The Bermuda Triangle

The Claim

There are 1 million square miles of ocean that have made countless ships and aircraft vanish without a trace.

The Bermuda Triangle is one of the most famous mysterious places that everyone interested in the genre would have heard of at some point. But is this just another hype train blowing a story out of proportion, or is there something more going on here?

Also known as the devil’s triangle and hurricane alley, this enormous triangle of ocean is bound to have the occasional vessel go missing every now and then due to its size, but there are a couple of things that set this apart from any other large span of sea.

The first is that every ship or aircraft that’s gone missing here has disappeared completely without any trace. Normally, if a search was mounted as soon as they got the distress call, there would be some kind of a sign that a ship sank nearby, such as floating cargo or a life raft, but many of the missing ships here have left behind no such clues.

The second strange thing is that various ships and especially aircraft have reported some very unusual things before contact was lost. Mainly, there are various reports of how the sea seemed to change to a silver sheet-like material with no signs of waves or tidal activity.

Also, communication equipment goes haywire before contact is lost, with plane dials spinning round uncontrollably and any electronics becoming overrun with static.

Over the years, there have been hundreds of missing ships and planes, though many of these are believed to be hoaxes; however, there have been a few well-documented disappearances in the area. The UUS Cyclops was a US Navy ship that, in 1908, was sailing through the Bermuda triangle with a crew of 309 on board. The ship disappeared shortly after leaving the island of Barbados, and the ship, along with its crew and all traces vanished, leading to the single biggest loss of life for the US forces that didn’t happen in combat.

Flight 19 has to be the most famous example of missing planes within the triangle. On December 5th, 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers left on a training flight around the triangle, with a total of a 354-mile round trip, but none of the planes made it back to base. A Mariner aircraft with a crew of 13 was dispatched to look for any wreckage, but it vanished without a trace.

As for an explanation, there are the two main sides there always are. On the one hand, the disappearances are very strange considering that there was never any trace of the vessels at all. The probability of someone making it onto a raft when a ship is sinking is relatively high, and floating cargo, even just a single barrel, would surely be present.

But on the other hand, it is a very large area of ocean which is known to have rather bad hurricanes and flash storms, leading some to claim that “it just happens” in an area this size, and the ships probably got caught in a storm swallowing them up, and aircraft either ran into storms or got lost and ran out of fuel.