It is 11 am on May 15, 2017 when a twin engine departs from Puerto Rico for Titusville, Florida. Traveling aboard the plane are entrepreneur Jennifer Blumin, her two children, and her partner Nathan Ulrich, who flies the Mu-2B. The four are returning to the United States after a short vacation on the island of Puerto Rico when air traffic loses contact with their vehicle, near the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
The disappearance of the plane and the searches
The 40 year old Jennifer Blümchen is CEO of Skylight Group, a company dedicated to the organization of fashion events. The buddy Nathan Ulrich is a veteran pilot who flew as a Coast Guard Auxiliary at Cape Code Air Station in the early 2000s to search for missing persons at sea. Jennifer, her children Theodore, 3, and Phineas, 4, and her boyfriend board the private plane after spending the weekend in the Puerto Rican city of Aguadilla, bound for Florida before returning to New York. But east of the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, the Miami control tower loses all trace of the plane that will disappear forever in the deep waters of the BahamasAtlantic Ocean.
At 2:10 p.m., the Eleuthera Coast Guard receives word from Miami airport air traffic controllers that a Mu-2B With four people on board, he disappeared from the radars. According to control tower reports, the plane was 37 miles east of the island of Bahamas and flying at an altitude of about 24,000 feet when communications were lost. Sea searches are conducted by Coast GuardCustoms and Border Protection and the Royal Bahamas Defense Force.
The following day, Tuesday May 16, after more than 30 hours of searching in the ocean, rescuers find what they seem remains an airplane and an oil spill, close Eleuthera. The Coast Guard, busy searching for the missing plane, finds parts of a seat and part of the engine of a plane similar to the one that the entrepreneur’s family flew in. A photo of the finds is also posted on Twitter, accompanied by the following caption: “Update: We confirm that the image of the remains found belongs to a Mu-2B aircraft found 15 miles from Eleuthera, Bahamas. The research goes on.”
#To update @USCG Image of debris, confirmed components of a MU-2B aircraft recovered 15 miles east of Eleuthera, Bahamas; search continues. pic.twitter.com/lP0lSX0bld
– USCGSoutheast (@USCGSoutheast) May 17, 2017
But what happened to the twin engine and where did its occupants go? “There is no evidence that the weather conditions that day were unfavorable,” Coast Guard spokesman Ryan Kelly said at the time of the accident, ruling out the possibility that the plane could have gone down during a crash tropical storm.
Unfortunately, to date, Jennifer, Ulrich, Theodore and Phineas have not been found, and nothing has been found from the twin-engine plane they flew in, apart from the few remains found in Eleuthera, Nbc New York reported. At the time of the research, the authorities stated that the parts of the aircraft found were one of the same aircraft template of the missing person, but they could not confirm that it was the very twin engine the missing family was traveling on.
The Bermuda Triangle
The disappearance of the Mu-2B in 2017 brought the secret of the infamous Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean between the Bermuda archipelago, Florida and Puerto Rico, where ships and planes have disappeared over the years without a trace. The disappearance of the so-called Squadriglia 19 is famous: five US Navy aircraft that disappeared simultaneously in 1945 while training near the Bahamas. The five torpedo bombers and their pilots are never found, nor is one of the rescue planes that went in search of them. As fate would have it, one of the two PB Mariners who took off to help with the search exploded in flight, causing the deaths of 13 people.
The list of suspected disappearances of ships and planes within the area known as the Bermuda Triangle or Devil’s Triangle is long: from the “Ss Cotopaxi”, a cargo ship that disappeared on the Charleston-Havana route in 1925, to several planes that more recently in disappeared into the sky near the Bermuda Islands as if vanishing into thin air. The mysterious disappearance has fueled the legend that they happen in the area in question paranormal activitiessuch as Alien abductions or that there are interdimensional portals that would engulf the vehicles and their passengers.
The Australian science journalist Karl Kruszelnicki tried to scientifically explain the strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle: “We are in an area near the equator and very close to the coasts of the United States. The sea and the sky are always very busy here, and it was like that in the past – commented the journalist, who attributes the numerous accidents to the adverse weather conditions that often occur in this area – Because they happened due to bad weather conditions, and here the waves can be more than 15 meters high and have affected even ancient and technologically backward ships for their time”.
The explanation provided by Kruszelnicki and supported by other scholars makes sense given that many of the vessels in this area of the Atlantic disappeared and had none by the late nineteenth century instrumentation technologically advanced. But it cannot be applied to the accident that occurred on the plane on which Blumin and her family were flying, who are still missing to this day.
As the Imaway blog reports, several recent studies have attributed the causes to the frequent accidents in the Bermuda Triangle depth of the water, which in some places reaches more than 8000 meters. It is not difficult that the vanished ships and planes were indeed swallowed up by the force of the sea and dragged for kilometers under the sea, with no possibility of getting back to the surface.