearing. They succeeded in recording odd whispering sounds of unknown origin. The Navy quietly conducted a new search of the Triangle in 1967, spending over five million dollars to search the ocean floors with special research submarines and devices. As usual, they failed to find any trace of the missing planes and ships and were unable to come up with any new explanation for the mystery. Sanderson's cautious theory about the vile vortices, as expounded in his book Invisible Residents, is that these areas are plagued with magnetic and gravitational anomalies. Maybe the planes fell up! In the summer of 1970 a giant Soviet cargo plane carrying supplies to earthquake-stricken Peru disappeared south of Greenland Planes from several countries searched the area for days and failed to find a trace of it. That September three adventurers set out in a balloon from New York, hoping to cross the Atlantic. They too vanished and repeated searches could not locate their supposedly un-sinkable gondola. Everyone has heard of the Marie Celeste, the ship found floating crewless in the Atlantic in 1872. There have been scores of similar finds. Usually such ships are completely intact, often with food cooking on the stoves and the galley tables set for dinner. The crews and passengers simply abandon ship, leaving all their personal effects behind, Five such ships were found adrift in the Bermuda Triangle area during June-July 1969. In the spring of 1969 a British sailor named John Fairfax was crossing the Atlantic alone when he reportedly observed two brilliant lights on the horizon. They separated and flew higher into the sky. As be watched, fascinated, he claims he entered a motionless trancelike state. 'It was more than just seeing them,' he related afterwards. 'It was this force. It was as though they were saying to me: "Do you want to come with us?" And I was fighting it and saying back: "No, no, nol" It was like telepathy, like being hypnotized.’ ships that fishermen carefully sail around it