Update: A listener has found several references to Bermuda Triangle appearing in print. It was the perfect book for the New Age movement of the 1970s, and quite suddenly the Triangle became a giant fixture in urban legendry. But it remained a relatively unknown footnote until 1974, when paranormal author Charles Berlitz published his mass market paperback The Bermuda Triangle. An author, Vincent Gaddis, dramatized this in the fiction magazine Argosy in 1964 with a story titled "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle", the first time the name is known to have been used.
The answer is that it never did, until 1945 when a flight of five Navy training planes (the infamous "Flight 19") ran out of fuel and ditched, and were unfortunately never recovered (see the complete Skeptoid episode on Flight 19). So then, how and why does the story exist at all? Unexplained doesn't mean unexplainable it simply means that insufficient evidence remained to allow to cause of the loss to be determined, which is, sadly, all too common with ships and planes that go down at sea. A similar percentage of losses worldwide are also unexplained. They also occur everywhere else on Earth. That's not to say that losses don't occur there. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified. In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes. The United States Coast Guard, which is the primary safety authority in the area, has this to say:
The books and TV shows are trying to explain an imaginary observation. Statistically speaking, there is no Bermuda Triangle. One of the first things you learn when researching the Bermuda Triangle responsibly - which means including source material beyond the TV shockumentaries and pulp paperbacks that promote the mystery wholeheartedly - is that transportation losses inside the Bermuda Triangle do not occur at a rate higher than anywhere else, and the number of losses that are unexplained is also not any higher. Popular programming today tends to skip the very first step: actually having an observation to explain. To investigate the Bermuda Triangle scientifically, we would start with an observation, and then test hypotheses to explain it. They test these explanations with scale models and sophisticated simulations.īut in fact, this representation of being scientific is wrong. These include rogue waves, undersea methane explosions, or strange geomagnetic fluctuations. They give the appearance of skepticism by dismissing the paranormal explanations like psychic energy, Atlantis, or alien abductions, and instead focus on natural phenomena that could be responsible for disappearances. The most common appearance of the Bermuda Triangle today is on television documentaries and popular books that purport to take a "science-based" look at the phenomenon.
The triangle goes from Miami to Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and despite a huge amount of normal shipping traffic passing through it every day, stories persist that some force there lurks to pull ships and planes to a watery grave.
It's perhaps the best known of all the world's regions said to be strangely treacherous. Today we're going to dive into the waters to see how deep the mysteries really are. Some believe that the Bermuda Triangle and its twin, the Devil's Sea south of Japan, are merely regions where natural forces combine to form a genuine navigational hazard while others believe that some unknown agent is responsible for sweeping the hapless travelers from the face of the Earth. Today we're going to hit the high seas, and venture into a matched pair of alleged danger zones where ships and airplanes are said to disappear at an alarming rate.