Raise your hand if you've ever heard about 'The Great Lakes Triangle'

I finished reading a really cool, older book the other day that some of you might find interesting, “The Great Lakes Triangle” by Jay Gourley.

The book delivers on a promise to provide “terrifying revelations about the mysterious Great Lakes region where ships and planes – and men and women – vanish forever.”

First published in 1977, this 192-page book discusses the hundreds of ships, planes and people who have disappeared forever in the Great Lakes region, just as they have in the notorious, better known Bermuda Triangle. In fact, the book’s author, an aviator and flying instructor turned journalist, goes to great lengths to show that “The Great Lakes Triangle” is “deadlier than the Bermuda Triangle.”

I thought Gourley’s short introduction to the book introduced the book's subject matter nicely:

“There exists within 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 concentration of such events is far greater than any random statistical dispersion would place within these narrow boundaries.

“The region, on the whole, is sparsely populated, but there are areas of dense population within it. The principal geographic features of this region are five freshwater lakes.”

I thought this book was extremely interesting, and I really enjoyed reading it. It appeared to be well-researched and offered detailed information about the numerous, unusual incidents involving planes and ships traveling over and on the Great Lakes, which cover an area of just over 94,000 square miles. Some of these craft have disappeared on days that were completely calm, and some of them vanished right before the eyes of several witnesses. Some of these accounts are downright creepy and if they don’t make you a little more nervous to fly, then you haven’t read the accounts closely enough.

As you might imagine, the book goes to great lengths to offer explanations for these incidents, and these explanations range from pilot error, sudden loss of altitude, engine failure, poor aircraft and vessel maintenance, space-time vortices, faulty radios, malfunctioning gyroscopes, the loss of visual reference, spatial disorientation, mental illness, rouge waves and UFOs.

I especially enjoyed the aviation aspects of this book. The fact that Gourley was a trained pilot and flight instructor brought an informed perspective to the subject matter, and he discussed flight planning and air traffic control in a way that I found engrossing. In fact, before I’d even finished reading this book, I looked up the radio frequencies for the two airports in my area and programmed them into my police scanner.

In the end, I thought the way Gourley wrapped up his book was just as effective as his brief introduction:

“Epilogue: In the course of researching and writing this book, many have asked what really caused the events herein described. I do not know.”

How many of you have read this book? What did you think about it? What do you think is responsible for the many unexplained disappearances in the Great Lakes region? Let us know in the comments section below.