The Bermuda Triangle: A Map of Missing Things
1945 · event
On the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five United States Navy torpedo bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale in Florida on a routine training flight known as Flight 19. Their compasses appeared to disagree, the coast did not appear where it should have been, and radio contact faded as the weather worsened. None of the aircraft returned. A large flying boat sent to search for them was also lost. The episode became the foundation stone of the most famous maritime legend of the twentieth century.
The Bermuda Triangle is usually drawn between Miami, the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico. The name was coined by the writer Vincent Gaddis in 1964 and became a worldwide phenomenon through popular books of the 1970s, which gathered ships and aircraft lost over many decades and presented them as a single pattern. Among the earlier cases often listed is the disappearance of the naval collier USS Cyclops in 1918, still one of the largest losses of life in United States naval history outside combat.
Careful research has since taken most of the mystery apart. The writer Lawrence Kusche traced the original records for case after case and found storms, mechanical failure, navigational error and simple distance from land, along with a number of incidents that had not happened inside the triangle at all. Insurers have never charged more for the crossing, and modern statistics do not show unusual danger for a stretch of ocean that is among the busiest in the world, crossed by the Gulf Stream and prone to sudden squalls.
The triangle survives because it holds two truths at once. The sea does swallow ships and aircraft, and grief needs a shape when nothing is ever found. For families the questions never fully close, and that is the part of the legend that deserves respect long after the maps and the theories have been put away.