For those who didn’t grow up in the late 20th century, it may seem strange to learn that for a time many people genuinely believed things like that humans randomly burst into flames for no apparent reason, with the occasional speculative news report or Unsolved Mysteries episode highlighting the latest instance, as well as that there was an area dubbed the Bermuda Triangle where almost certainly aliens were snapping up ships and planes for, we can only assume, maximal probage. This all brings us to the topic of today- how did the idea of the Bermuda Triangle first become ingrained in public consciousness, and was there ever actually any evidence of weird things happening there, or is it just yet another instance of the truism that humans will believe anything if a human in a suit says it on TV or it’s otherwise published in book form?

To begin with, let’s start with what exactly constitutes the Bermuda Triangle. While there is some disagreement among Bermuda Triangle truthers, the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle are the area formed if you drew direct lines on an oceanic map between the ports of Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico where allegedly a lot of weird stuff happens.

What kind of weird stuff? Well, legend holds that ships and planes passing through the Triangle occasionally just up and disappear like your dad when he went out for milk that one time.

Now, the skeptics among you may hear that and think, “Well, the ocean is pretty big and a generally dangerous place to exist, especially back before GPS and awesome satellite weather, so maybe a handful of the planes and ship traffic in that region just sank or something? I mean, it is a super high trafficked part of the ocean.”

Now, this is a very reasonable explanation.

But hear us out- what about if instead it was actually aliens?

This level of reasoning is essentially how the idea of the Bermuda Triangle took hold.

More specifically, the first to speculate towards this very reasonable and in all ways rational idea can be traced to an article written in 1964, titled, appropriately enough, The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.

This article was written for Argosy magazine by a man named Vincent H. Gaddis. A guy who basically spent his entire journalistic career applying the question “Okay, but what if an alien did it?” to everything.

Only slightly hyperbole, we should also point out that Gaddis penned other such essays as “New Evidence for Atlantis” and “Career of a Cursed Car”.

He also, funny enough, was one of the early pushers of the idea of humans spontaneously combusting.

On that note, for anyone who’s read some of Gaddis’s many pieces, as we, unfortunately, just had to do for work, it is clear that Gaddis was, in fact, in desperate need of a laxative, owing to being full of crap.

But as for his Bermuda Triangle piece, he notes that the Bermuda Triangle was already an observable phenomenon known to the sea-faring world, but that the air and sea captains of earth were hiding it from us landlubbers.

We can only presume because it’s not a good conspiracy theory if we don’t include potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people needing to be involved to make it check out.

Helpfully in his piece, he defines the area well and, despite his saying it was an existing well known thing, gives us the first known instance of both the idea and the name “Bermuda Triangle”. He states,

“Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this area, known as the “Bermuda Triangle,” most of the total vanishments have occurred.”

Defying all expectation, the article does go on to contain some factual elements, notably details concerning a number of ship and plane disappearances that occurred within the confines of the Triangle, some of which are genuinely fascinating. For example, Gaddis recounts the story of Flight 19, one of the most enduring mysteries in aviation history. Or, at least, that’s what a lot of people say. In fact, when you look at the details, there’s really no mystery at all here.

To sum up the tragedy of Flight 19 as quick as we can before we get back to the Bermuda Triangle- on Dec 5th, 1945, five American bombers, collectively given the designation Flight 19, were tasked with a training bombing exercise.

After bombs released, flight leader Lt. Charles Taylor had a problem. He radioed, “Both my compasses are out and I’m trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.”

We’re going to go ahead and give Taylor the benefit of the doubt that he was, in fact, being honest about his compasses, and it all wasn’t just an elaborate ruse to avoid having to go to Florida, as any sensible human would try for because, Florida.

But as you might imagine, without working compasses, at the time navigation over the ocean can be somewhat difficult, though not impossible if one knows where you started and can see the sun, which the flight could. And, of course, there were all the other planes in the flight that did have working compasses.

For whatever reasons, Taylor simply refused to listen to any of them or anyone on the ground or boats in the water who tried to help him, and was convinced he knew where they were. Such that when one of his students radioed to him “Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home; head west, dammit,” he seemingly denied the request.

On that note, Port Everglades Air Sea Rescue Unit 7 crew heard further exchanges between the pilots, with some of the students arguing with Taylor about their position, including discussing their own compass readings, but Taylor continued to go with what he thought was right, and the students continued to follow, despite disagreeing with him and that catastrophic disaster was sure to follow if Taylor was wrong.

