The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for mystery over mundane failure.
Flight 19 is a perfect case study. You have: inexperienced trainees, a leader with possibly shaky navigation skills, bad weather, limited radio and radar, and institutional reluctance to write "we lost them because of human error and poor procedures" in big letters. So the official story ends up fuzzy enough that later writers can pour anything they want into the gaps: aliens, Atlantis, magnetic fields, whatever sells this decade.
What gets lost is that the boring explanation is actually more damning. It's not a spooky ocean triangle, it's that in 1945 you could take off from Florida in a military aircraft and, through a few compounding mistakes and system failures, simply never come back, with no way to reconstruct what really happened. The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.
>The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.
I think the myth is comforting simply because it was fun to believe and a lot more interesting than the banal truth. I don't think many actually believed it, other than children who mostly grow out of it by the time they learn that Santa is not real. Folklore, ghost stories, urban legends, etc, are fun and a part of who/what we (humans) are.
Back when I was a kid and paid any attention to the Bermuda Triangle myth (do kids still pay attention to it? I have no idea), we didn't have any idea about the details of Flight 19. It just got mushed into a vague "planes drop out of the sky". Because, I think, we didn't actually care about explaining anything. It was just fun to believe in spooky things, as you say.
It is documented[0] that at its peak around 35 000 people were taking horse de-wormer against a virus, not sure if that counts as many or not but there were for sure pretty serious believers.
[0] doi: 10.1007/s11606-021-06948-6
Not sure what exactly is "comforting" about people going missing and presumably dying at sea.
I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.
Compass anomalies around there do seem well attested. Pretty plausible explanation for why things have gone haywire there. Not the only place.
I believe it is very hard to orientate yourself by landmarks around there too.
[deleted]
There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal human navigators with maps and sextants!
I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.
Your comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed across the U.S. for pilots.
Reminds me that there were a number of planes that landed accidentally on the runway of an Air Force base close to Heathrow, apparently because it shared some similar landmarks, some kind of gas tanks the pilots were using as waypoints:
Unfortunately, they de-commissioned the airway beacon system as an official navaid and stopped maintenance for the ground markers during the pandemic. Most are still there, but unlighted and unmaintained. A limited few are being operated by a historical society.
IIRC some passenger aircraft had a sweet periscopic sextant installed, and even the 747 still had a sextant port - not that it stopped KAL-007 crossing the Kamchatka peninsula...
There are better explanations than the vanilla call card of "conspiracy theory". One of them is that it is easy to get disorientated around there due a combination of many similar small islands in some areas and remote open ocean in another section, so it would be difficult to navigate by sight.
There are also widespread reports of magnetic anomalies which would mess with compasses, and it is within the hurricane zone providing another possible cause.
This story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated by this scene:
The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for mystery over mundane failure.
Flight 19 is a perfect case study. You have: inexperienced trainees, a leader with possibly shaky navigation skills, bad weather, limited radio and radar, and institutional reluctance to write "we lost them because of human error and poor procedures" in big letters. So the official story ends up fuzzy enough that later writers can pour anything they want into the gaps: aliens, Atlantis, magnetic fields, whatever sells this decade.
What gets lost is that the boring explanation is actually more damning. It's not a spooky ocean triangle, it's that in 1945 you could take off from Florida in a military aircraft and, through a few compounding mistakes and system failures, simply never come back, with no way to reconstruct what really happened. The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.
>The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.
I think the myth is comforting simply because it was fun to believe and a lot more interesting than the banal truth. I don't think many actually believed it, other than children who mostly grow out of it by the time they learn that Santa is not real. Folklore, ghost stories, urban legends, etc, are fun and a part of who/what we (humans) are.
Back when I was a kid and paid any attention to the Bermuda Triangle myth (do kids still pay attention to it? I have no idea), we didn't have any idea about the details of Flight 19. It just got mushed into a vague "planes drop out of the sky". Because, I think, we didn't actually care about explaining anything. It was just fun to believe in spooky things, as you say.
It is documented[0] that at its peak around 35 000 people were taking horse de-wormer against a virus, not sure if that counts as many or not but there were for sure pretty serious believers.
[0] doi: 10.1007/s11606-021-06948-6
Not sure what exactly is "comforting" about people going missing and presumably dying at sea.
I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.
Compass anomalies around there do seem well attested. Pretty plausible explanation for why things have gone haywire there. Not the only place.
I believe it is very hard to orientate yourself by landmarks around there too.
There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal human navigators with maps and sextants!
I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.
Your comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed across the U.S. for pilots.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-n...
According to that, Montana still uses them.
Reminds me that there were a number of planes that landed accidentally on the runway of an Air Force base close to Heathrow, apparently because it shared some similar landmarks, some kind of gas tanks the pilots were using as waypoints:
https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/
Unfortunately, they de-commissioned the airway beacon system as an official navaid and stopped maintenance for the ground markers during the pandemic. Most are still there, but unlighted and unmaintained. A limited few are being operated by a historical society.
https://www.mdt.mt.gov/aviation/beacons.aspx
Absolutely unbelievable there's not an overhead picture in that article.
Plenty of pictures are here instead
https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/
IIRC some passenger aircraft had a sweet periscopic sextant installed, and even the 747 still had a sextant port - not that it stopped KAL-007 crossing the Kamchatka peninsula...
There are better explanations than the vanilla call card of "conspiracy theory". One of them is that it is easy to get disorientated around there due a combination of many similar small islands in some areas and remote open ocean in another section, so it would be difficult to navigate by sight.
There are also widespread reports of magnetic anomalies which would mess with compasses, and it is within the hurricane zone providing another possible cause.
This story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated by this scene:
https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7