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Located between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, the Bermuda Triangle is famed for being the site of the mysterious disappearance and wrecks of over 50 boats and 20 aeroplanes, including the infamous Flight 19, five torpedo bomber planes lost over the area in 1945. Many of these wrecks have never been found, adding to its aura of mystery.
Where else to start but the Bermuda Triangle?
It’s Seafaring Conspiracy Time! Time to crumple up the tin foil hat in this new series about maritime mysteries and conspiracies.
Because more than a few of you will chart your course through the Bermuda Triangle in your yachting career, we thought it might be nice to take a little corrective jaunt through the wreckage of all the conspiracies about the Bermuda Triangle.
How did the Bermuda Triangle become one of the world’s most famous conspiracies?
Also known as the Devil’s Triangle, the first mention of the Bermuda Triangle came from a writer who published a piece for a pulp magazine in 1964 documenting all the maritime disasters over the previous century in the region. The name was obviously catchy, for ten years later, a paranormal enthusiast called Charles Berlitz published a bestseller about the Bermuda Triangle, arguing that the lost ships and planes were:
“Victims of some sort of electromagnetic disturbances that cause them to disintegrate and fall into the sea."
He would later argue that the Bermuda Triangle was the location of the lost city of Atlantis, and that was what was causing the disturbances. At the time, no one in the scientific or naval community took Berlitz’s book seriously, but after 14 million copies were sold, the sense that the Bermuda Triangle was a spooky place alive with paranormal activity was cemented in the public imagination.
The ship of reason had sailed, and as it sailed along, it picked up all sorts of imaginative flotsam and jetsam, conspiracy theories gathering in the wake of Berlitz’s wacky claims.
The Bermuda Triangle, quite obviously, was a wormhole to another dimension. The aliens had a portal to our world, abducting ships and planes to research our species. It might be a vortex, a giant whirlpool, or a home of sea monsters too terrible to name —let alone photograph. Atlantis still gets a regular run with ever-more outlandish claims, such as that the city of Atlantis used crystal technology that caused malfunctions in the boats and planes above.
So, what is actually going on with the Bermuda Triangle?
Nothing. Well, apart from some pretty intense weather, some incompetent sailors, and possibly a trick of the compass.
If the Bermuda Triangle is dangerous, nature is to blame. Most Atlantic hurricanes will pass through the Bermuda Triangle, and the Gulf Stream can create some pretty dicey weather changes in no time. The shallow waters and reefs around many Caribbean islands have called many ships to their fate, and there are also more waterspouts off the coast of Florida than nearly anywhere else in the world.
For a brief and scintillating moment, the discovery of craters likely formed by underwater methane explosions off Norway also got a run as the likely cause of shipwrecks in the Triangle, half a world away. Nobody quite explained how that made planes fall out of the sky, and the scientists in Norway were quick to say that this had nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle, at all. Not even a little bit.
According to scientific bodies, including NOAA who have run the stats, once you take into account the bad weather, human error, and the sheer amount of marine and air traffic passing through this high activity region, there is the same percentage of recorded losses in the Bermuda Triangle as any other cruising area in the world.
It’s not really that exciting, is it? You probably wouldn’t sell 14 million copies if you wrote about that. ‘Bermuda Triangle: Just a Place with Tricky Weather’’ just isn’t that catchy.
But what about the compass thing?
We thought you might bring that up. The Bermuda Triangle is one of two places in the world with evidence that the compass may point to true north instead of magnetic north, which might have led to a few ships going astray over the years.
So the compass thing isn’t spooky at all?
Well, it depends if you think other natural phenomena like tides, gravity, and magnetic fields are spooky. If you do, just keep the tin foil hat on. It helps the rest of us spot you.
But what about those bomber planes?
But what about all those tens of thousands of boats and planes that have traversed this area without a whisper of paranormal activity? Not a glimpse of an alien, a wormhole, or even a methane bubble rising like a toxic fart to smother your superyacht.
OR HAVE YOU?
Have you got any whacky Bermuda Triangle stories for us? Please, do tell.