At the time, Taylor was convinced heading west would lead to disaster because he thought that would just take them over the Gulf of Mexico.

That said, they did, for a time, do the sensible thing and split the difference and fly northwest, but Taylor eventually second guessed himself, radioing, “We didn’t fly far enough east; we may as well just turn around and fly east again.”

A bold move when you know North America is definitely to the west somewhere and the Atlantic definitely to the east.

Why none of his students simply noped out of his increasingly illogical instructions, it’s generally just chalked up to he was the instructor and in the position of authority, and they probably felt they had to follow orders like good soldiers.

Whatever the case there, it turns out Taylor had a bit of a history of losing his bearings, including two recent previous instances of needing to ditch into the sea when just such a thing happened. One instance occurred on June 14, 1944, and another around 7 months later on January 30, 1945, all leading up to this Flight 19 instance about 11 months after that finally doomed not only himself, but the entire Flight of planes.

In the end, as night descended and winds and stormier weather over the Atlantic picked up, Taylor’s last message of “All planes close up tight … we’ll have to ditch unless landfall … when the first plane drops below 10 gallons [38 liters], we all go down together.” clearly indicates aliens were involved in the disappearance and not simple faulty navigation and a flight leader in desperate need of Crew Resource Management training.

This is a concept that didn’t really become a defacto thing until decades later to avoid precisely the issue this Flight exhibited in spades- where the pilot in command or flight leader is clearly making mistakes, but those beneath them either don’t speak up when they see it because they are of lower position in authority, or the PIC simply refuses to listen to outside input from subordinates when given, sometimes leading to catastrophic results, as happened with Flight 19.

In the end, shortly before their complete disappearance, the flight’s position was triangulated based on their radio broadcasts to be far out to sea north east of the Bahamas. Had they simply headed west, as some among Taylor’s flight suggested, they’d have been fine. Other than, you know, now finding themselves having to exist in Florida.

Instead, Flight 19 was never seen or heard from again. To date there has never been any wreckage found and a massive, multi-day search and rescue operation utilising the combined might and resources of the Navy and Coast Guard in the days that followed didn’t find so much as a shred of evidence that the planes touched down anywhere in the roughly 250,000 square miles of ocean they searched.

Going back to while the planes were still in the air, the tower at Fort Lauderdale, upon it becoming clear that the Taylor and co were lost, began putting together a search and rescue. Part of this included diverting two PBM Mariner flying boats taking part in training exercises nearby with the 13 man crew of each plane being updated in real-time on the estimated location of Flight 19.

Adding to conspiracy theorist fodder, one of these rescue planes also disappeared, and unlike the crew of Flight 19, without any evidence anything was amiss, with the last transmissions recorded from this crew being a routine acknowledgement of its updated mission parameters before it also inexplicably disappeared.

In all, 27 souls were lost that day. The 14 man crew of Flight 19 and the 13 rescuers sent to find them.

Getting back to Gaddis, to his credit his recollection of the events that day in his article are fairly accurate, though he makes a few notable and telling omissions in his retelling. For example, Gaddis makes note of an “explosion” that was seen in the sky around 7:30 in the evening. A detail that does appear in official reports. With the observation being credited to the crew of the merchant vessel, the S.S. Gaines Mills.

However, in his article, Gaddis writes this off as a coincidence, claiming that the explosion happened several hours after Flight 19 made its final radio transmission, ultimately concluding that the explosion the crew of the Gaines Mills saw was probably “an exploding meteor”.

In truth, the explosion occurred in the exact area Navy radar teams lost contact with the rescue craft. In addition, the Captain of the Gaines Mills, Shonna Stanley, would specifically note in his message to the Fort Lauderdale tower that he and his crew sailed through both wreckage and burning gasoline in an ultimately fruitless search for potential survivors, to quote the message, in part –

“At 1950, observed a burst of flames, apparently an explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high and burning for ten minutes …Stopped, circled area using searchlights, looking for survivors. None found.”

A detail Gaddis failed to mention for some reason.

Gaddis also failed to mention that the Navy search team took samples of the water around where the Gaines Mills searched and this water developed, to quote “an oily film”. Sadly a literal more in-depth search couldn’t be conducted due to the roughness of the seas at the time, but this detail combined with the fact that the Gaines Mills reports of a large fireball in the sky were corroborated by other vessels in the area led to the Navy concluding that the PBM-5 taking part in the search had simply exploded in mid-air.

