Exploring the Bermuda Triangle
A Deep Dive into the Deadly Disappearances
Without a doubt, the Bermuda Triangle is the most enigmatic aspect of the Atlantic Ocean. As part of this, deep in the bowels of the Earth, there is a swirling vortex of molten core directly below the centroid of the Bermuda Triangle. As such, the corresponding portion of the magnetosphere high above the Bermuda Triangle is changing more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth. Based on this anomaly, the strength of the magnetosphere is steadily decreasing over the Triangle. However, this unique property has nothing to do with the unexplained disappearances attributed to that mysterious patch of the open ocean. Instead, the missing ships and planes tend to end up vanishing because of freak weather, human error, mechanical malfunction, electrical failure, and numerous other things.
About 1,000 lives have been lost in the Triangle in the last 100 years. On average, sixty ships and five planes vanish in the Bermuda Triangle every year. Although, one time five planes vanished in a single event, which has become the most famous case attributed to the Triangle. Flight 19 was a group of five Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle on December 5th of 1945, after losing contact during a US Navy overwater navigation training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In the wake of that, on a rescue mission, all 13 crew members of a Martin PBM Mariner flying boat vanished without a trace, as well. To make matters worse, Naval investigators could not determine the exact cause of the loss of Flight 19. Plus, no wreckage was ever found in spite of a massive search effort. The fact is that sometimes, the Atlantic Ocean swallows vehicles up in the Gulf Stream or they plummet to the bottom of some of the deepest water in the world, never to be seen again.
In line with this, one inexplicable effect of the Triangle has been that of creating a vast underwater graveyard of wreckage for several centuries, ever since the compass was first used in maritime navigation. The region has a long history of electrical instruments going haywire, for one reason or another, as well. On top of that, the really bad part is that the Bermuda Triangle is a minefield of unstable methane hydrate that can violently erupt into gas clouds and instantly snatch planes from the sky or drag ships into the bowels of the ocean without warning, as a result of seismic activity. To make matters worse, the island of Bermuda sits on a volcanic plateau made of jagged limestone reefs. The whole place is filled with ten billion tons of iron-rich magnetite, which pulls compass needles off of true north, causing ships to wreck. Along with this, there are separate reasons for the disappearances between Florida and Puerto Rico.
In particular, thunderstorms and hurricanes can have equally devastating effects on ships and planes. In regards to this, a microburst is a localized column of downdraft within a thunderstorm. For instance, in 1986, the raging winds that blasted down from the belly of a storm instantly sank the Pride of Baltimore, which vanished suddenly from radar screens, 240 miles north of Puerto Rico. Similarly, Atlantic hurricanes are born off of the African coast and then they feed on the energy of the warm tropical waters. These then begin to make their way toward America, many of which veer through the Bermuda Triangle, otherwise known as “Hurricane Alley”. This is a hotspot for this kind of activity which will only intensify as the climate crisis worsens and severe superstorms become increasingly more common, thus sinking more and more ships.
Not surprisingly, although waterspouts, riptides, and other kinds of phenomena have been going on for millennia, the folklore surrounding the Bermuda Triangle is actually quite modern. It seems to have all began in September of 1950, with an article in The Miami Herald written by Edward Van Winkle Jones. The article mentioned unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area for the first time in recorded history. This set the stage for the urban legends that would follow. Two years later, Fate magazine published “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door”, an article by George Sand which covered the loss of several planes and ships, including the planes from Flight 19. More importantly, his article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place.
Years later, in February of 1964, Vincent Gaddis wrote an article called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” in the pulp magazine Argosy. In it, he claimed that Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region. The Gaddis Argosy article delineated the boundaries of the triangle, giving its vertices as Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book entitled Invisible Horizons. The thing is that other writers have given different boundaries and vertices to the Bermuda Triangle, with the total area varying from about 500,000 to 1,500,000 square miles. So, although not everyone agrees on where it is, no one is disputing what it does, just how it’s done. Every imaginable hypothesis has been put forward in an effort to explain the disappearances, including, but not limited to, alien abductions, interdimensional portals, time jumps, and sea monsters.
In the end, sometimes there’s just no way of knowing for sure what happened, but at the same time, we need to understand what is within the realm of possibility and what is a complete fantasy. Going back to George Sand again for a moment. He was also the first person to suggest a supernatural element to the incidents, which seems completely unfounded to me, even more so than alien abductions. In my mind, the disappearances are all obviously geological and meteorological in nature, not theological, or even extraterrestrial. Similarly, no one is telekinetically crashing planes or anything of the sort. Regardless, shipwrecks keep happening for whatever reason, and as the traffic on Hurricane Alley continues to increase more vessels will surely get lost in mysterious ways. In spite of this, the world must go on, which means some people will inevitably vanish off of the face of the Earth into the depths of the Bermuda Triangle, often without a trace, just as they always have and always will…
