Huey: Debunking the mystique of the Bermuda Triangle

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People have been brainwashed into believing that this area of the Atlantic Ocean is somehow cursed because of so many mysterious disappearances of ships and planes that are attributed to unexplained forces rather than natural phenomena. Flight 19 disappeared there in 1945. That was a squadron of U.S. Navy planes that vanished somewhere in that area, and is often cited as the starting point for the legend of The Bermuda Triangle.

This body of water, infamous as a place where scores of vessels go to their doom every year, is the area between Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. The subsequent loss of the rescue plane sent to find them only added to the mystery. This belief in the supernatural is fueled by the misinterpretation that more incidents happen there than in other areas, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came up with another conclusion.

There was a revealing special on The Travel Channel recently about the mysteriously foreboding Bermuda Triangle, and if you’ve ever wondered about it, wonder no more. There’s no mystery. Everything about it has been explained ad nauseum in the past few years. As it turns out, there’s nothing sinister or extraterrestrial about it, and it does NOT deserve the cryptic reputation that it wallows in.

It’s not some elusive magical force or paranormal entity that’s causing those ghostly disappearances. There are many other shipping lanes around the world with similar numbers of traffic and they have about the same number of losses, but for some strange reason, those places are never mentioned. They’re just not as enchanting as some of those Hollywood scriptwriters have made The Bermuda Triangle.

Most scientists as well as the NOAA say that the disappearances are the result of natural forces and human error rather than the supernatural, especially since most credible scientists don’t think there’s any such thing as the supernatural. The Bermuda Triangle has claimed around 1,000 lives in the last 100 years, with 300 of them being from a single ship. Factor that number out, and the mystery of The Bermuda Triangle is not so mysterious.

That’s only one person every other month, and with the thousands of vessels that go through every year, legend suggests that there should be many more. It’s a shipping lane, and the number of people who disappear there is roughly the same as in other shipping lanes, sometimes less, and it has nothing to do with aliens or fire-breathing dragons.

Rogue waves, waterspouts, and high winds are definite concerns for large vessels, and while those things have caused problems, the main reason for heavy losses in that area is heavy traffic. That’s where the most traffic is, so that’s where more accidents are going to happen. It’s simple arithmetic. It’s no different from the warning that most car accidents happen within 25 miles of home because that’s where cars are most of the time.

Many events there were caused by human error. Flight 19 was a training mission that vanished in 1945, those military-looking guys who were retrieved by the mother ship in Close Encounters. In reality, it was nothing but rookie pilots trying out their wings, and failing. A seaplane with another rookie pilot was sent to search for them, but it also disappeared in that same area because he probably made the same mistakes they made.

Navigation back then was done mostly by sight. There really isn’t a mystery in any of this, and having only conventional equipment at her disposal is the reason Amelia Earhart went down in the Pacific. Neither she nor her navigator could see Howland Island, so they flew right by it, ran out of fuel, and that was that. It’s easy to get lost over water.

Nowadays, movies and books have at least made The Bermuda Triangle seem interesting, but at most, it’s still just fiction. There’s no mystery, no magic, it’s not the lost city of Atlantis, and with no more than 1,000 deaths in 100 years, it sounds more like fiction writers creating something from nothing. But then, that’s their job.

The Bermuda Triangle’s reputation as a mysterious place where unexplained phenomena occur routinely and ships go to die, has long since been debunked, and even normalized by real numbers from people who know what they’re talking about. There’s no mystery at all about the triangle, but it DOES make for some good entertainment.