It was 1945, and the war was over. In May, Allied victory in Europe had been achieved, and in September, a month after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan finally surrendered. Within days of this demonstration of power, existing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union escalated with the two countries each occupying half of Korea, dividing it as their forces had also divided Germany. It was clear that world peace had not exactly been achieved, as the stage was clearly set for the ensuing Cold War. The US Navy, which grew a great deal in strength and importance during operations in the Pacific Theater, would have to remain vigilant and ready for further operations. Two months after the Japanese surrender, on the fifth of December, 1945, a squadron of five Avengers, the torpedo bombers most effectively and commonly used in the war, undertook a routine training exercise intended not just to maintain readiness and capability of their pilots with regard to bombing and train new pilots, but also, somewhat ironically, to hone navigation skills. It was called a “navigation problem,” basically a scenario intended to challenge the pilots, as they flew out of Fort Lauderdale naval air base, navigated to a certain shallow coral reef near the Bahamas called the Chicken Rocks, practiced a low-altitude bombing run, and returned to Florida. It was the 19th of these training exercises, so it was called Flight 19. The name would end up going down in history for all the wrong reasons, as these five Avengers would never be seen again. It’s said that the flight leader had had a premonition of danger before the flight, and that during the flight, they reported the sea looking strange and their instruments failing, radioing in their concerns about being off course and unable to navigate. After losing contact with the squadron, a boat plane was dispatched to find the airmen, who would have made an emergency sea landing and awaited rescue when they ran out of fuel, but they lost contact with the rescue plane as well, and none of the 14 men in the squadron, nor any of the 13 crewmen of the rescue flight were ever found, nor was wreckage of the aircraft ever located. The loss of Flight 19 was attributed to navigational error, in combination with instrument failure, and its rescue flight was believed to have gone down in a catastrophic midair explosion, but within 5 years, it had already begun to strike some as a mystery. A couple of more years, and some publications began to claim there was a pattern of disasters in the area, which they said claimed planes and ships at a higher rate than elsewhere. Within twenty years of the disappearance, the legend had been fleshed out, and the area of sea between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda had been dubbed The Bermuda Triangle, a patch of ocean stretching from the Caribbean to the Sargasso Sea that its researchers asserted was fraught with mysterious danger, the deadliest waters in the world. It wasn’t long before these ships and aircraft lost at sea were said to have fallen victim to fantastical threats. They had entered time portals, it has been said, or sailed right through rifts into an alternative universe. They were abducted by alien spacecraft, or they had been targeted by the advanced technology of the sunken civilization of Atlantis.

Welcome to the first episode back from my year-end hiatus, as we kick off what I hope will be another great season of the podcast and blog. This topic, the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, will take us on a tour through many of the topics I have covered in the past. In fact, besides the lost first episode, which I’ve taken down because I no longer want the first episode some listen to be a political diatribe (there will be plenty more of that for them later), the very first episode in my main feed is on the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and in fact, strangely, though the Roanoke colonists were not at sea, their disappearance has sometimes been suggested to be connected to the supposed strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Since I am working right now on revising and rerecording that first episode for rerelease (which I hope will help retain new listeners who might otherwise be turned off by the audio mix), this topic seemed the perfect one to explore as accompaniment as we revisit that first episode. But in fact, I am finding that the topic connects further, to, for example, my episode on the loss of Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia at sea, and to my episode on the mystery of the derelict schooner the Carroll A. Deering, both of which happened on the Outer Banks, near the site of the Lost Colony. Unlike the Lost Colony, though, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle did not develop right away. As I indicated, it only developed years after the loss of Flight 19 in 1945, embellished by writers who had latched onto the notion that something mysterious was happening in the area. These writers came from the UFO world. One of the earliest promoters of the legend was the magazine Fate, published by Ray Palmer, the science-fiction enthusiast who almost single-handedly popularized the idea of flying saucers of extra-terrestrial origin. And in the 1970s, perhaps the most influential book promulgating this legend, which compiled numerous other incidents long predating Flight 19, was written by linguist Charles Berlitz, who before that had written pseudohistorical books on Atlantis and afterward, as listeners of the podcast may remember, popularized the Philadelphia Experiment hoax and the Roswell Incident myth in his books of the same names, co-authored with known CIA disinformation agent Bill Moore—yet another connection to previous topics covered on the podcast. What we find, then, is that a genuinely surprising incident—the 1945 loss of a whole squadron of bombers as well as the rescue plane sent after them—was afterward embellished and used as a jumping-off point by people known for fabricating other lasting urban legends and modern myths.