Clearly Aliens… Or perhaps that the PBM was well known for being unsafe and at risk of such a catastrophic failure. You see, the flying gas tank, as the plane was also sometimes called, held almost 10 tons of gas, with flexible fuel lines having an annoying tendency to come loose and leak, especially in heavy turbulence conditions. While leaking fuel isn’t necessarily a catastrophic issue, in some rare cases it can be beyond the obvious problem of running out of fuel.

In this case, it is assumed that a fuel line came loose, ultimately caused a fire and, as any pilot knows, if you have a fire in an airplane, you’re going to have a bad time. Which is why in the general case if one occurs, the rule of the day is to throw everything else to the wind and while someone aboard is attempting to get the fire out if they can, the pilot in command is to get the plane on the ground as fast as safely possible without ripping off the wings. In this case, they seemingly had no such major warning, with fuel leaking, igniting, and the entire near fully fueled plane going up in a fireball.

As for Flight 19 itself, officially the cause of the disappearance today is listed as “Cause unknown”, though initial findings placed the blame squarely on Lt. Taylor, noting that he was “guilty of mental aberration”. Read, he got lost, panicked, and refused to listen to anyone on the ground or any of his subordinates in Flight 19 with regards to their position. He simply knew better, explicitly basing his positional thoughts on some islands he had spotted he was convinced were part of the Florida Keys.

Of note here, directly before this exercise, Taylor had been based out of Miami, and even during the flight at one point mistakenly identified himself as MT-28, or Miami Torpedo Bomber, and presumably simply saw some islands that reminded him of part of the keys, even though that’s not at all where they were flying that day.

While all of this may seem monumentally stupid on Taylor’s part, and it was rationally, for anyone who’s ever watched any of the many awesome videos from the Air Safety Institute on various real world aviation accidents, you’ll see this sort of thing is shockingly common in aviation accidents. Something goes wrong. Pilot panics to some extent, and as a result generally starts making increasingly irrational decisions and increasing irrational radio calls, with ever escalating panic, not so much because of the initial problem per se, but more so as a result of the aftermath of panicking. Sometimes this irrationality is aided by hypoxia at high altitudes, but not strictly necessary. Panicking humans often do and say weird things regardless.

In contrast, as those Air Safety Institute documentaries often show, pilots who keep their heads, even in seemingly catastrophic conditions, have a remarkable tendency to get themselves on the ground safely despite it all.

As to why the official explanation of what happened here got changed to “Cause unknown,” this came as the result of a complaint filed by Taylor’s mother who didn’t appreciate her deceased son being blamed for the deaths of everyone on Flight 19, and someone among the military brass deciding to not rub salt in her open wound, changing the official cause of accident from blaming Taylor’s decision making in it all to “Cause Unknown.”

Back to Gaddis, his careful massaging of the facts of Flight 19 as well the details of other similar cases of plane and ship disappearances within the confines of Bermuda Triangle (which if you recall, he himself seems to have made up and defined) allowed him to spin the narrative of the area being a hotbed for mysterious, unexplainable phenomenon.

The problem is, it isn’t.

Like at all.

In the many decades since Gaddis wrote his piece, many studies have been done on the so-called Bermuda Triangle by everyone from insurance brokers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and none have found any proof whatsoever that planes or ships are more likely to crash, sink or otherwise vanish without a trace when traveling within the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle than any other part of the ocean. Or to quote how the NOAA put it in a 2010 press release –

“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.”

In essence- the ocean is unfathomably big and deep. Ships and planes are not. Finding one that has disappeared in its depths, even if you know exactly where it sank, is often an effort in futility.

For instance, consider the Titanic, the wreck of which took about seven decades of searching to find despite the area in which it sank being widely known and billions of dollars, if adjusted for inflation, being spent searching for it over that span.

As an aside, because this is wild, attempts to recover the wreck of the Titanic, or at least all of the stuff and people aboard, began almost immediately after it sank, with one company tasked by the families of those on board seriously considering dynamiting the area of the ocean in which the ship sank. The thinking being that the explosions would destroy the wreckage and launch all of the bodies out of the water like meaty missiles.

Back to the Bermuda Triangle, despite there being no evidence that the area is more dangerous than any other comparably trafficked section of ocean, Gaddis’ article captured the attention of the more conspiratorially minded, culminating in the publication of a book titled simply, The Bermuda Triangle.

