Bermuda Triangle (or Devil's Triangle) by Maarten Brys. In: Shermer, M.;Linse,Pat (2002) The Skeptic encyclopedia of pseudoscience. With friendly permission by Skeptics Society
The Devil’s Triangle, better known as the Bermuda Triangle, is the triangular
area in the Atlantic Ocean between the Bahamas, Bermuda and the east coast of
the United States in which ships and airplanes are said to mysteriously
disappear. The absolute peak in cultural interest in the Bermuda Triangle followed
the bestselling 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz and J.
Manson Valentine, of which millions of copies were sold.
Some of the more imaginative explanations for the disappearances are
kidnappings by UFOs and dangerous force fields originating in the lost continent of
Atlantis below. The truth is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that
area.
The exact position and size of this devil's triangle is somewhat disputed:
certain authors say that it has a surface of five hundred thousand square
kilometres, others mention figures three times as high and also consider the Azores
and parts of West India as being part of the triangle. The rumours about
mysterious disappearances in that part of the Atlantic Ocean already existed in the
era of Columbus, but the craze reached its peak in the 1970’s.
What were the claims? All stories about the Bermuda Triangle contain certain
similarities: it is always about ships or airplanes that, although in the
hands of experienced pilots or sailors, mysteriously disappear in a calm sea and
in bright weather conditions. Usually, strange radio messages are mentioned to
liven the story up.
But those who truly investigate the facts will find out that often these
stories are transferred from one book to another, and each author adds a number of
juicy details. As such, an unseaworthy ship that sank during a heavy storm is
slowly turned into an unsinkable ship that mysteriously disappears in a calm
sea.
The most famous example is the story of 'Flight 19', the crew of which is
brought home by a UFO in Spielberg's 1977 box-office hit Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. The Bermuda Triangle books tell the story of experienced pilots
flying out to see, sending mysterious radio messages just before disappearing.
The facts about this case, however, make an explanation rather mundane:
inexperienced pilots, inaccurate navigation, broken compasses, bad weather
conditions, and poor radio connections. The pilots got lost, ran out of fuel, and crash
landed in the sea. The heavy airplanes sank to the bottom within minutes.
A year after the book by Berlitz and Valentine was published, the complete
and partial lies that had been copied from book to book during the years (until
they ended up in Berlitz’ publication) were finally exposed in The Bermuda
Triangle Mystery—Solved (1975) by Lawrence Kusche. He demonstrated that there is
nothing wrong with that part of the sea. He indicated that there are no more
accidents there than in other heavily used sea routes and that all these
exaggerated stories about mysterious disappearances were just the product of the
imagination of a number of writers. Kusche's book is still held up as a classic
in skeptical research.
Slowly, the subject was forgotten. Only occasionally does one hear about the
Bermuda Triangle, even though ships and planes still encounter disasters in
the normal course of traversing the storming Atlantic. In 1980, Berlitz
presented a couple of new “unexplainable” accidents, which turned out to be not so
unexplainable at all, and only three of them occurred in the famous triangle. In
1991 there was a stir when one of the hundred airplane wrecks near Fort
Lauderdale was thought to be the infamous 1945 Flight 19, but that turned out not
to be the case.
References
Kushe, Larry. 1975. Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books (reprint of the Warner Books 1975 edition).
Randi, James. 1982. Flim-Flam! Psychics, Esp, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, ch. 3.
Stein, G. (ed.) 1996. The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Author:
Maarten Brys
0496/45.73.70
Maarten Brys (studied philosophy and philosophy of science at the University
of Ghent, Belgium. Member of skepp, skepsis and csicop. Contact: Maarten Brys,
Leliestraat 22, B-8820 Torhout, Belgium.