A squadron of TBM Avengers like those that disappeared on Flight 19.

To start, let’s look at the oldest supposedly mysterious incidents said to have happened in the Bermuda Triangle, most of which have been identified by people like Berlitz and his predecessors who had it in their mind that something anomalous in those seas caused the disappearance of Flight 19. They therefore pored over all the records they could find for that stretch of water, believing that any incident in which a craft or vessel or person was lost in that place must have been evidence of the anomaly’s existence. It is a kind of proof by location that does not hold up under scrutiny and logic, since it is never actual evidence of something paranormal or supernatural, and to prove it anomalous would require comparing the number of similar incidents in every other patch of sea all over the world. Otherwise, it is simply an exercise in confirmation bias. Take, for example, one of the earliest incidents ever claimed to be a mysterious Bermuda Triangle disappearance: the loss at sea of American Founding Father Thomas Lynch, Jr. Lynch had signed the Declaration of Independence, stepping in to replace his ailing father, a South Carolina representative in the Continental Congress. Interestingly, in a very early presaging of the Civil War, within a month of signing the Declaration, Lynch was threatening that South Carolina would secede from any Confederation if their ownership of slaves was made a topic of debate. Yet more evidence to refute the Lost Cause Myth. Thomas Lynch, Jr., then became quite ill himself, and he and his father returned to South Carolina. His father died of a stroke on the way, and as his own illness dragged on, Lynch, Jr., retired at just 27. It seems likely that he suffered from tuberculosis, as his condition only worsened over the next two years, and he ended up planning a voyage to the South of France with his wife, hoping the air there would do him good. Their ship, a brigantine called Polly, set sail on the first leg of their voyage, headed for the Dutch Antilles island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean, and was promptly lost at sea. To Bermuda Triangle researchers, it’s a vanished ship known to have been sailing through or at least near their Triangle, so it’s perfect. But all this is evidence of is that those were dangerous waters, for any number of reasons. The simple fact that there may have been a lot of lost voyages in those waters does not prove anything unexplainable occurs there. Bermuda Triangle researchers will sometimes focus more on lost ships or aircraft whose wreckage was never found, suggesting that since there was no evidence of a shipwreck, this is somehow evidence of paranormal vanishment. But this logic should be reversed. There may be no evidence of a shipwreck, but there is also no evidence of aliens or portals or lost technological civilizations, and which is more likely to be the case? Also, the fact that ships lost at sea and planes that have crashed into the sea might leave no evidence behind is not surprising. While it may be common for some to leave floating debris or oil slicks, it is also very common for every sign of such a disaster to sink or be swept away, especially in this area, as we will see. According to Popular Mechanics, less than 1% of the world’s shipwrecks have been explored. With 90-95% of the sea floor unmapped, it’s believed that there may be 60$ billion worth of recoverable artifacts and valuables strewn across the ocean. So it’s clear that lost wreckage is common, all over the world’s oceans, and the absence of wreckage cannot stand as evidence of some kind of supernatural disappearance.

