THE BIBLE AND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE by George Johnson and Don Tanner

We're getting back to our roots here for our big 400th post with some classic crank writing on the Bermuda Triangle courtesy Christian authors George Johnson and Don Tanner, as they run us through the connections between THE BIBLE AND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE! Their religious POV gives us some great Triangle tidbits like missionary couple Warren and Betty Miller of East Lansing, MI, who fly their Beechcraft through a mysterious yellow fog over the Triangle that kills their instruments and leaves them SOL at 11,000 feet! The authors make some biblical interpretations of this yellow fog later on ...

I assume that "the movie" referenced on the cover is Richard Winer's 1971 documentary The Devil's Triangle, narrated by Vincent Price. Typical of '70s Christian authors, everything here is laid out plainly and flows logically within the busted frameworks of biblical literalism and young Earth creationism. Johnson and Tanner quote classic Triangle stories extensively from authors like Charles Berlitz, Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey, psychic Page Bryant, Richard Winer, and most interestingly Lawrence David Kusche, whose skeptical book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved is used to deflate some of the Triangle myth making of the other authors. One example has Johnson and Tanner using the phony line "they look like they're from outer space" from retellings of Flight 19 in an early chapter (quoting Art Ford specifically) and then correcting it later with Kusche's work to prove a point about occultic lies. Our authors have us coming and going though, because both the fake Triangle myths and any genuine weirdness going on out there spring from the same source: Satan! Another heavily cited work is the Christian text UFOs: What on Earth is Happening? by John Weldon and Zola Levitt, which posits that flying saucers are emissaries of Satan.

Johnson and Tanner dredge up Ignatius Donnelly, of course, and W.S. Cerve's 1931 text Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific for evidence of sunken lands proving biblical catastrophism. Velikovsky and those old flash frozen mammoths also buttress this argument. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monsters are bad portents of rising occultism, and monster hunting creep Frank Searle puts in an appearance for some satanic synchronicity.

Edgar Cayce and other psychics like Darwin Gross, ECK Master, are also quoted to support catastrophism and the idea of an imminent Atlantean resurrection in the Bermuda Triangle, with the authors disclaiming that, of course, any funny business involved is straight from Satan! Johnson and Tanner work in some Creationist cant too, with clumsy references to the coelacanth and "index fossils" that aren't fully explained. These and many other references come from the 1961 blockbuster catastrophist work The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.

There's plenty of well done maps and illustrations, including a mysterious deep hole in the Gulf of Oman (relevant to Revelation 9:14) and a diagram of the Devil's Triangle and Bermuda Triangle both leading to Sheol, the biblical underworld. This is Johnson and Tanner's big idea, that Satan and his demonic minions are luring lost souls with UFOs, USOs, sea monsters, Bigfoot, and assorted occult phenomenon into the Triangles and vile vortices of Ivan T. Sanderson, which lead straight to Hades, where they'll await the final judgement to be cast into the eternal lake of fire! The authors suggest getting right with God to avoid this fate, in their specific manner of course.

The back page ads are a snapshot of American Christian concerns in the late '70s, covering economic woes, Eldridge Cleaver's conservative conversion, effective ministry, and another book by Tanner called On the Other Side, dealing with the near death experience of one Martin Ford. Tanner cowrote it with Dave Balsiger, who was also behind In Search of Noah's Ark, which was adapted post haste by Sunn Classic Pictures into the smash hit documentary of the same name. Tanner mentions On the Other Side in the introduction to this title as a reason he began investigating the occult/biblical connections to the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bible and the Bermuda Triangle is available to read and download at archive dot org. Here's to a new year, and some new old friends. Don't step into any bottomless pits!

Logos International, 1976