9 Fascinating Facts You Should Know About the Bermuda Triangle

When it comes to aviation mysteries, they don’t come much stranger than Flight 19. On December 5, 1945, a fleet of five U.S. Navy torpedo bomber planes carrying a total of 14 men took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to embark on a training exercise over the North Atlantic ocean. Over an hour after takeoff, pilots from the unit began to radio in distress calls, saying things like, “I don’t know where we are,” and “Both of my compasses are out.” They seemed oddly disoriented and confused. Though protocol demanded that the planes fly west, they kept changing direction. A rescue craft sent to look for the planes also disappeared. Neither the planes nor the crew of Flight 19 were ever found.

Flight 19 might be one of the most remarkable stories to ever emerge out of the Bermuda Triangle, a consistent source of intrigue and paranormal suspicion. But is there any evidence that the area can make planes and ships vanish without a trace, or is it a case of mass maritime hysteria? Let’s dive into one of the greatest geographical controversies of all time—otherwise known as the Devil’s Triangle. 

1. It can be hard to separate fact from legend about the Bermuda Triangle.
2. Christopher Columbus may have had strange experiences in the Bermuda Triangle.
3. Several ships, planes, and people disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the 20th century.
4. A writer named the Bermuda Triangle in the 1960s.
5. People have come up with very strange theories to explain the Bermuda Triangle …
6. … But perfectly logical things could be to blame.
7. Ocean farts are another theory behind the Bermuda Triangle.
8. The Bermuda Triangle is really no more dangerous than any other region.
9. You can visit the Bermuda Triangle.

It can be hard to separate fact from legend about the Bermuda Triangle.

There’s a big problem with any discussion about the Bermuda Triangle. As the National Archives says, after the bare bones facts of some planes disappearing off Florida in 1945, “that is where rational agreement ends, and the conspiracy theories begin.” 

If you look around the internet you’ll learn that the Navy pulled out all the stops in search of the missing aircraft from Flight 19, dispatching over 300 planes and ships to canvass a 300,000-square-foot area in the Atlantic. But the search yielded nothing—not a body, not even a single piece of debris. In fact, one rescue plane also disappeared. The Naval incident report commented that it was as though the fleet “had flown to Mars.”

(Now, some of that is true, some of that is false. According to writer Larry Kusche, the “flown to Mars” quote is a complete fabrication from a time when the Navy report wasn’t available. Many other quotes and anecdotes also seem to have just appeared in the mid-20th century with no backing to them.)

Flight 19 helped construct the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. Though there’s no official boundary set, it’s often thought to be a 500,000-square-mile triangular region of the Atlantic bordered by Miami, Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the island of Bermuda. It’s also been known by names like the Twilight Zone and Limbo of the Lost. Stories of missing ships and people have plagued the region for decades. But its reputation as a mysterious place actually dates further back. 

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Christopher Columbus may have had strange experiences in the Bermuda Triangle.

While sailing to the New World in 1492, Christopher Columbus passed through the region that would come to be known as the Bermuda Triangle. You might read accounts of him seeing a giant flame in the sky and compasses acting erratically. While those are real things, they happened too early in the voyage to possibly be in the Triangle. Stronger ground is that shortly before sighting land, Columbus reported having seen a light in the distance. Various explanations have been given for the sighting—a bonfire, bioluminescent worms, that Columbus was lying so he’d have the honor of discovery to himself. 

Columbus wasn’t the only historical figure to offer an early glimpse into the Triangle’s mysteries. Some Shakespeare scholars believe The Tempest was based in part on reports of a shipwreck named the Sea Venture in Bermuda. Shakespeare wrote of “still-vexed Bermoothes,” which one could interpret to refer to a storm-burdened Bermuda. But Shakespeare wasn’t attaching any supernatural traits to the area, or pointing out any kind of pattern; those ideas didn’t begin to take hold until the 20th century.

Several ships, planes, and people disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the 20th century.