The problem here is that promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend present any loss at sea that is deemed “unexplained” and therefore technically “mysterious” as bizarre or unearthly. Cue the X-Files theme music. Really though, most of the losses at sea pointed out by these researchers are only considered to have no explanation because we may not know exactly what happened but do have some likely explanations. What these fabulists do is just reject or purposely omit the rational likely explanations and focus only on the uncertainty, which is misleading. For example, Charles Berlitz in Without a Trace lists the USS Pickering, which left Delaware in August of 1800 bound for the West Indies, as the first known ship lost in the Triangle, but he makes no mention of the USS Insurgent, a frigate that left port in August as well and is believed to have been lost in a severe storm that ripped through the West Indies in September. In fact, it’s believed that both ships were sunk by the same storm. And this is the key to many of the oldest Bermuda Triangle disappearances that frequently get ticked off as proof of some unexplainable danger, as that area is commonly struck by tropical storms and hurricanes. The next two lost ships Berlitz lists, the Wasp and the Wildcat, were lost in early autumn 1814 and in October 1824. These are all squarely in the window of the Atlantic hurricane season, as tropical cyclones are known to form mostly between June 1 and November 30th every year. Yet the actual word “hurricane” only appears once in Berlitz’s Without a Trace, and it’s not to explain these lost ships, but rather to explain the sinking of Atlantis, which he suggests may literally lie at the bottom of all the strange disappearances. The topic of Atlantis is a whole other monster that I cannot address with any depth in a series on the Bermuda Triangle, but suffice it to say here that the entire tradition of a lost civilization called Atlantis originated in an allegorical story told by Plato to illustrate metaphorically his ideas about an ideal state. However, some medieval writers came to view it as historical tradition, and 19th-century pseudohistorians later endeavored to prove that it was real, no longer believing it was in the Mediterranean, as was originally suggested, but in the New World, in the Caribbean. But what’s certain is that, when Plato wrote about Atlantis, he knew nothing about the part of the world where Berlitz and others demarcate the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS *Pickering*, one of many ships whose loss is attributed to the mystery power of the Bermuda Triangle.

What’s pretty ridiculous is that Bermuda Triangle theorists even go beyond the boundaries they themselves have set in their search for juicy cases of ships lost at sea that they can tout to their readers. Some, for example, have even pointed to the lost schooner Patriot, a swift vessel sailing from South Carolina to New York, carrying the daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia. Likewise, they will group in the abandoned Carroll A. Deering, which did sail through the Bermuda Triangle on its journey back to the U.S. from Rio, but was seen with men on her decks off the coast of the U.S., having obviously made it through the Triangle intact, and was only later discovered abandoned and run aground off Cape Hatteras. In both of these cases, which you can hear about in far more detail in my episodes “The Loss of Theodosia Burr Alston” and “The Carroll A. Deering, Ghost Ship of Cape Hatteras,” there are further, far more rational and supported explanations other than that some mystery vortex swallowed the ships or their crews and passengers. For example, there is some reason to suspect that, whatever happened to the Patriot, it happened along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which is also where the Carroll Deering was found, and the waters off the coast of this chain of barrier islands, on which was located the Lost Colony of Roanoke, as it happens, are notoriously treacherous because of the shifting sands on the sea floor constantly changing the depth of the waters. Because of this, it’s called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Since the late 16th century, there have been more than 350 shipwrecks there. Tellingly, no one attributes those to supernatural causes. But even discounting the very obvious possibility that these ships just wrecked and ran aground in waters known to be treacherous, there is the further idea that they may have been the victims of piracy, which offers yet another rational and believable explanation for the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle as well. In the Patriot’s time, there were bankers, or wreckers, which lured ships toward the islands with lights and then murdered the crew and stripped the ships of valuables. And during the Carroll A. Deering’s day there was some speculation of pirate activity in the Atlantic, by bootleggers or perhaps Bolsheviks. At the same time that something was befalling the Carroll A. Deering, an oil steamer, the S.S. Hewitt also disappeared off the Carolina coast, and like the Deering, it too seems to have been spotted, and its crew seemed to behave suspiciously. Add to this the fact that another ship, the USS Cyclops, had disappeared on its way from Rio to Baltimore a couple years earlier, and it began to look like ships were being captured off the U.S. coast at the time. In the case of the Cyclops, there were further possibilities, such as that it had been captured by the Germans while the Great War was still being fought, or that its captain and crew, several of whom were of German descent, may have been German sympathizers and purposely delivered the ship to Imperial Germany. But like the Deering, the disappearance of the Hewitt and especially of the Cyclops would be attributed to the mystical powers of the Bermuda Triangle even despite all of these more obvious and credible explanations, like shipwreck, capture, and—a further explanation for more than one disappearance attributed to the Bermuda Triangle—lack of seaworthiness.

