RECOVERED OLD FILE
"You're feeling safe in your harbor,
and everything seems certain.
Right next to Palm Beach and Key Biscayne,
behind a velvet curtain.
But then the moon goes gray with worry,
and the sea turns a pale white.
You better believe something strange is going on tonight."
-- From "Bermuda Triangle," by Fleetwood Mac
Dew still clung to the wings of the battleship-gray airplane as it sat fueling under a blazing early-morning sun on the Boca Chica Naval Air Station tarmac.
It was 1944, and the country was at war in Europe and the Pacific and the Keys bristled with military hardware and a personnel buildup unlike any seen before or since.
But war was the last thing on the minds of 18-year-old twin soldiers David and George Rothschild, who had just received word of the death of their father. Distraught, the brothers were granted permission to travel to the funeral, 1,500 miles away in Camden, N.J.
Sympathetic Naval officers had even arranged for the Rothschilds to fly to the mainland on a small plane they were sending to Norfolk, Va., to be decommissioned.
But shortly after takeoff, the inexplicable happened.
"When we got caught in the Triangle, the instruments wouldn't work," said David Rothschild, now a 75-year-old real estate broker in Los Angeles. "The pilot got so frightened that the co-pilot took over and kept hollering at us to look out the sides of the plane to find land. We knew that we had just enough fuel to get us to Norfolk, so if we were lost at sea, we would have had to ditch."
Fortunately for the Rothschilds and the others on the plane, they were able to locate land after about 20 minutes, and the flight continued without incident. But for the sharp eyes of the Rothschilds, the trip nearly ended the way the infamous Flight 19 would the next year: With the unexplained disappearance of plane and crew.
DISAPPEARANCES IN THE KEYS
Nearly two decades after the Rothschilds' near-death experience, author Vincent Gaddis coined his "Bermuda Triangle" term to explain the numerous sinkings and disappearances of planes and ships in the area bounded by the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico -- inspired, in part, by the sinking of the 504-foot tanker Marine Sulphur Queen, near Key West, in 1963.
But strange disappearances have been reported in the Keys for decades, and many consider the island chain a contender to Miami's title as the second corner of the Triangle; it's one of two places on earth where a magnetic compass points toward true north.
On March 6, 1948, the yacht Evelyn K. was found abandoned in the Keys, its crew of three vanished.
And in the waning days of 1957, the all-weather racing yawl Revenoc left Key West for Miami with a crew of four and sailed off into maritime history.
The yacht's captain, Harvey Conover, was a celebrated sailor, having won the Nassau-Miami race three times. And the 44-foot vessel was in tip-top, seaworthy shape.
Nonetheless, it must have succumbed to the elements: All that was left a few days later was the ship's dinghy, found capsized in Jupiter Inlet, 80 miles north of Miami.
The case of the Marine Sulphur Queen itself is one of the greatest mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle.
The ship was a T-2 tanker surplussed from World War II and carrying a cargo of molten sulphur. It left Beaumont, Texas, on Feb. 2, 1963, and was due at Norfolk on Feb. 7. Its last radio transmission came at 1:30 a.m., Feb. 4, when it reported being close to Key West. The ship wasn't heard from again, and when it failed to show in Norfolk on Feb. 7, a vast search of 348,400 square miles was initiated. Despite a search that expended nearly 500 man hours, not a trace of the ship was found and the search was called off on Feb. 13.
On Feb. 20, the crew of a Navy Torpedo Retriever discovered the ship's foghorn floating 12 miles southwest of Key West. Nearby, they found a life-ring emblazoned with "Marine Sulphur Queen," coupled to a T-shirt bearing predatory fish teeth marks.
At the time, authorities were baffled by the location of the debris, which by all accounts, should have floated northeast, being held in the Gulf Stream current. No trace of sulphur was detected in either the nearby water, or on the flotsam.
Due to its immense size and apparent proximity to land at the time of its disappearance, the fate of the Marine Sulphur Queen and its 100-plus crew has become the stuff of legend.
