The Bermuda Triangle & the Devil's Sea

There is no official Bermuda Triangle, which is the first clue. The region is conventionally drawn as the area bounded by Miami in Florida, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda, a rough triangle across the western North Atlantic. But the corners are a matter of taste. Depending on whose outline you use, it covers anywhere from about 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometers of open ocean. A mystery zone whose own boundaries can triple depending on who is telling the story is a mystery zone worth being skeptical about.

The name is younger than most people assume. The writer Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase 'Bermuda Triangle' in a February 1964 article for Argosy magazine titled 'The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.' It went global a decade later, in 1974, when Charles Berlitz's bestseller The Bermuda Triangle turned a pulp-magazine coinage into a worldwide phenomenon. The idea, in other words, is only about sixty years old. The ocean is not.

Lloyd's of London is the world's leading maritime insurance market, and pricing sea risk accurately is its entire business. Lloyd's reviewed the record and found that the Bermuda Triangle does not have a statistically higher rate of shipwrecks or losses than any other comparable stretch of ocean. If the Triangle were unusually dangerous, Lloyd's would charge more to insure a crossing. It does not, because the data does not support it.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which runs the actual search and rescue operations in these waters, reached the same conclusion. Its position is that the number of incidents in the area is not extraordinary once you account for two ordinary things: the sheer volume of traffic that passes through, and the very real natural hazards, the storms and reefs and hard currents, that this heavily used ocean throws at it.

The definitive work was simply a matter of going back and checking. In 1975 Lawrence David Kusche tracked down the original sources for every case cited by Berlitz and the rest of the Triangle literature, and his book, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery, Solved, took the legend apart one case at a time. What he found was not a cover-up but carelessness. Many of the famous incidents had happened outside the Triangle's boundaries entirely. Many involved severe weather that the dramatic retellings simply left out. Several ships and aircraft written up as vanished had in fact been found, but the correction never caught up to the story. A few incidents had been fabricated outright, or stitched together from separate events. And the rest were the perfectly ordinary losses you would expect in one of the busiest, most weather-beaten shipping and flying corridors on Earth, reframed as something spooky.

On December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a training flight and never came back. This is Flight 19, the founding legend of the Bermuda Triangle. The U.S. Navy Board of Investigation that examined the loss did not conclude anything supernatural. It found that the flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, had become disoriented. He believed his aircraft were over the Florida Keys, to the south, when they were actually over the Bahamas, to the east. Convinced he was in the wrong place, he led the flight further east, out over open ocean, chasing a coastline that was behind him, until the planes ran out of fuel and went down into the sea.

Then the story got its second act. One of the two Martin Mariner flying boats sent out to search for Flight 19 also disappeared. That sounds like the Triangle claiming its rescuers, until you know the aircraft. The Martin Mariner had a known and documented design flaw: fuel-tank vapor that could build up and explode. A Mariner vanishing in a burst over the water is not an unsolved mystery. It is a fatal engineering defect doing exactly what such a defect does.

One case in the whole legend is a genuine mystery, and this is it, though the mystery is a maritime one and not a paranormal one. In March 1918 the USS Cyclops, a Navy collier, sailed from Barbados toward Baltimore with 309 crew and was never seen again. No wreck, no distress call, no survivors. The plausible explanations are all mundane and all serious: she was overloaded with heavy manganese ore and may have suffered a structural failure, she may have been caught and capsized in a storm, or, since this was the First World War, she may have been lost to German submarine activity. No one has ever proven which. What matters for the Triangle is the date. The Cyclops vanished in 1918, more than forty years before anyone wrote the words Bermuda Triangle. It is a real, unsolved loss at sea, of the kind that has happened in every ocean in every era, and it was retrofitted into a legend that did not yet exist.

Rogue waves. For a long time sailors' accounts of sudden walls of water, far taller than the surrounding sea, were dismissed as exaggeration. Then the satellites caught them. The European Space Agency's MaxWave project confirmed that rogue waves, waves that can top twice the surrounding significant wave height, happen far more often than the old models allowed. The western North Atlantic is a good place to make them: where the powerful Gulf Stream runs up against colder water, the clash of currents can raise the odds of one forming. A rogue wave can overwhelm and sink a vessel in seconds, which is exactly how you get a disappearance with no distress call and no debris. This is genuinely one of the ways the sea kills ships. It is just not special to the Triangle, and it needs no explanation beyond fluid dynamics.

The compass quirk. This one is true and completely undramatic. There is a line on the Earth, the agonic line, along which a magnetic compass points to true north and magnetic north at the same time, because the difference between the two falls to zero. For a long time that line ran through the Bermuda Triangle, which is where the compasses-go-haywire stories come from. But every trained navigator on Earth knows about magnetic variation and corrects for it as a matter of routine, the way you account for a crosswind. It has never been a plausible cause of a serious navigation error in the modern age. And here is the final deflation: the agonic line drifts over time, and it has since moved west. It does not even pass through the Triangle anymore.

The electronic fog. In 1970 a pilot named Bruce Gernon reported flying through a strange, tunnel-like cloud over the Bahamas, and described his instruments going wild and time itself seeming to stretch and compress. He has told the story ever since. The problem is that the story is all there is: a single first-person account with no instrument recordings, no second aircraft, no data of any kind to corroborate it. Meanwhile the tropical western Atlantic is a factory for violent, disorienting weather, the microbursts and waterspouts and towering cumulonimbus storms, any of which can produce a genuinely frightening and strange experience in a cockpit without a shred of the paranormal. Gernon's account is real in the sense that he really tells it. It is evidence of nothing beyond itself.

The Devil's Sea. The Triangle has a supposed Pacific twin, a stretch of water south of Tokyo that the Japanese call Ma no Umi, the Devil's Sea, often billed as an eastern counterpart where ships also vanish. It falls apart the same way, and here the debunking evidence is unusually solid. When Kusche looked into it, he found that Japanese authorities had recorded no unusual number of losses in the area at all. And the incidents most often cited, a cluster of fishing-vessel losses in the 1950s, were attributed to documented volcanic activity at the Myojin-sho submarine volcano. The dangerous water was real. The danger was a volcano, not a curse.

The Atlantean fire crystals. A line of claims descended from the psychic Edgar Cayce holds that giant 'fire crystals,' or 'tuaoi stones,' relics of a sunken Atlantis, lie on the sea floor and fire off energy that disrupts ships and planes. There is no physical evidence for this, no geological evidence, and no archaeological evidence. There is no Atlantis on that sea floor, and there are no crystals. This is not a theory with weak support. It is a story with none.

Aliens and interdimensional portals. The other fringe branch explains the disappearances as extraterrestrial abduction, or as ships and planes slipping through a doorway into another dimension. These carry no evidentiary support of any kind, and they have a second problem stacked on top of the first: they are answers to a question that has already been answered. The documented incidents already have natural and human explanations, the disorientation and the weather and the engineering flaws and the deep water and the ordinary bad luck at sea. Reaching past all of that for a portal is not bold. It is just skipping the homework.