The Mysteries of Bouvet Island

Bouvet Island is an isolated island in the South Sea. In fact, it is said to be the most remote uninhabited place on Earth. Despite its remoteness and the inhospitable climate of the icy island, or perhaps because of it, Bouvet Island is a magnet for unsolved mysteries. Very few people have ever visited the island, yet mysterious discoveries have been made on the island and mysterious events have happened in its vicinity.

The closest land mass to Bouvet Island is Antarctica, which is more than 1,000 miles away. The next closest land mass is Africa, which is 1,569 miles away. The island belongs to Norway, but Norway is so far away as to be irrelevant to anyone who winds up on the island. More than 90 percent of the island and glaciers and the shores of the island are almost all steep cliffs. Only the best weather and a carefully chosen landing spot will get visitors on the island. You can land by helicopter as well, but the weather still has to be just right, which is difficult, considering it storms there 300 days out of the year and the sea is covered in a near perpetual mist.

The Lifeboat

In 1964, Lieutenant Commander Allan Crawford and his team landed on Bouvet Island in a helicopter. They were there to investigate a new area of the island that had recently appeared through volcanic activity. They wanted to see if it was a viable location for a weather tower. Soon after he got off the helicopter, he came across a lagoon. In the lagoon, he says there was a lifeboat with no mast, engine or sails. On the shore, he found oars, a barrel and a flattened copper tank. A cursory search revealed no signs of a campsite, no people and no bodies. However, due to the nature of the expedition, his had strict time constraints and probably did not wander far from the site of the lagoon.

The new patch of land had not been there fore more than nine years when Crawford allegedly found the lifeboat there. Therefore, the boat could not have been there for longer than that. Crawford said there were no markings on the boat to indicate where the boat came from or any indications of its purpose there, though he did call it a lifeboat. Had the owners abandoned the seaworthy boat whilst on an expedition similar to Crawford's? If so, who were they and why does there appear to be no record of such an expedition? It seems impossible that survivors of a shipwreck would be able to locate Bouvet Island in the vast and barren sea. In other words, there seems to be no viable explanation for the boat. Two years later, another expedition studied the new part of Bouvet Island and described the lagoon, but they said nothing of a boat. Did the owners come back for it or was it ever there at all?

The Vela Incident

The Vela Incident is essentially a batch of evidence that points to a nuclear device being detonated somewhere in the Indian Ocean or South Sea in September of 1979. A recording was picked up by the Vela 6911 satellite that gave an identical reading to that of a nuclear device explosion. To researchers' knowledge, nothing else would give off that reading and the chances that it was some mistake caused by a damaged satellite or an outer space collision are very small. To back up the information, an ionospheric disturbance was recorded by a different device on land and a U.S. Navy device picked up a suspicious sound in the ocean in the area. Some say the detonation took place near Bouvet Island, but the actual site of the explosion has never been found and no country has admitted to conducting the type of nuclear test that would cause the events of the Vela Incident.

Bouvet Island remains a scarcely visited wilderness, but there have been no more mysterious happenings in the past few decades. At least, there have not been any reported. Who knows? It could be a veritable Bouvet Triangle out there.

Sources

Bellows, Alan, The Vela Incident, retrieved 6/29/11, damninteresting.com/the-vela-incident

Dash, Mike, An Abandoned Lifeboat at World's End, retrieved 7/1/11, allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2001/02/13/an-abandoned-lifeboat-at-worlds-end