Bermuda Triangle

I was in the Navy between 1972 and 1975, out of Norfolk, Virginia. Our main area of operation was in the Bermuda Triangle. We made more than a dozen trips through it.

On one trip, we were patrolling off the island of St. Thomas, cruising in a counterclockwise direction. There were about a dozen of us on the fantail of the ship. Someone brought our attention to a red light off our starboard side. We all went over to the railing and watched the light. Didn’t look like much, just something to see-that is, until it got brighter and brighter, and became more transparent till it disappeared.

A shipmate of mine was a quartermaster. He said he was going up to the pilot house to see if anyone else noticed the light. They had. He came back telling us that the captain thought we were being tested, since we were there for war games, but there was no contact of any kind-no radar, sonar, radio, nothing.

The captain turned the ship to starboard and headed toward the light. My quartermaster shipmate kept us informed by going back and forth to the pilot house. What he told us was spooky and got us to wondering. The light kept doing the same thing as before-becoming brighter and more transparent. It also kept getting higher on the horizon. No matter how fast we went, we could not close the distance between us and the light. It kept ahead of us all the time.

The quartermaster came back to us with news. We were headed back. The captain had plotted our course and found out we were headed straight into the center of the Bermuda Triangle. We turned around and went back.
The next morning I asked the quartermaster about the light.
“What light?” he replied.
-Ramon Priddy, Paducah, Ky.