There is a place in the Atlantic where ships vanish, where planes fall from the sky, where vast, inexplicable mysteries haunt the sea. The Bermuda Triangle, darling of mysterious disappearance buffs.
What causes all these weird disappearances? Numerous hypotheses have been put forward, from aliens to methane bubbles, to magnetic anomalies.
Unfortunately, the real answer is not nearly as exciting. There is no Bermuda Triangle. An analysis of all the Triangle stories revealed that many of them were mis-remember, poorly reported, exaggerated, or just plain fabricated. In reality, there number of ship disappearances is not statistically greater than anywhere else in the ocean. Some of the vanished ships may be unexplained, but there is no link between the Triangle and higher than average maritime incidents.
~Southern Fried Scientist
Absolutely. There is a list of unexplained disappearances around the world from after ww2 to, I think, the late 1960s prepared by insurance companies. Few of them happened in the ‘Triangle’. More importantly, even in these days of EPIRBs and other distress systems several ships disappear every year with trace, the Rezzak and Jupiter come to mind.
That does not mean that the mythology is not worth mining once in a while. After three ships and 43 seafarers died in just 39 days in October/November 2010 due to liquefaction of the mineral ore they were carrying I took a look at the disappearance of the three Proteus Class colliers that went missing (Cyclops in 1918, Nereus and Proteus in 1941). My prediction, before looking at them, was that the cargoes had been loaded during, or shortly after heavy rains. Sure enough, they had been. We may not know where the wrecks are, but I’d argue that we know why they sunk.