The ship never made it to its Baltimore, Maryland destination from the Bralizan port city of Salvador and a century later people are still wondering what peril befell it. At 540 feet long and 65 feet wide, it was the largest collier in the United States Navy and had a cargo holding capacity of 12,500 tons. Lieutenant Commander George W. Worley commanded the ship.

That could have been a possibility, but no storms were reported and there were no distress calls from the ship. The possibility of an attack by German U-boat was brought into question, but not a trace of debris was ever found.

All Rights Reserved. Of course, the Navy didn’t give much consideration to this and instead turned its focus to the ship’s commander. (US Naval History and Heritage Command) At this time, Lieutenant Commander George W. Worley served as commander of the mighty ship. She left Brazil loaded up with the brittle metal, then voyaged to Barbados to resupply for the long journey home to Baltimore. At 540 feet long and 65 feet wide, it was the largest collier in the United States Navy and had a cargo holding capacity of 12,500 tons.

This was the question on many people’s minds in March 1918, when an enormous collier, the USS Cyclops, disappeared on a voyage between the West Indies to Baltimore. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Like it was plucked from the Earth by God himself, the USS Cyclops and all of its 309 crew were gone without a trace.

The U.S. Navy says in its official statement about the Cyclops, “The disappearance of this ship has been one of the most baffling mysteries in the annals of the Navy, all attempts to locate her having proved unsuccessful.”, But some still cling to investigations—particularly those with a personal connection to the ship. Throughout the decades, there have been a flurry of sometimes sensational theories about the ship’s disappearance, as one among more than 100 ships and planes to have mysteriously disappeared in the so-called Bermuda Triangle—the region roughly bounded by Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico.

A century on, its no closer to being answered. Nothing.

Like other disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, some speculated that the Cyclops was sucked down into the ocean’s depths by a giant sea monster or supernatural phenomenon. Named for the fierce one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, the USS Cyclops was a beast of a ship. The 522-foot Cyclops displaced 12,000 tons of water. Two ships of the United States Navy have borne the name Cyclops, for the Cyclopes of Greek mythology, giants with only one eye.. USS Cyclops (1864), was an ironclad steamer.Originally Kickapoo, she was rechristened Cyclops from 15 June to 10 August 1869, and then to Kewaydin. Navy ships scouted the route that the Cyclops was believed to have taken and crews radioed day after day for any sign of contact. It was the biggest ship in the U.S. Navy and it disappeared without a trace. More than 100 ships and planes have disappeared within the invisible lines of the Bermuda Triangle, and the efforts to locate the lost Cyclops were exhaustive. “She just disappeared as though some gigantic monster of the sea had grabbed her, men and all, and sent her into the depths of the ocean, and the suddenness of her destruction is amplified by the absence of any wireless calls for help being picked up by any ship along the route.”. “I just want her to be found,” said Marvin Barrash, the great-nephew of one of the men who was lost with the ship. The Navy defended Worley of these charges, and he returned to his command with apparently little fanfare.

But in 1917, when America entered World War I, Cyclops became a key naval asset, transporting troops and coal to fuel other ships all over the world. All of this, he thinks, may have coincided with the ship passing over the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic, where she would be near irretrievable. How could the biggest ship in the U.S. Navy vanish without trace? Meet Ida Lewis, History's Most Heroic Lighthouse Keeper, The Great Blizzard Of 1888 Was So Devastating That We're Still Feeling Its Effects Today, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch, Captain George W. Worley, commander of the USS, largest collier in the United States Navy, Flight 19, which disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, Franklin expedition shipwreck that culminated in cannibalism.
In March 1918, the ship was given a new cargo: tons and tons of dense manganese ore, used in steelmaking.

All of it proved fruitless. It was barely a year into the war, and the Cyclops would have made a strategic target.

What happened to the Navy shipping vessel has been a source of debate for the past century with no clear answers rising to the surface. The Bermuda Triangle has claimed its fair share of vessels over the centuries, but none are quite as baffling to Navy historians as the tale of the 1918 disappearance of the USS Cyclops. Why The Bermuda Triangle Vanishing Of The USS Cyclops Remains Chilling 100 Years Later.


list of ships with the same or similar names, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=USS_Cyclops&oldid=916429000, Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 18 September 2019, at 21:31. For the Navy and those who had relatives aboard the ship, the USS Cyclops remains a tale of tragedy that ends with a question mark. Others have pointed fingers at the captain, George W. Worley.

He has spent more than a decade researching its history, painstakingly gathering Navy records, ship logs and any ephemera that might come in useful—including a blackened bag of manganese ore. “The whole existence of the ship has been swept under a rug,” he told the Baltimore Sun. The Cyclops may be next on the list.