What is the Bermuda Triangle?

The Bermuda Triangle is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean in which ships, planes, and people are alleged to have mysteriously vanished.

For decades, the Atlantic Ocean’s fabled Bermuda Triangle has captured the human imagination with unexplained disappearances of ships, planes, and people.
Some speculate that unknown and mysterious forces account for the unexplained disappearances, such as extraterrestrials capturing humans for study; the influence of the lost continent of Atlantis; vortices that suck objects into other dimensions; and other whimsical ideas.  
Some explanations are more grounded in science, if not in evidence.  Read more!

Where is the Bermuda Triangle?

The Bermuda Triangle, as it’s most commonly defined, stretches between Miami, San Juan, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda. In all, it encompasses hundreds of thousands of square miles in the North Atlantic Ocean, a huge area.

The region also sees heavy traffic from ships coming and going from the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico.

The Bermuda Triangle got its name from a 1964 article in the pulp magazine Argosy, which linked together a few disappearances in the region. “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” didn’t offer up any explanations for the occurrences, though it did heavily emphasize the mysterious nature of the area.

Dangerous Waters

The fact that the area within the Bermuda Triangle is heavily trafficked could account for some of the mystery. Any region with lots of ships going through it is bound to see more accidents than a place with less activity.

Another common explanation for the Bermuda Triangle rests on magnetism. The Earth’s magnetic North Pole isn’t the same as its geographic North Pole, which means that compasses usually don’t point exactly north. Only along what’s known as agonic lines, which line up magnetic and geographic north, are compasses truly accurate.

Kruszelnicki in 2017 told news.com.au that the Bermuda Triangle is close to the Equator, near a wealthy part of the world – America – therefore there's a lot of traffic.

What's The Real Science Behind The "Bermuda Triangle"?

Every few years, a story goes viral claiming that experts have finally 'solved' the Bermuda Triangle mystery.

But there's one problem with all of these 'solutions' - the Bermuda Triangle doesn't actually exist, and there is no 'mystery' to solve.

The name Bermuda Triangle refers to a region of ocean bordered by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and it was first brought to public attention back in the 1950s by a journalist named Edward Van Winkle Jones, who wrote a story for the Associated Press about a large number of ships and planes that had disappeared in the region.

The idea really took off in the 1970s, when Charles Berlitz published the best-selling The Bermuda Triangle, and everyone started speculating about UFOs or rogue waves that were frequenting the region.

But the problem was, no one had actually fact-checked the claims of boats and planes going missing in the first place. And when journalist Larry Kusche did go over the facts a few years later, he discovered there was no mystery to solve in the first place.

As Benjamin Radford explained for Live Science in 2012:

In some cases there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer's imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough – but Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they 'mysteriously disappeared' during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside the Bermuda Triangle.

Mystery of the disappearing facts

But before we accept any of these explanations, a good skeptic or scientist should ask a more basic question: Is there really any mystery to explain?

A journalist named Larry Kusche asked exactly that question, and came to a surprising answer: there is no mystery about strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. 

Kusche exhaustively re-examined the "mysterious disappearances" and found that the story was basically created by mistakes, mystery mongering, and in some cases outright fabrication — all being passed along as fact-checked truth.

In some cases there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard.

It's also important to note that the area within the Bermuda Triangle is heavily traveled with cruise and cargo ships; logically, just by random chance, more ships will sink there than in less-traveled areas such as the South Pacific.