This book is a great place to begin researching the Devil's Triangle. The author simply states the facts, he doesn't lean towards the occult, nor does he deny the strangeness of the events which have occured there. The last chapter is aptly titled "Natural or Supernatural?" If you can find this book it is worth it-- ...

Richard Winer is best known as the author of the Devil's Triangle books in the Devil's/Bermuda Triangle craze in the 1970's. You may be wondering how this relates to this "new" book. Basically this is the story of a publisher who has 3 old Devil's Triangle books sitting in their vaults gathering dust....So how about combining stories from the three books, throwing a new title on it and seeing how much money they can rake in. And that's pretty much what you have here. The stories vary in quality ( just as the original books did ). If you like ocean mysteries it may be worth a look.

I bought this book because I'm an enthusiast of both maritime literature and ghost stories, and this book purported to appeal to both interests. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to its claims. The author, who, as he reminds us time and again throughout the book, wrote "The Devil's Triangle," which inspired the cheesy 1971 Vincent Price-narrated documentary of the same name. This might account for the over-dramatic tone of some of the accounts, which promise to scare, but don't. A ship enters a fog bank and crashes on rocks that were poorly charted. Putting "was there something more to the fate of this ship?" at the end of the story doesn't make it creepy. There are some truly alarming disappearance stories out there, but they're not to be found here. Particularly disturbing was the author's digressions into personal opinion, as in the chapter about a group of seal-hunting ships that were trapped by an ice floe. Winer claims that it was nature restoring the balance against the brutality of the hunters. If this was the case, why didn't this sort of disaster happen every year during seal season? And why are we supposed to care what he thinks of Errol Flynn's draft-dodging, which enters into the tale on celebrity haunted yachts? The book could also have used a better editor; grammatical errors abound. Want a good maritime-based chiller? Grab a copy of Berlitz's "The Bermuda Triangle" instead.

Okay . . . I really liked this book. Enough said.

However, I have numerous problems with it. For one, Winer (who thirty-odd years ago wrote a book on the Bermuda Triangle) is either stuck in the past or hasn't done much reading; he lists numerous debunked or blatantly false occurances in this book. For example: the famous "message in a bottle" from the "Carrol A. Deering", which suggested that the crew was kidnapped and put in chains by a mysterious steamer, was proven to be a hoax perpetuated by the founder of it way back in the 1920s, when the "Deering" was front-page news - even though Winer lists it as being proven authentic. Also, as Lawrence Kusche writers in "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved", the disappearance of the USS "Cyclops" is not so mysterious after all, given that there was a rather severe storm in the immediate vicinity of Baltimore at the time that the "Cyclops" was supposed to arrive. The Japanese freighter "Raifuku Maru" or what ever it was called ("Danger like a dagger now!") went down during a severe storm off the coast of France; those famous words were never actually sent. Numerous other "Bermuda Triangle"-type incidences are listed in an equally erroneous manner (especially the "Revonnoc").

Nonetheless, the majority of the book is interesting - especially the chapters on items that I knew little or nothing about (the chapter about the "Ivan Vassili" is arguably the best in the book). I have long been haunted the pictures of the ghosts of the SS "Watertown"; it's interesting to get an insight into the actual events preceding it.

Overall, a good book - if you don't mind the occasional dated/erroneous entry.

More "true" stories of strange events in the Bermuda Triangle. One of many Bermuda Triangle books published in the 1970s.