
Charles Berlitz popularized the myth of the Bermuda Triangle in his 1974 book on the topic. He and others described a triangular area with vertices loosely defined by Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Florida as a place of countless mysterious disappearances.Speculation about why so many vessels and planes have vanished in the area has ranged from the mundane such as the release of methane bubbles from the ocean floor to the more bizarre such as alien abductions.One of the more famous disappearances associated with the triangle was that of theFlight 19 air squadron.
Five planes on a training exercise in 1945 were lost at sea, and still have not been found.
Berlitz and
others suggested that the flight was a routine training exercise in
near-perfect weather. According to Larry Kushe's more critical analysis
of that flight, the weather was less than perfect and the planes were
not equipped with very sophisticated navigational tools.
Officials speculated that
they likely were lost and ran out of fuel. Further, Berlitz seemed to
have embellished this story with unsubstantiated details, as he
appeared to have done with many of the other accounts offered as
evidence of the dangers of the triangle.
The Berlitz book and other
accounts are at bestpoorly researched stories of vessels lost without
a trace. The region of the ocean clearly holds its dangers, but it does
not seem to be any more perilous than other parts of the ocean.
Stories about the
disappearances in the triangle, like Amityville's haunting and Area
51's UFOs, will live on and become more elaborate. Our mental processes
effectively detect patterns and lead us to believe in what we think we
perceive. Sometimes the patterns we extract are not real.
Unfortunately, even with overwhelming contradictory evidence, the
beliefs we develop from those misperceptions are difficult to dismiss.
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