It's 118 miles wide, 307 miles long and has a maximum depth of 925 ft. It's Lake Michigan. Full of stories and mystery... or is it?
Maritime historian Valerie Van Heest has done an extensive investigation into the so-called Lake Michigan Triangle,
"All kinds of strange disappearances happen between three ports. Manitowoc, WI, Luddington, MI, and Benton Harbor MI."
One story attributed to the mysterious triangle was of flight 2501. In 1950 the Northwest Orient flight left New York's La Guardia bound for its first stop in Minneapolis. When suddenly the flight disappeared. Contact with the plane was lost after it crossed Benton Harbor, MI. The plane went down with all 58 souls lost. The wreck itself was never found, though plane parts and remains were found washed ashore in Michigan.
"I've been searching for that wreck with author Clive Cussler for the last 14 years and all of our evidence indicates that it went down far south of the boundaries of the triangle." says Van Heest. "There are no more or now fewer incidents that occur within those three points that form that triangle than anywhere else on the lake."
As a matter of fact the busiest ports of Chicago and Milwaukee, where you'd think many shipwrecks would be are not even included in this mythical triangle.
So what is it about the Lake that makes folks believe these stories.
Rolf Johnson, the CEO of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, which incidentally is one of the points of the infamous triangle, says, "With every large body of water, you're going to have a lot of mythology, a lot of lore about those bodies, and about what happened to them."
Johnson goes on to say, "The weather patterns certainly have something to do with the amount of shipwrecks on the bottom of Lake Michigan. But it's not just, you know, the conditions, it's also the fact that there is so much more traffic in a relatively concentrated area that has an impact on the numbers of shipwrecks as well."
And according to Mr. Johnson, other than storms, mechanical, human error and fires are the most common causes for shipwrecks.
"So the Great Lakes are very treacherous, Johnson says. "Ships go down for a lot of different reasons. Now, is Lake Michigan any more treacherous than any of the others? That's probably not the case."
Still the mysterious stories are there.
Van Heest told me about one that's still a mysterious occurrence on the waves. "...the lake was whipped up into a wild fury, 30 to 40 foot waves, 120 mph winds. This was a very quick storm that came up in early November of 1940. Three large freighters found themselves all caught in the vortex of the storm, when they were off Luddington, MI. Never before have three ships perished within hours and just a few miles of each other right in one spot. And that stands as, truly, one of the strangest coincidental accidents in all of the Great Lakes' history."
So if there's anything to these mysteries of the triangle, I'll leave it to you to decide. But supernatural or not, you can't dispute our neighbor directly to our east has her fair share of stories, whether told or still hidden beneath her vast waves.
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