Published in 1974 and written by a guy called Charles Berlitz, the book is noted as being the thing that really put the Bermuda Triangle on the map. With it covering and expanding on many of the same ship and plane disappearances noted by Gaddis in his original article a decade prior. Like Gaddis, Berlitz wasn’t exactly entirely accurate in his retelling of events and wasn’t above pulling stuff out of his circular, rather than triangular, sphincter when it suited his narrative.

This, in turn, led to the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, published in 1975.

Largely written as a literary response to Berlitz’s book by sceptic and clear individual on the alien’s payroll, Lawrence (Larry) Kusche, the book examined hundreds of official reports to interrogate Berlitz’s claims and found that much of what he wrote was of quality similar to the leavings of horses.

Kusche found that not only did Berlitz misrepresent many facts – for instance noting that Navy brass were “baffled” by certain disappearances, when in reality they’d simply accepted the grim reality that sometimes planes and ships sink and that it is generally impossible to recover the bodies aboard or wreckage swallowed by the waves- but also Berlitz just made stuff up. Inventing, among other things, fictitious radio transmissions that never happened.

To quote Kusche summing on his findings –

“What isn’t misinterpreted by Berlitz is fabricated”

As an aside, Kusche also wrote a book about the disappearance of Flight 19 in 1980, which similarly poured over the official report of the incident by the Navy Board of Investigation and is today considered one of the most comprehensive overviews of the incident and pretty clearly illustrates what likely happened.

Kursche is definitely working for the Pentaverant you guys.

Following up on all this is Australian scientist, Karl Kruszelnicki, who has made metaphorical waves over the last few years with his groundbreaking conclusion that the ocean is really big and that finding missing ships and planes lost in it is akin to finding a needle in an ocean sized haystack. And that, to quote the results of his groundbreaking research, –

“The number [of ships and planes] that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis.”

Nevertheless because, humans, Berlitz’s book nonetheless ignited the imaginations of the public and other speculative fiction writers, with the latter in the aftermath generally regurgitating the work of Berlitz, occasionally adding their own spin to it, crediting the disappearances listed (many of which have logical, accepted explanations) to everything from aliens to a black hole.

Thus, while it is largely agreed that ships and planes don’t disappear within the confines of the Triangle more often than they do any other popular, commonly traversed area of the ocean and that the disappearances that do occur generally have reasonable explanations (bad weather, human error, sea-faring werewolves ect …) some have decided that it is totally actually aliens. Or mermen. Or ghosts. Or maybe even a rogue sea monster.

There’s of course no proof of this, but then again, there’s also no proof that it wasn’t aliens.

Checkmate scientists.

As for those who adhere to this aliens explanation, and why this specific part of the ocean over all the rest, some speculate the aliens use it as a sort of space-Walmart, picking up a ship or plane when they need parts or human beings to probe in various ways. Apparently the aliens haven’t heard of modern dating apps… I mean, many members of Grindr would probably even welcome the probing. No non-consensual abductions required.

For those who don’t buy that aliens are responsible, we also happened upon conspiracy theories positing that the Triangle contains a wormhole, with there being some disagreement about exactly where this wormhole leads. Some say to an earth-like alien planet billions of light years away, others an alternate dimension, and some the far off past or future. All we do know is that wherever the ships, planes and unfortunate people aboard go, it is a one-way trip, similar to the hypothesis that they actually find themselves at the bottom of the ocean.

On that note, then there are theories that posit that the Bermuda Triangle threat comes not from the sky, but below the waves. While a random, rogue sea monster or very angry and committed super-sized whale or shark is a popular hypothesis, our favourite we found is that the Bermuda Triangle is actually located directly above the fabled lost city of Atlantis and that its denizens randomly sink ships or shoot down planes for reasons.

This is actually one of the hypotheses Charles Berlitz proposed in a later book about Atlantis being totally super real you guys despite it very explicitly just being something Plato pulled out of his butt and everyone understood it as such, even his contemporaries- see our video What Did the Grees Really Say About Atlantis, but nevertheless Berlitz suggesting that the people of Atlantis used a special magic crystal to both shield themselves from view, and also attack passing ships and planes that get too close. From the air we guess.. And, you know, just some of them. Not all the thousands upon thousands of others traversing the region…

Also, because we can’t not mention this, at some point Berlitz claimed to have somehow obtained one of these crystals but then inexplicably lost it. Which is why he couldn’t show it to journalists when asked. He totally had one though. Wake up Sheeple!

