Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsCheck the Internet for updates on some of these mysteries
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2019
"The Great Lakes Triangle" (1977) is a collection of stories about mysterious aviation disasters and Great Lakes shipwrecks that had no logical explanation—or at least no logical explanation that the author could discover. His tendency is to lean on the supernatural or extra-terrestrials for explanations as to why airplanes fall out of the sky over the Great Lakes, or why ships to go down on days when the weather should not have been a factor. In his brief introduction, the author states:
“There exists without the United States and Canada—principally between longitudes 76 degrees west and 92 degrees west and between latitudes 41 degrees north and 49 degrees north—a region in which several hundred peculiar events have been recorded….The principal geographic features of this region are five freshwater lakes.”
This book was published in 1977 and since then there have been updates to some of the stories in it, if you google the flight number or ship’s name. For example, Northwest Flight 2501 that went down over Lake Michigan in 1950 did not vanish without a trace. A group called Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates (MSRA) uncovered a couple of mass burial sites in 2008 and 2015 that are believed to contain the remains of passengers aboard Northwest Flight 2501.
Another mystery that can be updated is the sinking of the Edmund FitzGerald on 11/10/75. The wreck has been located and the U.S. Navy’s CURV III controlled underwater recovery vehicle has taken thousands of feet of video of the Fitz under 500 feet of Lake Superior water. While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that “the most probable cause…was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.” This trumps the author’s suggestion that mysterious red lights in the sky on the night of 11/10/75 had something to do with the loss of the Fitz and her crew.
A friend of mine, a retired aircraft tower controller stated that he was never interviewed for a mysterious air crash described in this book that directly involved him, so you should take this author’s stories with a grain of salt and check the Internet for updated information.
