When Navigational Errors Become Paranormal Mysteries
Ah, the Bermuda Triangle — that soggy wedge of ocean where, according to enthusiasts of sloppy thinking everywhere, the laws of physics take a coffee break and planes vanish into thin air because “mystery.”
The legend is simple: ships and planes disappear inside a roughly triangular region bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Therefore, obviously, it must be supernatural. Not bad weather. Not pilot error. Not mechanical failure, miscommunication, magnetic anomalies, or the fact that you’re flying a rickety tin can over thousands of miles of open water. No — it must be cursed. Naturally.
The entire Bermuda Triangle myth was cooked up by a handful of sensationalist writers in the 1950s and ‘60s who realized there’s big money in scary stories. They cherry-picked incidents, ignored obvious explanations, and dramatically inflated the mystery around every disappearance. One author in particular, Vincent Gaddis, practically invented the Triangle as we know it, cobbling together tales with all the rigor of a fifth-grade book report written at midnight.
The facts are a lot less glamorous. The area is heavily traveled. Tropical storms are frequent. Ocean currents are strong and unpredictable. Radio communication was notoriously bad in the early 20th century. Planes that went down often did so because of navigational errors, fuel exhaustion, poor maintenance, or pilots who weren’t qualified to fly by instruments alone. Shocking, I know: people occasionally crash when flying long distances over featureless, storm-prone ocean.
Insurance companies — who, you’ll notice, have a vested interest in pricing risk accurately — do not charge extra for trips through the Bermuda Triangle. The U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t treat it as unusual. Maritime agencies don’t issue special warnings about it. But why listen to boring experts when you can listen to a guy named Chad on YouTube who swears his compass spun weird one time while fishing?
The Bermuda Triangle isn’t a gateway to another dimension. It’s a monument to our need to turn ordinary accidents into cosmic drama. If you think every missing vessel is proof of alien abductions, wormholes, or ancient Atlantean revenge, you might want to recalibrate your internal compass — because it’s spinning a lot faster than theirs ever did.