It didn’t seem like you wanted to be traveling through the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1900s. In 1918, a Navy cargo ship named the USS Cyclops sank without sending any sort of distress signal, the 300 souls onboard vanishing in a seeming instant. Its wreckage was never found. Two sister ships to the Cyclops also vanished in the same general area decades later.

In 1921, a schooner named the Carroll A. Deering navigated the Triangle before coming ashore on the North Carolina coastline. The Coast Guard boarded the vessel but found no trace of the 12-man crew, which had prepared food before vanishing. Weirder still, some captain’s notes appeared to be written in another person’s handwriting. Lifeboats were missing, but—much like the crew—they were never found.

Triangle investigators also point to the disappearance of a commercial plane, a Douglas DC-3, flying from San Juan to Miami in 1948, with 32 passengers and crew unaccounted for. A search turned up nothing. A similar story took place in 1949, when the Star Ariel, a plane bound for Jamaica, also went missing. Despite weather being favorable, radio contact was lost just an hour into the flight. The 20 people on board were never seen again.

Well over 70 vessels have seemingly been consumed by the Triangle over time, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that people began to take notice.

A writer named the Bermuda Triangle in the 1960s.

Obviously, stories of these disappearances were noted in newspapers of the era. But it took a little time for someone to tie them together by observing that they took place in a specific pizza slice-shaped part of the Atlantic. And it wasn’t until 1964 that someone coined the phrase Bermuda Triangle. That person was Vincent Gaddis, a writer for the men’s magazine Argosy, who titled his piece “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and proceeded to run down the various disappearances and mysteries inherent in the region. 

In addition to the infamous Flight 19, Gaddis cited several then-recent examples, including the 1963 disappearance of the tanker Marine Sulphur Queen and two jets on a classified mission that same year. 

Gaddis wrote: “The Bermuda Triangle underlines the fact that despite swift wings and the voice of radio, we still have a world large enough so that men and their machines and ships can disappear without a trace.”

Gaddis offered a number of explanations for these events, including what he dubbed the “hole in the sky theory,” or an atmospheric aberration that can interfere with a pilot’s vision. He also speculated about magnetic interference unique to the area that can cause compasses to malfunction. Absent any sense of direction, ships could simply get lost. 

Before the Argosy article, there had been a handful of mentions of the Bermuda Triangle, but afterward, newspapers began running stories on the missing planes and ships. And while some of the proposed explanations were pretty rational, others were … imaginative.

People have come up with very strange theories to explain the Bermuda Triangle …

You can’t really examine the Bermuda Triangle in detail without acknowledging what a rich resource of fanciful thinking it’s provoked over the years. People haven’t just theorized that it’s environmentally weird—some also think it could be supernaturally weird.

In 1974, Charles Berlitz, the grandson of foreign language educator Maximilian Berlitz, released a book titled The Bermuda Triangle. It became a bestseller among readers of the era by putting forth the idea that the Triangle was the site of so much oddness because the lost city of Atlantis is lurking beneath the ocean depths. Ancient yet advanced technology, he explained, interfered with navigational instruments. 

During a later expedition, Berlitz claimed to have located a 420-foot tall pyramid on the ocean floor. He couldn’t inspect it any closer, he said, because of its depth. Another time, he said, a Triangle excursion left his boat with a dead engine. Green lights came from under the water and then shot into the sky, where they turned orange. He believed something in the Triangle “shifts the molecular composition of anything in it and causes things to disappear or go into another dimension.”

All of it did little to endear Berlitz to scientists or experts. Famed maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison called the book “almost all hooey.”

But the lost city of Atlantis wasn’t the only theory cropping up. There’s also the wormhole theory, which espouses the Triangle is home to an interdimensional portal that could spit vessels out into another area or even another place in time. 

… But perfectly logical things could be to blame.

