RE: [DL] Erie Canal {Warning...LONG}

["Dade" <dade@columbus.rr.com>]

Ever hear of the Great Lakes Triangle.. if not heres some info..

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North America's Best Kept Secret: THE GREAT LAKES TRIANGLE

There is a body of water where the cries of distress come more often than
any other body of water per square mile in the world. It is not the Devil
Sea off the coast of Japan. It is not the treacherous waters off Cape Horn.
Nor the deadly calm of the Sargasso Sea. It is an area where the search and
rescue capabilities have no equal. It is not the Bermuda Triangle, but
another triangle formed by the Great Lakes locked in the heart of industrial
North America.

Too often the crack search and rescue units of Canada and the United States
come back empty handed. A ship or a plane vanished for no apparent reason or
destroyed by forces that no one can explain. An extraordinary statistic has
been recently disclosed. Fully one third (1/3) of all unsolved American sea
and air disasters take enlace in the Great Lakes Triangle.

A man that has accumulated and assessed the data that has led him to
designate the Great Lakes as perhaps the greatest disaster area in the world
is J. L. Gourlet.. J. L. Gourlet is not only an experienced author and
journalist, he is also a highly qualified professional flying instructor.

Gourlet has flown thousands of miles throughout the Bermuda Triangle and he
has been out of radio contact with anyone for as much as an hour at a time.
He claims that it is much easier to understand how in an expansive ocean
like the Atlantic, that someone can disappear in the vastness of it. On the
other hand, while it takes a mere ten minutes to fly over Lake Ontario, a
pilot can see Canada on one wing tip and the United States on the other wing
tip. No one is ever out of radio contact in the Great Lakes Triangle. At any
given time, whether on the lakes or in the air, communication can be made
with at least one hundred different government employees in the United
States and Canada. It is inconceivable that anyone can disappear in the
Great Lakes Triangle - yet it keeps on happening.

And disappear they do, and under circumstances of mystery. One hundred
kilometer head winds that no one else can feel. Dangers that come so
suddenly, the victim never even cries for help. In terms of the sheer
magnitude of the tragedy, it has been discovered that the Great Lakes
Triangle surpasses the Bermuda Triangle. The Bermuda Triangle covers come
1,500,000 square miles, some sixteen times the size of the combined Great
Lakes. There are no strange remote waters or vast stretches of ocean. These
are completely enclosed fresh water pools. The playground of middle America.

On the shores of the Great Lakes stand the great American cities of Chicago,
Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland. Piercing the sky over Toronto on the
northern shores of Lake Ontario, the highest man-made structure in the
world... the CN Tower, the pinnacle of highly sophisticated communications
technology. Air traffic controllers urge pilots flying the Great Lakes to
report continuously to ground stations. A ten second lapse will launch
full-scale search and rescue. And yet the fact remains that there is a high
number of inexplicable incidents of disasters. Gourlet follows up on any
clue, any speck of evidence that might shed some light onto a mysterious
tragedy. He had pursued high government officials in Ottawa and Washington
and interviews the men and women on the spot, including OPP, RCMP, Coast
Guard, and other search and rescue personnel. He has spent days at marinas
to discuss the weather peculiarities with yachtsmen whose lives depend on
their knowledge of the weather and their effects on the Great Lakes.

Information which has been fed into computers over the years is constantly
be analyzed in the hopes of finding some pattern, natural or supernatural.
Searching for patters. Searching for correlation's. Searching for clues.
Searching for explanations.

And finally, not dry data, but flesh and blood. Eye witnesses who have
survived to express their bewilderment. Such a man is Robert Joy Jr. of
Michigan. A police officer, a pilot and a professor of criminology. On April
23, 1973, Bob Watched his father disappear. His father was flying a safe,
amphibious aircraft which was well equipped. Bob Joy was in another aircraft
a few hundred feet away. They were flying over shallow Lake Erie. The water
was not rough. There was no cry for help. No trace of the lake amphibian
aircraft or Bob's father was ever found. The small aircraft that Bob's
father was flying, simply disappeared while Bob watched in horror.

The disappearance of small aircraft are hard enough to explain. The strange
disasters of the great laker boats are perhaps even more mystifying. These
are ships that are built for the lakes. Never far from shore, massively
equipped with every conceivable safety and communication device. When the
Edmund Fitzgerald was launched, it was the largest of all the great laker
boats. When she sailed from Duluth, Minnesota on November 9, 1975, she too
was sailing in tandem with another laker, the Arthur M. Anderson. They
easily weathered a mild storm but to be safe the Edmund Fitzgerald checked
her speed to close the distance between her and the Andersen. A snow flurry
obscured their view briefly. The radar told the Andersen that the Fitzgerald
was less than nine miles ahead. When the flurry lifted the Andersen could
see for twenty miles but there was no Fitzgerald. She had gone with a sudden
convulsion to the bottom, with all hands. When the wreckage was found, it
was discovered that every life boat was still securely fastened.

The amazing part of that accident is that for at least three hours the
Fitzgerald was filling up with water. We know now that even though no one
aboard the Fitzgerald knew it at the time. What is really strange about this
accident is that no one did know that. No one put on life jackets. No one
called out in distress. In fact, up until the very last minute before the
Fitzgerald went under the water, the First Mate of the Fitzgerald was saying
that the ship was all right, that they were having no problems.

And what about the Kamloops and the strange events of December 7, 1927? The
Kamloops too had plotted a cautious course entering Lake Superior in tandem
with the freighter Quedoc. In the late afternoon the men on the Quedoc
sighted rocks a head and swerved hard to starboard to avoid them. The
Kamloops was following and could clearly see the Quedoc's action. The
Kamloops sailed on despite warning blasts from the Quedoc's great steam
whistle. She was not seen again. It was presumed that she was gashed on the
rocks of Isle Royale. There was no wreckage. There were no bodies. No
evidence whatsoever that the Kamloops or her crew had ever existed.

The strange history of the lakes has brought researchers and investigators
to the records and evidence of the marine museum on Toronto's water front.
The first commercial ship to sail the Great Lakes, the Griffin, disappeared
with all hands on her maiden voyage. Although relics and parts of ships
retrieved led to the discovery and reasons for shipping disasters, this is
not always the case on the Great Lakes. Often evidence is contradictory.
Other times evidence is totally non-existent.

There is for example, an exquisite ships figure head which was found adrift
but there is no record of any ship carrying this figure head.

During the winter of 1902, divers searched unsuccessfully for the wreckage
of the Bannockburn. They were not surprised because they could not believe
that she had sunk. She was last spotted by a passing ship. The Skipper
pointed her out to the First Mate. But when the First Mate turned his head
to look at the proud vessel, the Bannockburn had disappeared.

From time to time over the years, she has been reported sailing on over the
lakes.

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Just do a web search for the Great Lakes Triangle and I'm sure you'll find
some more info...

Dade