Eerie patch dooms travelers

Even Christopher Columbus was creeped out by the Bermuda Triangle.

While sailing through the mysterious stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda on Oct. 8, 1492, the nervous New World explorer wrote in his log about wild compass readings and seeing a fireball crashing into the sea.

It doesn’t matter that some historians believe the “flames’’ were likely caused by a meteor and the compass readings were typical for the area’s unusual magnetic field.

True believers say there is a deadly dark force — or extraterrestrials, time warps or even the ghost of the lost city of Atlantis — gobbling up planes and ships and their crews and passengers in the triangle’s roughly 500,000 square miles.

“[The] limited area is the scene of disappearances that total far beyond the laws of chance,” author Vincent Gaddis insisted in a 1964 “The Deadly Bermuda Tri- angle’’ article — the first time someone put a name to the area.

The list of souls lost in the Triangle includes Flight 19, a group of five US Navy bombers that disappeared during a training mission on Dec. 5, 1945. A Navy report later declared it was “as if they had flown to Mars.’’

More recently, on Oct. 1, 2015, the cargo ship El Faro and its crew of 33 disappeared in the Triangle. The ship was found a few weeks later on the ocean floor.