The Myth of the Bermuda Triangle
As numerous nations who are often rivals continue to work together to locate wreckage from the downed Malaysian Airlines flight 370 and the families of the victims now grieve the loss of their loved ones after finally hearing an official explanation of their fate, the news shows continue to criticize the coverage of various commentators. Thanks to CNN host Don Lemon, we now know that, yes, it is “preposterous” to think that there was a black hole on the earth which may have swallowed MH370.
But while anyone who saw this coverage has heard a debunking of the idea of black holes existing on earth, they may have left still believing in another myth alluded to by the host, who had also listed the Bermuda Triangle as a possible explanation for the plane’s disappearance. Over the past couple of weeks an internet scam appearing on sites like Facebook claimed that the plane had been found in the Bermuda Triangle. While commentators have conceded that these are hoaxes, and others have pointed out that the plane disappeared in Asia – nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle – many have failed to clarify the more basic fact that the Bermuda Triangle itself is a myth.
The U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle (an area supposedly bounded by Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda), and the Navy and Coast Guard claim that bad weather and human errors explain all the flights and ships lost in that area of the sea. They claim there is no evidence that more mysterious disappearances happen there than in any other heavily traveled area of the ocean.
The myth of the triangle was born in February 1964, when Vincent Gaddis wrote a cover story for Argosy magazine covering the 1945 disappearance of five torpedo bombers that had taken off from Florida on a routine training mission. The planes got hopelessly lost after compass malfunctions, and the pilots agreed that they would eject themselves from the bombers. No wreckage or bodies was ever found, and one of the planes and its 13-man crew sent to rescue them also disappeared without a trace. A ship had reported seeing an explosion in the sky in the plane’s path, and it was believed to be a plane that could explode rather easily, so the Navy halted production of it in 1949.
These natural explanations of the flights’ crashes, however, did not stop Gaddis from connecting the disappearance of Flight 19 to other ships and planes that had been lost in the area, and he expanded it into a book the following year.
One thorough refutation of the idea of anything supernatural, strange, or mysterious being at work in causing the missing ships and planes came in 1975 when Lawrence Kusche published “The Bermuda Triangle: Solved”. He exposed inaccuracies and omissions of important facts by the writers of these dramatic articles and books, demonstrating reasonable explanations for lost ships that the authors claimed were mysteries, and even proving that many of the claimed incidents happened well outside the Bermuda Triangle.
There is one aspect of this geography that makes it different from other areas, which is that it is one of two places on earth where magnetic north and true north are aligned (the other is the Devil’s Sea off of Japan). Even Christopher Columbus noted that their compass was acting strangely in this part of the world. Yet strange disappearances in the area didn’t start getting noted until the 20th century, when they were compiled into enticing narratives making for great books, articles, and TV specials.
There certainly have been unexplained disappearances in this geographic area (as in other parts of the world), but demanding a single, consistent reason to explain every disappearance would be like demanding a singular, consistent explanation for every losing season the Cubs have had since 1908 and then declaring that this proves the existence of a curse on the team. This area is home to some of the deepest ocean trenches in the world, making it more difficult to find the wreckage and bodies of some tragic accidents, thus leaving them unexplained. But the Coast Guard reports that the number of ships lost in the Triangle is relatively insignificant considering the amount of traffic it handles, and thousands of flights land in and take off from the area each year without incident.
It is believed that there never was a Jack the Ripper. A journalist decided, for the sake of a dramatic story, to tie together various unsolved and gruesome murders and give them a common villain. Likewise, the disappearances of ships and planes off the coast of Florida have been tragic, but no single thread unites them all. It just makes a better story to invent one.
