chiller blog

Posted Jun 29, 09 03:09 PM

All Signs Point to...???

Board games were so much better when they weren't PC. My brothers and I had some real lulus.

Charlie had The Sinking of the Titanic Game. In that one, plastic captain game pieces dueled to rescue goofy passengers (Reverend Parish, Major Bull) while dice rolls of six sunk the infamous cardboard ocean liner a notch at a time. Somehow, I acquired Lie, Cheat & Steal. The object of this game? Be the first candidate to 500 votes - buying them was just fine. Andy owned another (seriously) Worst Game of the Year candidate: Public Assistance: Or, Why Bother Working for a Living? Welfare scams - fun for the whole family.

But Andy possessed another gem, Milton Bradley's own Bermuda Triangle Game. The box blared the tagline, "Sinister Mystery Cloud Swallows Ships!" It was quite cool, actually, if you could conveniently forget about the history of planes and boats vanishing and all of the lives lost. For kids, that was alarmingly easy. Operate a shipping line in the Caribbean. Transport sugar, coffee, tobackey and oil between San Juan and Key West. Just watch out! Smack in the middle of the board, changing direction on shakes alone, was ye olde ominous swirling cloud. Magnets were affixed underneath. And if turned right, vessels - even those in some ports - "disappeared" with a...CLICK.

Boo ha ha!

Hours of entertainment? Da. Tasteful? Nyet.

That was my childhood initiation into the vast mythology known as the Bermuda Triangle. (The runner-up monicker, the Devil's Triangle, makes one wonder how it could have possibly lost that vote.) Kick in special segments from the old TV show Project UFO. Add movies of the week, documentary specials, sci-fi magazine articles, and pulp paperbacks, and voila! I've affectionately given my imagination a lifelong case of the creeps. That kind of stuff comes in handy when you're onboard a 747 cruising through "it" on the way to Puerto Rico. Up until then, my gravest concern was that the in-flight movie wasn't going to be another Robin Williams film.

Of course, there are all sorts of theories about what exactly lays at the heart of that aviation-charted area. Inside-out hurricanes and phantasmic storms. Worm holes. Pirates. Suspended physics that wreak havoc with compasses and navigational equipment. Alien abductions. The gateway to Atlantis. Even something called methane hydrates (knock yourself out if you wanna look that one up). But I'd always been curious, beyond the craft disappearances and the vaguely sinister lost radio communications, of how people could actually live there.

Take a good look at a map of the Bermuda Triangle. It overlaps a section of Florida and multiple islands. I wondered. If all various types of crafts went missing over air and sea, why weren't there any reported missing over land? Couldn't someone, on that same train of thought, be out with the metal detector, looking for coins on the beach when all of a sudden - CLICK - the cloud's got another one?

Come to think of it, the Bermuda Triangle's been quiet for quite some time. In this age of Coast Guard sonar and busy Atlantic Coast shipping ports, frequent flier flights and Disney Cruiseline, it becomes increasingly no fun to learn about all the debunking. Planes reported missing were later found - yet the records never updated. The amount of lost ships in that particular oceanic geography is roughly on par with any other spot across the globe. Hurricane zones create various meteorological phenomenon that, when viewed through bad weather, can logically be misunderstood and erroneously reported through radio transmissions. Thankfully, a whole lot of incidents haven't been explained away.

The mystique lingers like burnt toast. But the Bermuda Triangle better getting cracking - and soon. Come to think of it, it's been years since we heard a peep outta that potential dinosaur pouting at the bottom of Loch Ness. Ditto for Bigfoot and the Yeti. Life's no fun when the stuff of legend fades away...