Is the Bermuda Triangle Actually Dangerous?

Time warps, reverse gravity, alien abduction — there are plenty of theories about why so many ships and aircraft have vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. But none have been proven (and are almost certainly not what’s going on).

Nonetheless, people have been observing mysterious phenomena in this vast tract of ocean (somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 million square miles) for hundreds of years. Despite centuries of odd occurrences taking place in the region, the myth only became widely popular in the 20th century, thanks in part to Charles Berlitz’s bestselling 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle. 

What we do know is that roughly 70 vessels, including planes and ships, have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. Upon closer inspection, though, that’s not quite as bizarre as it may seem.

Lost at Sea

“It looks like we are entering white water… We’re completely lost.” These were the last words radioed from Flight 19 in 1945. The squadron of five U.S. Navy bombers had taken off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a training mission, before entering the Bermuda Triangle. They vanished without a trace. 

Soon after, two additional bombers were dispatched to search for the missing squadron, only for one of those planes to disappear, too. No wreckage from any of the six bombers was ever recovered. 

That wasn’t the only time the U.S. military lost troops to the Bermuda Triangle. In 1918, a Navy cargo ship named the U.S.S. Cyclops was en route to Baltimore from Barbados when it disappeared. The ship failed to issue an S.O.S., and no wreckage was recovered. The mystery became a major headline and vexed President Woodrow Wilson himself. In fact, dozens of ships and planes have been lost at sea, including plenty of civilian craft as well, with only a handful of wrecks ever eventually discovered. 

Besides the fact that these planes and ships were lost without a definitive cause, the only thing connecting them is where they were lost. The Bermuda Triangle isn’t any specific geographical feature. It’s just the triangular space formed in the Atlantic Ocean when you connect three seemingly random points: South Florida, Puerto Rico, and, of course, Bermuda.

These three sides are mostly arbitrary, with the name “Bermuda Triangle” first coming into use in 1964 in a pulp magazine article describing its plethora of mysterious disappearances. However, it’s fitting that the area is named after Bermuda and not the other two corners, because it’s the strange geography of the island that may point to the bad luck some travelers have encountered in the Triangle.

The Isle of Devils

Technically, Bermuda is an archipelago — not just one island, but 181 of them, governed as a dependent territory of the United Kingdom. These are some of the most geographically isolated islands on Earth — the closest landmass is North Carolina, some 650 miles away.

There’s no fresh water source on the island, either, which explains why Spanish explorer Juan de Bermúdez found no inhabitants when he landed there in 1505. He deemed Bermuda uninhabitable — and also treacherous, thanks to the rocky shoals surrounding the island that made navigating by ship a nightmare. Because of this, at the height of Europe’s Age of Exploration, he didn’t even bother claiming it for Spain. 

Perhaps Bermúdez was right. In the years that followed his discovery, Bermuda’s rocky coast sank many New World-bound vessels. Shipwrecked survivors who made it to shore reported horrifying shrieks coming from the forests, earning Bermuda a nickname: the Isle of Devils. 

Word spread that the mysterious island was cursed and explorers avoided it for a century, until a hurricane forced a ship bound for Jamestown to seek shelter there. The British sailors soon realized that the ghoulish shrieks coming from the forests were simply the calls of seabirds and wild pigs — not evil spirits.

Sargassum and Statistics

The other thing going against Bermuda is that it’s situated in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. It’s the only sea on Earth with no land boundaries — instead it’s bordered on all sides by different currents. This traps debris (including Sargassum seaweed), which stagnates in the sea — especially because the area isn’t particularly windy, either. The debris means it’s harder for ships to safely navigate, with the lack of wind making it especially difficult for ships powered only by sail.

These factors added to sailors’ superstitious fear of Bermuda, as well as the area around it. Plus, Bermuda sits along the Gulf Stream. This provides it with its pleasant, subtropical climate, but also puts it — and the entire Triangle — directly in the crosshairs of hurricanes. Could bad weather be behind the Bermuda Triangle’s many victims? It depends on how you define “many.” 

The Bermuda Triangle is situated in the middle of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, with heavy sea and air traffic every day. While dozens of ships and planes have met untimely ends in the region, it’s not significant compared to the countless craft that traversed it without a scratch. 

The fact that many of these wrecks were never found isn’t even that mysterious. The ocean is a very big, very deep place, and locating a boat or downed plane is akin to finding a small needle in a giant haystack. There are an estimated 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks across the globe, most of which occurred outside the Triangle. After analyzing global shipping traffic, the World Wildlife Fund concluded that the Bermuda Triangle is not actually dangerous — at least, not statistically.

It didn’t even make the top 10 list of the world’s most dangerous seaways. But don’t tell Bermúdez…