Return to my Pseudoscience
pages
Go to my home page
© Copyright 1999, Jim Loy
The Bermuda Triangle is a triangle in Bermuda. Sorry, that was meant to be a joke. Actually the Bermuda Triangle is a triangle with Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and southern Florida at the three vertices. Charles Berlitz, of the Berlitz language teaching family, started the myth of a supernatural ship, boat, and airplane destroying area, in his book The Bermuda Triangle. Since then, there have been several other books which mostly copy Berlitz' "evidence." Actually, the myth is based upon truth. The Bermuda Triangle is indeed a place of many disasters. The reasons for this are lots of boats, ships and airplanes (busy shipping lanes and lots of tourists), and the weather (surprise storms and hurricanes).
Despite the natural explanation above, Berlitz and his clones want supernatural explanations. And they make quite a few errors in their research. They cite disasters which occured nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle (for example in the Pacific and in the North Atlantic). They cite disasters that were never disasters (boats which eventually turned up with no damage). And they cite calm weather when there was very rough weather. And they seem to think that only an idiot can get lost at sea, and that any fool can survive the ditching of an airplane at sea.
Two excellent sources of information on this subject are The Bermuda Triangle, Solved!, by Larry Kusche, and the Nova video on the Bermuda Triangle.