The Bermuda Triangle

A stretch of the western Atlantic between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, described in a 1964 magazine article as a zone where ships and planes vanish. Losses linked to it include the five bombers of Flight 19 in 1945; the U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA say the losses there have ordinary physical causes.

Vincent Gaddis set out the area in the February 1964 issue of Argosy: one line joining Florida and Bermuda, a second joining Bermuda and Puerto Rico, and the last running back through the Bahamas to Florida. Inside it, he wrote, most of the disappearances had taken place. Wikipedia says the article counted Flight 19 among a run of odd losses in the region that he traced back to 1840 or earlier, and that Gaddis expanded it the following year as the book Invisible Horizons.

Real ships, aircraft and crews have been lost in these waters. Smithsonian Magazine recounts that the S.S. Cotopaxi left Charleston, South Carolina, on 29 November 1925 with a crew of 32 and a load of coal, bound for Havana. Two days out, near the Triangle, she ran into a tropical storm and disappeared; Smithsonian's 2020 headline reports the ship found again 95 years later. Wikipedia describes Flight 19, five Grumman TBM Avenger bombers on a training exercise, which vanished over the Atlantic on 5 December 1945. Their planned course ran east from Fort Lauderdale, then north, then home on a last leg. None of the planes came back to base, and Navy investigators blamed a navigation error that left them without fuel.

The U.S. Coast Guard's historian's office says the service does not treat the Bermuda Triangle as a place of special danger to ships or aircraft. Its review of many losses in the area found nothing to suggest any cause beyond physical ones. NOAA's National Ocean Service reports that the Navy and Coast Guard reject supernatural explanations, pointing instead to the weather and human error. No official map marks the area, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names gives the name no official standing.

Larry Kusche challenged the stories in his 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved. Wikipedia says he argued that many claims by Gaddis and later writers were exaggerated, doubtful or impossible to check, and that he listed errors in the accounts of another writer, Berlitz, when set against what witnesses and participants said. One example was the yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, whose disappearance Berlitz presented as a mystery although clear evidence explained it.