Pioneering cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson believed in the existence of the Yeti in the Himalayas, as well as other strange animals and zoological phenomena (Richard Svensson/Fortean Picture Library).
Elsewhere, he explored a range of extraordinary claims. These writings combine sometimes thin research with the most extravagant sorts of speculations. In one, for instance, he contended that ants practice teleportation. He also fell victim to a few outlandish hoaxes, including a 1948 case in which a prankster left giant three-toed tracks on a Florida beach. Sanderson’s own on-site inquiries failed to uncover the fakery, and led him to the hypothesis that a giant, 15-foot-tall (4.6 meters) penguin was responsible. (The hoaxer confessed in 1988, long after Sanderson was gone.) Most of all, though, the chatty, egocentric Sanderson loved to tell stories, however dubious, and to spin theories, however woolly, for the sheer pleasure of giving expression to an unfettered imagination. Many of his listeners and readers took him seriously when he was simply being playful.
It is perhaps in this context that we ought to consider Sanderson’s contention, outlined in one of his last books, Invisible Residents, that the earth’s oceans harbor technologically advanced civilizations, undetected— needless to point out—by us surfacedwelling humans. The book’s subtitle is “A Disquisition upon Certain Matters Maritime, and the Possibility of Intelligent Life under the Waters of This Earth.” He coined the faintly comic acronym “OINTS” from “Other Intelligences.” In its conclusion Sanderson wrote with his characteristically droll wit, “That they are for the most part overcivilized and quite mad is, in my opinion, an open-ended question but quite probable.”
Naturally, he brought UFOs into the equation, though he preferred “UAO,” which could mean either “unidentified aerial object” or “unidentified aquatic object.” (Sanderson allows for UFOs coming from other planetary bodies or more exotic places but is most interested in ones that represent shared Earth space.) Invisible Residents relates sightings of unidentified structures and lights above seas and fresh-water bodies, on them, and beneath them, and then proceeds to recount allegedly mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft in areas Sanderson calls “vile vortices.”
“Vile vortices” were an expansion of the notion of the “Bermuda triangle,” a name invented by the veteran Fortean writer Vincent H. Gaddis (1913–1997) in a 1964 article for the men’s adventure magazine Argosy. Though it was Gaddis who put those two words together, he did not create the idea of unexplained vanishings between the Florida coast and Bermuda. The first published piece to allege that the area was haunted and dangerous was an Associated Press account dated September 16, 1950, written by E.V.W. Jones. In Fate for October 1952, Florida writer George X. Sand detailed what he called a “series of strange marine disappearances, each leaving no trace whatever, that have taken place in the past few years” in a “watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.” The claim was picked up in 1950s UFO books by Donald E. Keyhoe and M. K. Jessup and in Frank Edwards’ best-selling “true mysteries” collection Stranger than Science (1959). By the time Gaddis’ article appeared, devotees of the mysterious had all the pieces together; all they lacked was a name.
The Bermuda Triangle, marked off as the region between the tip of Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Bermuda Islands, has long been feared as a place where ships and planes mysteriously disappear or are destroyed (Dezsö Sternoczky/SUFOI/Fortean Picture Library).
Sanderson held that the Bermuda Triangle is only one of 10 vile vortices (actually a dozen, if one counts the polar regions). These are not actually triangles but lozenge-shaped areas, stretching in parallel bands above and below the equator, exactly 72° apart. In these regions meteorological and oceanic conditions are so radically unstable that they actually disrupt the space-time continuum, allowing visitors from elsewhere—other planets and dimensions—to establish undersea bases. These OINTS do not hesitate to take severe measures if they think someone or something threatens the secrecy with which they surround themselves and their activities. Thus, airplanes and marine vessels vanished from the face of the ocean, never to be heard of or from again. Beyond the jokey “overcivilized and quite mad” observation (perhaps better defined as a wisecrack), Sanderson had little more to say about these hypothetical beings, their natures, or their motives.
Subsequent research by Larry Kusche, Paul Begg, and others effectively discredited the Bermuda Triangle and related legends, which owe more to poor or nonexistent research than sinister OINTS. Overall, there is no evidence that marine disasters happen any more frequently in these areas than elsewhere, and most of the so-called inexplicable incidents turn out to have well-documented prosaic explanations.
Further Reading
Begg, Paul. Into Thin Air: People Who Disappear. North Pomfret, VT: David and Charles, 1979.
Kusche, Lawrence David. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
Sanderson, Ivan T. Invisible Residents: A Disquisition upon Certain Matters Maritime, and the Possibility of Intelligent Life under the Waters of the Earth. New York: World Publishing Company, 1970.
But skeptical archaeologists retorted that the stones, while real enough, were not artificially made. They were a perfectly natural formation formed by ordinary geological processes, they insisted. In May 2005 an expedition led by archaeologist William Donato and psychologist Greg Little uncovered artifacts with what appeared to be shaped or manipulated by human beings. Little and Donato are harshly critical of skeptical claims, arguing that the assertions are based on inadequate to nonexistent investigation and, beyond that, misrepresentation of the evidence. Little theorizes that the artifacts are from a “maritime culture” which perhaps 4,000 years ago set up a harbor in Bimini. The issue “doesn’t relate in any way to Edgar Cayce, Atlantis, or any other fantastic claims,” says Little (notwithstanding his and his wife Lora’s long membership in the A.R.E. and involvement in New Age thought)—but in fact needs to be viewed in the context of ongoing controversies over the early dates for the peopling the Americas. “What has been discovered about the ancient past in the Americas since 1997,” Little rightly notes, “has almost completely altered the history that had been accepted since the 1930s.”
It may well be that revelatory archaeological discoveries await further documentation in the waters off Bimini, but validation of Cayce’s Atlantis teachings remains an unlikely prospect.
Further Reading:
Cayce, Edgar Evans. Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968.
Cayce, Edgar Evans, Gail Cayce Schwartzer, and Douglas G. Richards. Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1988.
Johnson, K. Paul. Edgar Cayce in Context: The Readings: Truth and Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Kirkpatrick, Sidney D. Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet. New York: Riverhead Books, 2000.
Little, Greg. Alternate Perceptions Magazine online (November 2005). http://www.mysteriousamerica.net/Resources/Bimini%20HarborScreen2.pdf.
Robinson, Lytle, ed. Edgar Cayce’s Story of the Origin and Destiny of Man. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972.
Stearn, Jesse. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company,