In the case of the Deering, when she was encountered before her abandonment, a man on her quarterdeck had signaled a passing ship and said they had lost their anchors in a storm, and when the ship was found, it showed signs of having been out of control, as her emergency lights were burnt out. Certainly if it were out of control, it was no longer seaworthy, though in the strictest sense of the term, seaworthiness refers to the fitness of a vessel prior to undertaking a voyage. In the case of the Cyclops, there is reason to believe that it never should have undertaken its voyage. The captain had reported before leaving Brazil that her starboard engine was not operational due to a cracked cylinder, and the ship had to make an unscheduled stop in Barbados due to being overloaded with the manganese ore she was carrying, which also may have caused the ship to list and even capsize in rough seas. In fact, more than 20 years later, two sister ships of the Cyclops, the Proteus and the Nereus, both were lost in the Triangle while shipping loads of bauxite ore within weeks of each other. Score three for the Triangle it would seem, until you learn that these sister ships, these naval freighters, all had a structural flaw. They were held together with I-beams that ran the length of the vessel, and these beams were known to become corroded due to contact with the kinds of cargo these ships were designed to carry. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that all three of these lost freighters were simply not seaworthy when they undertook their final voyages. Similarly, in 1925 the coal freighter SS Cotopaxi was lost after departing from Havana, but it appears two of her sister ships suffered similar fates. And we know the Cotopaxi sank, rather than pulling some kind of vanishing act, because her crew radioed a distress call, stating that they were taking on water and listing. Still, she was for a long time listed as a victim of the Bermuda Triangle because here wreckage wasn’t recovered. In the 1980s, though, her wreckage was found, and in 2020, they were definitively identified. Yet that won’t stop Bermuda Triangle enthusiasts from still suggesting that it was some mystery force specific to that region that caused her to sink. Likewise, the frigate HMS Atalanta, which was lost in 1880 after leaving port in Bermuda and has frequently been cited as a victim of the Triangle, has been shown to have been unseaworthy by researcher David F. Raines. His exhaustive research demonstrates that the Atalanta was unstable because of its narrow design, as it had been built for speed by a yacht designer. Her sister ship, the HMS Eurydice, sank two years earlier off the Isle of Wight, and the investigation indicated that its instability led to the ship being lost in severe weather. But the Atalanta had even more working against it than just its design. It also seems that it was declared fit to sail again despite having recently taken hull damage in a storm, and on top of that, it was overloaded with an enormous volley gun, essentially dooming the ship before it even departed. Lastly, in 1963, 18 years after the disappearance of Flight 19 and just before the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to take off, the SS Marine Sulphur Queen, a tanker carrying molten sulfur, was lost somewhere off the southern Florida coast. While the Coast Guard investigation determined that the vessel was not seaworthy owing to the fact that it had been converted from tanker to a sulfur carrier, concluding that, if not due to capsizing in rough seas, it likely sank because of an explosion or structural failure, it nevertheless is routinely cited as yet another mysterious disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle.

The USS Cyclops, one of numerous ships whose disappearance, though explainable through numerous more rational means, is frequently said to have been the victim of some supernatural forces in the Bermuda Triangle.

