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Go look on any serious, no-no nonsense map for a notation marking "The Bermuda Triangle." You won't find it, but everybody knows where it is. The imaginary lines connecting (roughly) Miami, Bermuda and San Juan, Puerto Rico form an area well known in lore as a place where there may indeed be monsters, or aliens, or ... well, something that can make big things disappear.

While much fiction and grand storytelling has surrounded the waters that form the triangle, that doesn't mean all of the stories are yarns. There are hard, uncomfortable facts to confront -- even if in the end they are really just the result of a perfectly ordinary (if tragic) occurrence of maritime and aviation catastrophe. The disappearance of U.S. Navy Flight Squadron 19 comes to mind. Or, to pick another such uncomfortable fact, consider the U.S.S. Cyclops.

Built in 1910, the nearly 20,000-ton ship had a humble but important job as a collier, ferrying coal and other supplies to naval fleets. Before World War I, the Cyclops worked the waters off the Atlantic seaboard and also sailed in the Caribbean. At the start of 1918, with the Great War in full swing, the ship completed a mission to supply British naval ships in the south Atlantic. After that, she left Brazil in February and stopped in at Barbados on March 3rd and 4th. The ship's "last words" were in a telegram sent from Barbados to the West Indian Steamship Co. in New York, indicating an expected arrival in Baltimore on March 13. And that's the last anyone ever heard of the ship or its 306 crew members.

What happened? We still have no idea. Theories abound. The Cyclops had a banged up starboard engine, but that only meant it would have had to go a bit slower than usual. It should have been a routine cruise up to Baltimore. She was carrying a heavier cargo than her normal coal. The weightier manganese ore in her hold (10,000 tons of it) risked shifting when and if the ship were to roll in harsh waves. Perhaps a freak storm conspired with the weakened engine and the especially heavy cargo to bring her down. Or perhaps she was torpedoed by a German U-boat (though the Germans had no record of such a sinking). An early rumor after the disappearance even blamed a giant octopus for pulling the ship under! (We're going to be good skeptics and let the mythical giant octopus theory off with a warning until someone can actually prove it.)

It's possible we'll never know what happened to the Cyclops. Its wreckage could be sitting several miles deep beneath the waters in the Bermuda Triangle, not exactly an easy place to find or salvage lost things. In the end, only the triangle knows what really happened, and it seems to be fond of keeping secrets.