The Real Bermuda Triangle

The term “Bermuda Triangle” was first coined by writer Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 article for Argosy magazine, a pulp magazine dedicated to sensational tales of mystery, crime, and ghost fiction. Giddis described a triangular region in the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, notorious for unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft and wove a predictably sensational tale of woo sufficient to captivate the readership. The idea took hold, filtering (like spontaneous human combustion and numerous other silly ideas of the time) through subordinate pulps and books and infiltrated the broader culture.

But here’s the thing: This are was and is one of the most congested knots of shipping and air lanes in the world. Of COURSE there were a lot of mishaps here. It would have been remarkable if there hadn’t been, especially in the age before modern satellite tracking–a technology by the way that has all but killed off this particular myth.

So what was Gaddis on about?

• Flight 19 (1945): Five Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers vanished during a training flight, followed by a rescue plane that also disappeared. This happened right after the end of the war and the confused radio messages and twin loss arouses public interest, leading Gaddis to include the event (and later, Steven Speilberg to reference it in CE3). But in fact, there is no mystery here at all. Wartime losses of this sort (and even in this area) were shockingly common by today’s standards, and military investigators concluded the lead pilot became disoriented after his compass failed, leading the squadron to run out of fuel, ditch in rough seas., and break up. The PBM Mariner rescue plane sent to search for it had a known history of fuel leaks, and is believed to have exploded mid-air shortly after takeoff.
• 2. SS Cotopaxi (1925):  A cargo ship tha disappeared en route from Charleston, South Carolina, to Havana, Cuba. In 2020, marine archaeologists identified the wreck near St. Augustine, Florida. Records showed the Cotopaxi had sent distress signals indicating it was taking on water during a storm so there was never any mystery to begin with.
• 3. USS Cyclops (1918): This naval collier disappeared without a trace while traveling from Barbados to Baltimore with over 300 men onboard. Records show it was heavily overloaded when it encountered heavy weather, so again, no real mystery.
• 4. Star Tiger and Star Ariel (1948-1949): These two British South American Airways flghts were both Lockheed Constellations that vanished without months of each other in roughly the same area, raising them in public awareness. But while the Constellation was well reguarded for the time, about 3.5% of them were lost over the service life of the type. Many like these two, disappeared at sea, often without a trace, or as in this case, after sending partial radio messages indicating unspecified trouble.

The simple fact is, where thousands of ship and planes travel, some will be lost. Where navigational complexity, primitive tracking and communications technology, and unpredictable weather come into play, some of those losses will (at least initially) be unexplained. None of this requires voodoo or little green men to explain. This is like the people who think the pyramids were build by ancient aliens. Folks, the pyramids are literally piles of rock. And mostly not really very big rock. And we know exactly where the rock was quarried. And in many cases, the tools used to quarry it were left behind and are in our museums. Sure, there are plenty of questions to be answered, but none that require advanced technology, magic, or things that go bumb in the night.

The world is amazing and entertaining, just as it is. Study and rejoice in reality, then you can appreciate fiction for what it is.