Exumas Island, The Bahamas - panoramio (1) by David Broad, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Bermuda Triangle: Separating Fact from Myth
The origin of the myth
The Bermuda Triangle, roughly the area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, became famous through a series of magazine articles and books in the 1960s and 1970s. The name came from a 1964 Argosy article by Vincent Gaddis, and Charles Berlitz's 1974 book popularised the idea and established the popular picture of a zone where ships and planes vanished mysteriously.
The geographical boundaries of the Triangle are not officially defined by any government or maritime authority. They shift between accounts, which makes it easy to include almost any incident in the relevant area.
What Lloyd's of London says
When a television producer asked in the early 1990s, Lloyd's of London reportedly found no unusually high number of losses in the area, and it does not charge higher premiums for ships passing through. The United States Coast Guard is officially sceptical of the legend, and NOAA says there is no evidence that disappearances happen more often there than in other heavily travelled parts of the ocean.
Insurers price risk from loss records rather than anecdote, so if the Triangle produced anomalously high loss rates, that should show up there.
The actual explanation
Most incidents cited in Triangle literature either did not occur in the Triangle, or have mundane explanations: unexpected weather systems, human error, the Gulf Stream (which can disperse wreckage rapidly), and the high volume of traffic through the area, which statistically produces more incidents than quieter waters.
Navy investigators attributed the loss of Flight 19, five torpedo bombers that disappeared in December 1945, to navigational error that left the aircraft out of fuel over open water. A PBM Mariner flying boat sent to search for them, with a crew of thirteen, also disappeared, which added to the sense of mystery.
Sources and further reading
Pages we consulted when writing and revising this article, last checked October 8, 2026. They open in a new tab, and we are not responsible for what other sites publish.
- Bermuda Triangle — NOAA National Ocean Service — NOAA on whether the area is unusually dangerous.
- Bermuda Triangle — Wikipedia — origins of the legend, Flight 19, Lloyd's and the Coast Guard.
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