I’ve spent the past few days in my old stomping grounds, the Bermuda Triangle. I’ve written about the place where the world’s ships, planes and sailors go to vanish into thin air in a few articles; it’s a story more fascinating as a modern myth that evolved thanks to modern media than an actual, extant phenomenon.

Anyway, I located a neat article in the US Merchant Marine’s periodical, The National Marine, from 1919 which details the maiden voyage of the Raifuku Maru, whose tragic sinking six years later would turn into a central Triangle mystery. Barring a few condescending comments about the “diminutive” Japanese typical of the era, it’s a flattering portrait of a ship that was the pride of Japan’s merchant fleet; it had been constructed at Kobe in just twenty-three days, a record for steamships at the time, and was the first in a series of vessels to establish a regular trade between Asia and New Orleans. The voyage was accompanied by a spokesman from the vessel’s owners, Osaku Shosen Kabushiki Kaisha; we also briefly meet its skipper, Captain Yehara, who would later perish when the vessel sank in April 1925. The technical details might not interest anyone but naval buffs, yet I’m always happy to see Triangle victims humanized as something more than bit players in a bogus mystery.

From the Triangle to the Indian Ocean, I found an interesting piece on the Ourang Medan, the “Death ship” who was found with its crew mysteriously killed by an unseen force in 1948 before the ship, conveniently, exploded and sank. This story, whether blamed on chemical fumes, plague or the inevitable extraterrestrials, found its way into virtually all the classic “mysteries of the sea” books, from Richard Winer to Vincent Gaddis. Modern writers, notably Fortean Times researcher Theo Paijmins, have written off this story as a hoax perpetrated by an Italian conman named Silvio Scherli, noting that Scherli sold the story to a number of newspapers in the early ’40s, long before the common version claims the vessel sank.

Researcher Alexander Butzinger draws an unfortunate connection that hadn’t occurred to me; the story first appeared in several newspapers in Nazi-occupied Europe during, and the original article depicted the Medan as a convict ship notorious for criminal activity. In these first versions, the vessel is transporting chemical weapons for the Allies, but in a karmic twist the chemicals leaked out and killed the whole crew, leaving only Signor Scherli to tell the tale. Butzinger finds it even more suggestive that the story was popularized after the war by German writer Otto Mielke, who spent the war years as a propaganda officer with the Kriegsmarine. Could it be that this staple of the Unsolved Mystery genre was in fact Nazi propaganda that outlived its sell-by date? He makes a persuasive case, and it wouldn’t be the first time the Mysterious Mysteries crowd fell for a fascist fraud.