Beyond the plain and I think unsurprising facts that ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle most likely just sank in a storm, were captured and absconded with by pirates or perhaps even mutineers, or were simply unseaworthy, there are actually some rational and scientific explanations for vessels being lost in those seas that should really satisfy even the staunchest Bermuda Triangle enthusiast, as they indicate there really is something unusual in that region causing ships to disappear. First, there are the unusual currents of the area. The area identified as the Bermuda Triangle is where the Gulf Stream, the warm waters flow out of the Caribbean and up the coast of North America, meet the circular currents of the Sargasso Sea. At a time when the speed of ships was calculated by tossing a log tied to a knotted rope from the ship’s bow and timing the appearance of each knot, any ships that did not conduct this practice very frequently could find that the surprisingly fast Gulf Stream had carried them significantly off course. They might easily find themselves adrift in the Sargasso Sea, then, which is largely covered in masses of floating sargassum seaweed and, being located on the so-called horse latitudes, without much wind. Often ships found themselves becalmed and trapped there. Additionally, the base of the Bermuda Triangle, the tract of sea between Florida and Puerto Rico, lies above a continental shelf, and at its tip the insular shelf of Bermuda, and in these shallower ocean floors, scientists have shown that methane hydrate fields sometimes erupt, creating a bubbling frothy ocean that can actually affect the buoyancy of ships and theoretically even swallow them whole. Anyone who recently saw the blockbuster film Godzilla Minus One saw this science put into fictional practice in the characters’ efforts to sink the monster. But beyond this relatively recent and technical explanation for ship disappearances in the region, there is also the simple fact that right in the middle of the Triangle, between the continental shelf and Bermuda’s insular shelf, is extremely deep water, especially in the Puerto Rico Trench, which is some 30,000 feet deep. Its depths were only first reached by submersible in 2018 and have yet to be thoroughly explored. It would indeed be unsurprising for the wreckage of many of these lost victims of the Bermuda Triangle to be found down there eventually. These scientific explanations and common sense reasons for why ships may go missing in the Bermuda Triangle should satisfy those who want to believe, as they confirm there are some unique qualities to the area that do indeed make it more treacherous than other waters. But Triangle enthusiasts typically reject such explanations as too prosaic, preferring instead their aliens and Atlanteans. The simple fact, though, is that even with the unique risks in the area, statistically the Bermuda Triangle does not appear to be any more dangerous than other waters. This according to Lloyd’s of London, the oldest and biggest insurer of seagoing vessels in the world, who in a 1975 statement to Fate magazine revealed “that our intelligence service can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has more losses than elsewhere.”

As the legend was meticulously created in the following years by writers assembling lists of unexplained but not unexplainable disappearances, they inevitably played fast and loose with facts and ended up amplifying and perpetuating errors. For example, one of the earliest examples of a mysterious disappearance given by Berlitz in Without a Trace is the Rosalie, which he says was found derelict in 1840 with no person aboard, and only a canary. He seems to have taken this from an 1840 London Times article, which actually describes a cat and other birds being left aboard. It turns out that this Times article got it wrong. They seem to have been talking about a ship called the Rossini, which ran aground and was abandoned, but whose crew had been rescued and taken to Cuba. Similarly the creepy tale of the Ellen Austin’s late 19th century encounter with a ghost ship, a tale that has the captain twice putting his own crewmen on the derelict in order to salvage it and twice more finding it abandoned, his own crew somehow vanished, appears to have been a ghost story told and retold among mariners, such that we see among its earliest appearances numerous contradictions, including the year it occurred, what flag the ship flew, and even the discrepancy of what the Ellen Austin was called at the time, its name having been changed, much like the Facebook corporation, to Meta. It was very clearly a campfire tale that Bermuda Triangle myth-makers like Charles Berlitz included in their lists as fact. And not to be fenced in by their imagined watery triangle, they routinely suggested that even people’s disappearances on land might have been part of the same imagined phenomenon. There are the colonists of Roanoke, but also two lighthouse keepers on Great Isaac Cay, a tiny Bahamian island off the southern coast of Florida. The story of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Great Isaac is extraordinarily similar to that of the vanished lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor, which I explored in detail in my episode, “Three Men Gone.” In that piece, I found one compelling explanation of their disappearance to be a rogue wave that may have struck the island and washed the men away to drown. Such an explanation of the missing Great Isaac lighthouse keepers seems even more plausible, since Eilean Mor rises more than 200 feet above sea level, whereas Great Isaac only rises about fifty feet above the waves. But the real drivers of this legend, the stories that started it all and that remain the most compelling support for promoters of the Bermuda Triangle legend also have to do with the disappearance of those who weren’t on the seas, but rather flying above it, like the lost squadron of Flight 19, that I will be studying in far closer detail in Part Two of The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

Until next time, remember, if something remains for the moment unexplained, that does not mean it cannot be explained. Only fabulists sensationalize the unexplained as if it is unexplainable.

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle - Part One: A Watery Grave

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