There can never be one singular cause of mishaps just as there’s never any one cause of car crashes. Still, in the case of the Bermuda Triangle, there might be some common elements.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that the most likely explanation for Triangle mysteries is the simplest: weather events. As NOAA writes: 

“The majority of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes pass through the Bermuda Triangle, and in the days prior to improved weather forecasting, these dangerous storms claimed many ships.  Also, the gulf stream can cause rapid, sometimes violent, changes in weather. Additionally, the large number of islands in the Caribbean sea creates many areas of shallow water that can be treacherous to ship navigation.”

As such, per NOAA, the Triangle is likely hostile terrain, but not necessarily malevolent. Bad weather that comes on suddenly can give crew members a false sense of confidence. A 1975 Federal Aviation Administration article painted a gruesome picture, writing that “The pilot flying in restricted visibility has no warning that he is headed toward disaster until it is too late…the cyclical storms pack a punch that can rip the wings off a plane and drop the pieces into the ocean where they will never be found.”

NOAA also notes that it’s possible magnetic compasses could be influenced. Usually there’s a difference between magnetic north and true north, and mariners have to calibrate for that difference. The idea would be that in parts of the Bermuda Triangle, magnetic north and true north actually line up, and so the compass is perfectly accurate but mariners are still correcting for a mistake that doesn’t exist. Couple that with shallow water, and ships can easily run aground.

As for why wrecks aren’t often found, the Gulf Stream could explain that, too. Strong water currents are likely to carry ship debris away from a crash site.

There’s also the human error element. Take Flight 19 as an example. In 2017, Australian scientist Karl Kruszelnicki, who enjoys debunking various forms of hooey, told The Independent that the weather was bad on the day of the fleet’s disappearance in 1945. Worse, the fleet’s leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, was rumored to have been flying with a hangover and had displayed a knack for getting lost in the air previously. He also failed to listen to a junior pilot, per the radio transcripts, which might have brought him back on course. 

Kruszelnicki also points out that Triangle stories in pursuit of a mystery angle often leave out key details. The rescue plane sent after Flight 19 was known to be a model prone to catching fire. Some even reported witnessing an explosion in the area around the time it would have been searching for the missing planes. When people recount stories in an effort to frame them as part of a larger narrative, details that contradict that narrative tend to get lost.

Ocean farts are another theory behind the Bermuda Triangle.

Some have theorized that the Triangle is home to an abundance of methane deposits underwater—a.k.a ocean farts. As the methane escapes, it creates air bubbles that rise to the surface. If those bubbles were large enough, they could turn the water into a violent bubble bath, disrupting the ship’s buoyancy or creating dangerous waves.

But how would that explain planes going down? Consider the practice of lighting one’s own farts. It’s theoretically possible that highly flammable methane could be projected high enough to combust when making contact with engine exhaust. 

On the other hand, no such phenomenon has been observed in the area in recent history. Methane bubbles do exist, but they’ve never been linked to a Triangle disappearance, and a few physics experts agree that while it’s theoretically possible, it’s highly unlikely. And ocean farts still wouldn’t explain things like the Carroll A. Deering, where the ship was fine but the crew disappeared.

The Bermuda Triangle is really no more dangerous than any other region.

No matter the cause of the Triangle’s various mishaps, the region is not statistically more likely to harbor missing aircraft or ships. Due to its size and subjective borders, even an abundance of accidents wouldn’t be out of line when compared to other pathways. In 1991, astronomer Carl Sagan explained it this way:

“Statistically, it’s a fallacy. Compared with other places in the world as well traveled as that area of the Atlantic, do airplanes and ships go down more? The answer is no. Why is it always planes and ships that get lost? It’s because they can sink in water. If we started losing trains–-if we had a Duluth Triangle in which trains began disappearing—that would be interesting.”

You can visit the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bermuda Triangle is bordered by the island of Bermuda, a popular tourist destination—that means you can actually get a closer look at these mysterious waters. The so-called top of the triangle is said to be located at Bermuda’s capital city of Hamilton and is marked by a triangle sign. The island also offers an exhibit reflecting on the area’s many mysteries as well as a tram tour; you can even grab a Bermuda Triangle ice cream cone, which consists of three scoops.