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. Charles Berlitz's 1974 book sold millions of copies 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
Lloyd's of London, which insures ships, does not charge higher premiums for vessels sailing through the Bermuda Triangle. The United States Coast Guard does not consider it an especially dangerous area. These are institutions with direct financial incentive to identify genuine maritime risk.
The insurance industry's assessment is significant because it is based on actuarial data rather than anecdote. If the Triangle produced anomalously high loss rates, that would show up in the data.
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.
The US Navy's research into the disappearance of Flight 19, five torpedo bombers lost in December 1945, found that the flight leader became confused about his position and the aircraft ran out of fuel over open water. A rescue seaplane sent to find them exploded shortly after takeoff, probably due to a fuel leak, which may have been misreported as a supernatural disappearance.
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