Those Who Lived To tell ,
One of the most well-known encounters in the Bermuda
Triangle happened to Bruce Gernon Jr. on December 4, 1970. By his early 20s, Bruce already had about 600 hours flying time and was very familiar with Florida and the Bahamas. However, none of this prepared him for an encounter which over 30 years later still puzzles him.
Gernon was so amazed at his encounter that he wrote down details shortly after it happened and even began to do some of his own investigating. Here he shares some of what he encountered and what he has discovered over the last 30 years of flying the Triangle. His keen memory for detail has aided in the production of pictures and maps, detailing what he experienced.
In his own words:
My dad and I had been flying our own plane in the Bahamas since 1967, and had made at least a dozen flights to and from Andros Island. Everything seemed normal on that fateful day in December, just after 3 p.m., when my dad and I and Chuck Lafeyette, a business associate, lifted off the runway at Andros town Airport in a brand new Beechcraft Bonanza A36.
It was shortly after takeoff when I noticed an elliptical cloud directly in front of us about a mile away, hovering only about 500 feet above the ocean. Miami Flight Service reported over the VHF radio that the weather was good, so we
continued. We were climbing at 1,000 feet per minute, and the cloud seemed to be building up at the same rate. Unexpectedly, it caught up and
engulfed the Bonanza. After 10
minutes of climbing in and out of this cloud, the airplane finally broke free at 11,500 feet and the sky was clear.
I leveled the Bonanza off and accelerated to its maximum safe cruising speed of 195 miles per hour. When I looked back at the cloud, I was astonished. It now looked like an immense squall, abnormally shaped in the form of a giant semicircle extending around us. visibility was about ten miles and the cloud continued beyond my perception, so it must have been more than 20 miles long. After a few minutes, I lost sight of it.
Upon entering the cloud we witnessed an uncanny spectacle. It became dark and black, without rain, and visibility was about four or five miles. There were no lightning bolts, only extraordinarily bright white flashes that would illuminate the entire surrounding area. The deeper we penetrated, the more intense the flashes became, so we made a 135-degree turn to the left and headed due south out of the cloud.
We had been flying for 27 minutes. We thought we might be able to fly around the cloud, but after six or seven miles we saw that it continued in a near-perfect curve to the east. After two more minutes it became apparent that the cloud near Andros and the cloud near Bimini were actually opposite sides of the same ring-shaped body! The cloud must have formed just off of Andros Island and then rapidly spread outward into the shape of a doughnut with a diameter of 30 miles. This seemed impossible, but there was no other explanation. We were trapped inside a billowing prison, with no way under or over it.
Thirteen miles later, I noticed a large U-shaped opening on the west side of
the doughnut cloud. I had no choice but to turn and try to exit through the opening. As we approached, we watched the top ends of the U-gap join, forming a hole. The break in the cloud now formed a perfect horizontal tunnel, one mile wide and more than 10 miles long. We could see the clear blue sky on the other side.
We also saw that the tunnel was rapidly shrinking. I increased the engine RPM, bringing our speed to the caution area of 230 miles per hour. When we entered the tunnel, its diameter had narrowed to only 200 feet.
We were in the tunnel for only 20 seconds before we emerged from the other end. For about five seconds I had the strange feeling of weightlessness and an increased forwardmomentum. When I looked back, I gasped to see the tunnel walls collapse and form a slit
that slowly rotated clockwise.
All of our electronic and magnetic navigational instruments were malfunctioning. The compass was slowly spinning even as the airplane flew straight. I contacted Miami and told them we were about 45 miles southeast of Bimini, heading east at 10,500 feet. The radar controller replied that he was unable to identify us anywhere in that area.
Something bizarre had happened. Instead of the blue sky we expected, everything was a dull, grayish white haze. Visibility seemed like more than two miles, yet we could not see the ocean, the horizon, or the sky. The air was very stable and there was no lightning or rain. I. I had to use my imagination to feel our way west.
I could not logically understand what had happened during that flight, although I felt it was significant and reviewed it in my mind several times a day. In 1972 I heard about the so-called Bermuda Triangle and disappearances of boats and airplanes because of a possible time warp. It was then that I realized that time itself was the key.