4. Other writers became involved in expanding the myth of the Bermuda Triangle
Allan W. Eckert was an American naturalist, playwright, and novelist who published numerous novels featuring historical characters. Some of the real-life people of history who appeared in his novels were Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, and other heroes of the early American frontier along the Ohio River and Great Lakes. While Eckert stressed historical fact in his works, which included extensive footnotes in his novels, he also inserted dialogue which he created out of thin air. Eckert called the practice narrative biography, though critics disagreed. Kirkus Reviews called Eckert’s narrative biography “an apparent euphemism for poetic license” in a review of one of his works on Tecumseh. Kirkus called A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh “A biography that succeeds better as fiction”.
In an article written for American Legion Magazine in 1962, Eckert applied his technique of “narrative biography” to the loss of Flight 19. In his article, Eckert claimed that Taylor had said, just before the flight met its ultimate fate, “We are entering white water, nothing seems right”. Taylor then went on to say the water was “green, no white”. None of the official documentation of radio transmissions during the flight contain such a message. Eckert also claimed, in the same article, one member of the Navy Board of Investigation stated the flight had flown “off to Mars”. Neither Taylor’s alleged last comments nor the unnamed Navy investigator have any confirmed source. Yet it was just the sort of sensationalism which the media found the public couldn’t get enough of, expanding the mysterious nature of the body of water not yet known as the Bermuda Triangle.