How The Bermuda Triangle Got Its Terrifying Reputation For Making Ships Disappear

With tales of ghost ships, vanishing crews, aircraft disappearing mid-flight, and maritime catastrophes that leave no trace, the seas of the Bermuda Triangle have a reputation for unexplained disappearances. This vast, 270,000-square-mile area of the North Atlantic Ocean has been awash with mystery and speculation for decades. As far back as March 1918, the USS Cyclops vanished while sailing in the region, and neither the wreck nor the crew has ever been found.

In the years that followed, a further 20 aircraft and 50 ships were lost to these troubled waters, with each calamity adding a chapter to this uncanny tale. In 1921, the Carroll A. Deering — a five-master sailing into the Bermuda Triangle from Barbados – was found stranded on a shoal with every soul on board gone. The table was set for mealtime, but the commercial schooner was a ghost ship, inhabited only by three hungry cats.

The terrifying reputation of the Bermuda Triangle really took hold on the night of December 5th, 1945, when Flight 19 — a formation of five US Navy bombers — set off across the ocean from Fort Lauderdale. Partway into the flight, the base inexplicably lost radio contact, and none of the planes or 14 crew were ever seen or heard from again. But there was something else to the strange case of Flight 19, something that further fueled the flames of a fevered public imagination: the seaplane dispatched on the subsequent search-and-rescue mission vanished that same night — along with 13 unlucky crew members.

The idea that an airplane can seemingly disappear into the twilight zone while flying over water is not unheard of. The plane Amelia Earhart was flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 also disappeared – and it, too, has never been found. But this particular triangle of the North Atlantic Ocean was put on the hoodoo map by a story that appeared in Argosy magazine in 1964, "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle."The American author of the piece, Vincent Gaddis, posits the "Bermuda Triangle" as an enigmatic slice of the world that destroys ships and planes without a trace.

Within this triangle lie menacing powers that are solely to blame for the loss of the Flight 19 patrol, Gaddis contends, claiming the total number of disappearances are beyond the realms of chance. But as shipping insurer Lloyds of London notes, the number of incidents is so unexceptional that premiums for voyages within the Triangle are the same as anywhere else in the world. However, such myth-busting facts struggle to rise above the waves of sensationalism. 

In 1974, Charles Berlitz's best-selling book "The Bermuda Triangle" further reinforced its supernatural reputation, and in 1979 Steven Spielberg jumped the shark by having the Flight 19 crew abducted by aliens in his movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Is the Bermuda Triangle really a demonic vortex of ghostly forces, or can its fearful reputation be explained by poor weather, human error, and the boring realities of statistical probability?

When it comes to the Bermuda Triangle, conspiracy theories abound. Some claim secret weapons at the US Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center are to blame, while others look to hexagonal-shaped clouds on radar satellite imagery for explanation. Another belief is that the seas of the Bermuda Triangle are haunted by ghosts of enslaved people thrown overboard by sea captains en route to America.

A more rational explanation comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the same U.S. agency that recorded the sound of the Titan submersible as it imploded during its ill-fated dive on the Titanic wreck. NOAA says, "There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean."

Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, a popular Australian author and radio personality who communicates science to listeners, agrees. When it comes to Flight 19, Dr. Kruszelnicki told news.com.au that there is no mystery. Radio transcripts reveal confusion amongst junior pilots and flight leader Lieutenant Charles Taylor, who ignored instructions to fly west and continued east over deeper water, Dr. Kruszelnicki says. Lt Taylor "arrived with a hangover, flew off without a watch, and had a history of getting lost and ditching his plane twice before." And that search plane that "vanished" in the Argosy article? Witnesses saw it explode, and it left behind debris and an oil slick. So perhaps the real mystery is –– why does the Bermuda Triangle myth persist?