Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle was popularised in a book by Charles Berlitz, 'The Bermuda Triangle. The book consisted of a series of recountings of mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft from a roughly triangular area defined by the vertices at Bermuda, Porto Rico, and Florida; the stories were collected from local newpaper reports. The book was a best-seller, and many theories tried to explain what caused the disappearances. The list includes natural storms, transportation by extraterristrial technology, a temporal hole, the lost Atlantis empire from the bottom of the ocean etc.

A librarian named Larry Kusche was intrigued by the numbers of students coming to him looking for information about the Bermuda triangle, and he started following up the original reports. His findings were eventually published as The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved. In the course of researching the book, he found and interviewed a man who had supposedly vanished without trace; his yacht had been caught in a major tropical storm and he turned up safe and sound a day or two later, with no reprrter from the local press to notice that he wasn't missing any longer. The Berlitz book included the round-the-world yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst, in spite of the fact that Crowhurst had been fabricating his voyage, and his diary strongly suggested suicide. A boat with three fisherman, supposedly lost on a still, calm night, had been lost in the strongest tropical storm of the year. The largest incident quoted by Berlitz, the loss of a Navy training flight was completely at odds with the inquiry into what had happened: the planes were tracked by radar, but the teletype link to the aircraft control room was down. With no navigational equipment on the trainer planes, and the ground radar out of contact, the pilots thought they were west of Florida: in fact, they were east of florida, so flying east to try to find land resulted in them ditching, out of fuel, just before dark, somewhere in the Atlantic. One ore carrier ship, lost without trace three days out of port, was actaully lost three days from a port of the same name in the Pacific Ocean

Kusche came to several conclusions:

With this area being one of the busiest shipping areas in the world, the proportion of losses was no greater than anywhere else.

In an area with frequent tropical storms, the total disappearance of some ships was not unlikely or mysterious, and the number of such disappearances was exaggerated by sloppy research, when a missing boat would be reported in the press, but not its eventual return to port.

In actual disappearances, the circumstances were frequently misreported in the Bermuda Triangle books: the number of ships disappearing in supposedly still, calm weather did not jibe with press weather reports published at the time.