People love a good mystery.
And with some mysteries, we love them so much that we don’t want them solved.
That seems to be the case with the Bermuda Triangle, a section of the northern Atlantic Ocean where a number of ships and aircraft have allegedly gone missing under suspicious circumstances. The myth of the Bermuda Triangle first came about in the 1950s, when a few local news articles mentioned the historical loss of several ships in the area, including a group of planes from a U.S. Air Force training flight. And after one imaginative author suggested the possibility of a supernatural element to these disappearances, the area gained worldwide notoriety.
This urban legend has fascinated us for decades— and the only problem is, it’s absolutely false.
I recently scored a used copy of Lawrence David Kusche’s masterwork, “The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved”, and I have to agree with his findings. Kusche— a professional research librarian, as well as a trained pilot— spent years looking into every single disappearance that was accredited to the Triangle, and listed each of these cases chronologically in his book. And after analyzing centuries’ worth of commercial shipping logs, Coast Guard incident reports, and insurance records from Lloyds’s of London, Kusche came to the conclusion that the Bermuda Triangle was essentially no more dangerous than any other body of water on Earth.
So there you have it. No monstrous rogue waves, no electromagnetic fields, or UFO sightings ever haunted the Sargasso Sea. Just poor journalism, and a complete and total lack of fact-checking.
Through his research, Kusche was able to show that the many of ships named in Triangle disappearances might have only passed near the area at some point in their journeys, before going on to sink in other parts of the globe. And in many cases, there was simply no documentation to show that some of these “vanished” ships had ever existed at all.
But after reading through Kusche’s thorough analysis, one of these cases captured my attention— the sudden, and still-unexplained disappearance of the ship Witchcraft.
On the evening of December 22, 1967, a Florida real estate developer named Daniel Burack was out on his 23-foot yacht with a friend, a Catholic priest named Father Padraig Horgan. The two men had only gone about a mile out to sea, supposedly to view the Miami skyline at night, when the Witchcraft became disabled. Burack put out a distress call and requested a tow back to port, although he emphasized that their situation was not an emergency. But by the time a Coast Guard patrol boat arrived at their reported position— only 19 minutes later— there was absolutely no sign of the ship.
Burack, Horgan, and the Witchcraft had vanished without a trace.
The Coast Guard immediately launched a search operation, but even after a week of non-stop effort, failed to turn up any clues. The Witchcraft seemed to have disappeared altogether, without even a single scrap of debris left behind. This mysterious disappearance has continually been held up as proof of the Bermuda Triangle’s existence— never mind that these two men were so close to shore, that they probably could’ve swum back.
Which leaves all of us— the conspiracy theorists, and the skeptics alike— left to wonder: what really happened to the Witchcraft?
Excluding the possibility that these two men were kidnapped by aliens, I’m of the opinion that they simply chose to disappear. If the Witchcraft really had been sinking on such a busy waterway, another passing ship would have certainly rendered assistance, or at least spotted some of the wreckage. But because of the complete lack of evidence, it’s unlikely that Burack and Horgan were ever at the position they they radioed in on their distress call.
The rest of this story, though, is all speculation. As a Florida real estate developer, could Burack have been tied up in some sort of shady business dealings? Maybe the man was looking for a way to abscond with his ill-gotten loot, and he needed to fake his own death as an air-tight alibi. Or who knows? Maybe he and Horgan were just two guys looking for a way to spend the rest of their lives together… which I imagine would’ve been pretty tough to accomplish, just a few generations ago.
Whatever the real story is, I suspect that somebody out there has to know something about this disappearance. But for whatever reason, they’re choosing to keep quiet and preserve the mystery…