On New Year's Day 1969, the Citizen reported that a 16-foot open-air outboard captained by Key Westers Charles W. Aguero and Raymond Wells had not returned home from a day of fishing somewhere in the Keys. By Jan. 5, the Citizen said the Coast Guard was suspending its search, declaring the men "lost at sea." No trace of the vessel or its occupants was ever found.
A year later, on March 3, 1970, the Citizen reported that another small fishing boat with a crew of four had failed to return to port. One week later the search was called off.
"Those two incidents happened so close together that it was a real attention getter," said Tom Hambright, historian at the Monroe County Library. "You took a few precautions when you went out in a boat after that."
One of the more chilling experiences in the Triangle was had by the captain and crew of the Ixtapa, a 55-foot Marathon-based fishing charter that regularly ventured out into the Gulf of Mexico. Sometime in mid-December 1971, the vessel left for Cozumel, Mexico, for a week of fishing. On Dec. 30, the Citizen reported three of the five men on board were found beached in a raft at Elliot Key, 10 miles southeast of Miami.
One of the survivors, a Delaware man named Richard Antonio, told investigators, "The Ixtapa struck a submerged object somewhere in the Gulf" on Dec. 19, and that the other two men "went mad and jumped from the raft during the ordeal."
JUST PLANE BIZARRE
Key West's pioneering role in commercial airline flights ensured the Keys would see more than its share of lost planes.
Among the more mysterious incidents reported to the National Transportation Safety Board took place Jan. 14, 1967, when Robert Van Westerborg, his wife Adelaide and Mr. and Mrs. Phillip de Berard, departed Miami in a Beech Bonanza N7210B headed for Key Largo. They arrived, ate lunch and then took off to photograph the Keys. They were never heard from again.
A rash of missing planes and ships during this period prompted author Richard Winer to dub it the "Black Week."
Another strange case is that of an Argosy Airlines DC-3, said to have departed Fort Lauderdale in clear weather, en route to Havana to pick up 20 American fruit growers on Sept. 13, 1978. About an hour after take-off, the plane vanished over the Florida Straits, confounding air traffic controllers in Cuba and Miami, who had been tracking the plane, only to see it fall off their radar screens for no apparent reason.
Other planes reported to have disappeared in the area include a Cessna 182 that went missing somewhere between Marathon and Key West, on Oct. 31, 1965, a Beech D50b that never made it from Delray Beach to Key West on Nov. 19, 1979, a Piper between Key West and Clearwater on March 12, 1984, and a Piper northeast of Key West en route from Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 8, 1985.
According to Bermuda Triangle researcher Gian J. Quasar, more planes disappeared in 1978 than in any other year. This was followed by the second worst year in history. Between 1978 and 1979 some 18 aircraft are said to have disappeared.
THEORIES
Over the years, many theories have been floated to explain the high number of disappearances and sinkings in the area. UFOs, magnetic fields and operator error are frequently cited as possible causes behind the high number of disappearances. As far as the Coast Guard is concerned, all of them are bunk -- except for operator error.
"Overall, the U.S. Coast Guard is not impressed with supernatural explanations of disasters at sea," wrote 7th Coast Guard District public affairs officer R. A. LaBrec in a 1999 press release. "The Gulf Stream ... is extremely swift and turbulent. It can quickly erase any evidence of a disaster ... Not to be underestimated is the human factor ... All too often, crossings are attempted with too small a boat, insufficient knowledge of the area's hazards and a lack of good seamanship."
Sacramento, Calif.-based researcher Quasar is also surprisingly skeptical about suggestions of supernatural causes behind the many disappearances in the Triangle, and agrees there are probably logical explanations for each incident.
"I would say it's multi-factual," he said. "In a few instances, I think there are criminal explanations, and the people are still alive. There is a scientific explanation for anything, but I don't equate conventional with natural. There is a lot that nature can do on the ocean on its own."
But for David Rothschild, no explanation could put his mind at ease after the harrowing experience with his twin brother George.
"I really thought we were going to die," said David Rothschild. "And it scared the hell out of me. I didn't fly again for 20 years after that."