Speaking of which, Berlitz even suggested in some of his writings that the people of Atlantis actually worked in tandem with aliens to hide their existence and that the super-advanced technology they used to hide themselves from view or summon hurricanes and ship-swalling whirlpools was based on gifts given to them by little green men that had visited the Earth eons ago.

We can only hypothesize to build Pyramids. I mean, the pyramids are triangular too. Just saying… The truth is out there.

But in all serious, we think the aforementioned Larry Kusche said it best when discussing these sorts of obviously false narratives that many cling to despite all evidence to the contrary, from Flat Earth to Bermuda Triangle to Moon Landing Conspiracy to so much related to politics-

“Actually, there is an issue of greater importance than whether “paranormal forces” are at work anywhere. In this age of information explosion and social media, it is worrisome that so many people believe so many things without requiring any supporting evidence, that they employ little skepticism, have such a lack of curiosity, and such a bias toward what they want to be true, that they ignore what is true… Once false information becomes “common knowledge,” no matter how thoroughly it might be shown to be false, the false version will continue to be believed by some, either because they remain uninformed about the correct information or because they refuse to accept any information that is contrary to the beliefs they hold… The need for skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of critical importance in everyday life… Skepticism and critical thinking are important in politics when voters let their emotions rule rather than becoming informed on the positions of the candidates. It is important in issues of health, such as the vaccination/autism controversy, which is resulting in diseases that were virtually wiped out to start coming back…”

In the end, it’s easy to mock Flat Earthers, Bermuda Triangle believers, the list goes on and on, but human brain human braining ensures that literally all of us believe some things that are just as easily disproven, or disbelieve some things that are easily proved true with even a modicum of actually looking into it. Yet so often no amount of evidence presented to us can shake us from our firm belief, and often such evidence presented to us has the opposite effect, such that, much like Flat Earthers, we’re soon willing to make bizarre logical leaps just to find a way to rationalize continuing to believe what we believed before, despite all evidence presented to us to the contrary.

And, worse, when that clear evidence contrary to what we believe comes from experts in a given field, it can drive us to simply distrust that source of information about anything, despite their expertise and our relative lack of it. Leading to a greater problem in that, at the end of the day, if we’re conditioned to distrust the literal experts in a given field, rather than the result being us better informed on some specific issue, we’re simply more easily misled by those who aren’t experts, particularly those who are especially good at spinning narratives that usually contain a modicum of truth to hook our brains, then loading a whole lot of crap on top that isn’t true at all, but furthers the individual’s agenda. Whether that be in politics, or simply selling more of their books as in the case of Bill Kaysing’s bizarre and ever changing ideas that kicked off the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theory, see our video on the subject for more on that, or the aforementioned Charles Berlitz with the Bermuda Triangle thing.

Cascading to global levels, leading many to simply distrust all experts in a given field, such as scientists of a given branch, and in the most extreme case even some believing that these individuals are all simply in on some mass cover up of the truth on a given issue, despite how nonsensical that is when talking countless thousands of experts the world over who would all have to be in on it.

No expert is right all the time. Everyone gets things wrong. Science itself is all about trying to figure out where what we currently believe true may be wrong and studying to move the state of knowledge to more and more accurate to reality, with any good scientist being the first to point out all the ways they’ve been wrong once it’s revealed, which, of course, all just adds fodder for those trying to discredit them. After all, if they were wrong about X, and admitting it no less, who’s to say they aren’t wrong about Y…

Well, the data can often answer that one way or the other on many things. But who’s got time to look into that?

And on top of all that, scientists themselves are also subject to such biases of thinking and beliefs, particularly with regards to things they learned in their schooling days and haven’t looked into since as they focussed on other areas of their field, complicating all of this.

But all that aside, on the whole, at any given time, by virtue of having become experts in some field, the experts are going to know what they’re talking about far better than the non-experts, from random internet commenters to arguably the worst of spreaders of misinformation in particularly vocal politicians on any side of the political spectrum. With usually the more extreme on one end of the political spectrum or other being the worst offenders of all, and the moderates, well, more moderate and balanced in the general case.
In all though, the whole Bermuda Triangle thing is really just a representation of how all our brains are wired taken to the extreme. And every human who has ever humaned into adulthood has exhibited similar thought processes about some given issue, despite the data clearly saying something else from what we believe.

Kursche sums up what we need to try to battle this innate tendency- “Skepticism. Critical thinking. Honesty,” including with ourselves about what we believe, why we believe it, and whether we or our sources of information really actually know anything about a given thing or not.