Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as The Devil’s Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Pop-culture has attributed various disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings. In a 2013 study, the World Wide Fund for Nature identified the world’s 10 most dangerous waters for shipping, but the Bermuda Triangle was not among them.

The earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in the September 17, 1950 article published in The Miami Herald by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door”, a short article by George Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM  Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand’s article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular are where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine. In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote that the flight leader had been heard saying, “We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white.” Sand’s article was the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. In the February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis’s article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” argued that Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region. The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book, Invisible Horizons.