The Bermuda Triangle: Separating Fact from Myth

Few places on the map have a worse reputation than the patch of ocean between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Ships and aircraft are said to vanish there without trace, and the Bermuda Triangle has given its name to anything that swallows things whole.

The legend is less than eighty years old, and it was assembled by writers rather than by sailors. Looking at how it was built, and at the most famous disappearances, shows why investigators have found nothing unusual there at all.

A legend with a birthday

The story can be dated precisely. On 17 September 1950 an Associated Press article by E. V. W. Jones described a string of disappearances in the area. In 1952 the magazine Fate published an article by George X. Sand that first drew the triangle on the map, and in 1964 Vincent Gaddis's article in the pulp magazine Argosy gave it its famous name.

The idea became a bestseller in 1974 with Charles Berlitz's book The Bermuda Triangle. By then the area's reputation was set: a place where the normal rules seemed not to apply.

A triangle with moving edges

One problem appears at once. Writers never agreed where the triangle is. Its boundaries change from book to book, and estimates of its size range from about 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometres, so which incidents count as inside it depends on who is counting.

That flexibility matters. A legend whose borders can stretch to include any famous loss nearby will always seem to have more mysteries than a fixed area would.

Flight 19

The most famous case is Flight 19. On 5 December 1945, five US Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a training flight from Florida disappeared over the Atlantic. A PBM Mariner flying boat sent to search for them, with 13 crew aboard, also vanished.

Navy investigators attributed the loss of the Avengers to navigational error and fuel exhaustion: the flight leader became disoriented, the group flew the wrong way, and the aircraft ran out of fuel over the sea at night. Mariner flying boats were known for fuel vapour problems, and the loss of the rescue aircraft does not require a mystery either.

USS Cyclops

The largest loss of life associated with the triangle is the US Navy collier Cyclops, which disappeared in 1918 with 306 people after leaving Barbados. No wreck has been found, which keeps it on every list of mysteries.

The most likely explanation is mundane. The ship was carrying a heavy load of dense ore, and it was probably overloaded; a vessel in that state could founder quickly in rough seas without time to send a signal.

The librarian who checked

In 1975 a librarian named Larry Kusche published the results of going back to the original records of the famous cases. He found that many claims had been exaggerated or could not be verified, that a number of the incidents had happened nowhere near the triangle, and that accounts often left out the storms raging at the time.

His conclusion was that the number of losses was not disproportionate to other busy stretches of ocean. The mystery, in other words, was largely a product of the way the stories had been retold. It is a pattern worth knowing; see our guide to evaluating a claim.

What the insurers say

The people with the most money riding on the question agree with Kusche. Lloyd's of London has found no unusual number of sinkings in the area and does not charge higher rates for ships crossing it, and US Coast Guard records support that view.

The scientist and broadcaster Karl Kruszelnicki has made the same point: the accident rate in the region is no higher than in other busy shipping lanes, and it is one of the busiest stretches of ocean in the world.

Why the story keeps spreading

If the evidence has been clear since 1975, why does the legend survive? Part of the answer is repetition. Each new book or documentary drew on the earlier ones rather than on the original records, so the same exaggerated cases, with the storms left out, travelled from one retelling to the next.

Another part is selection. A region that sees heavy traffic will see many accidents; listing the dramatic ones without counting the thousands of safe crossings makes the area look uniquely dangerous. And an unsolved disappearance is more memorable than a solved one, so the cases with no wreck found are the ones that get retold.

The ordinary dangers

None of this means the sea there is safe. The Gulf Stream is fast and powerful and can carry debris and drifting craft far from where they were lost. Hurricanes and sudden squalls form quickly. Compass variation, often quoted as mysterious, is normal across large areas of the globe. And human error accounts for much of the rest.

Some writers have suggested sudden eruptions of methane gas from the seabed, but the US Geological Survey reports no large gas releases there in the past 15,000 years. Like the stories of Roswell or the famous UFO cases, the triangle shows how a good story can outrun its evidence.