History Of

Bermuda Triangle

Triangle area:


The first written boundaries date from a 1964 issue of pulp magazine Argosy where the triangle's three vertices are in Miami, Florida peninsula; in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and in the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda.But subsequent writers didn't follow this definition.Every writer gives different boundaries and vertices to the triangle, with the total area varying from 500,000 to 1.5 million square miles.Consequently, the determination of which accidents have occurred inside the triangle depends on which writer reports them.The United States Board on Geographic Names does not recognize this name, and it's not delimited in any map drawn by US government agencies.

The area is one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north.

Some people trace the Bermuda Triangle history back to the time of Columbus. Estimates range from about 200 to about 1,000 incidents of ships and airplanes disappearing in the past 500 years.  

Howard, an expert on Bermuda Triangle, claims that more than 50 ships and 20 planes have gone down in the Bermuda Triangle over the last century itself. 

It was in 1952, when the author George Sand first mentioned about the Bermuda triangle in a magazine called Fate. 

In this magazine, he mostly described the Flight-19 incident where the U.S navy airplanes went missing in 1945. He also mentioned about the ship Sandra that disappeared in 1950. 

In the whole of 1950s, the stories of Bermuda triangle basically had been spreading by the word of mouth. every time there was a new incidence, people used to refer to the area by Bermuda triangle. In early 1960's though, it acquired the name The Deadly Triangle. 

In 1962, the author Dale Titler in his book The Wings of Mystery started introducing concepts like the electromagnetic phenomenon and such. This was the book which actually started to trigger all the discussions and hypothesis about Bermuda triangle. 

Again in 1962, Allan W. Eckert wrote about some interesting dialogue from Flight-19 in one of the American magazines. This sensational article The Mystery of the Lost Patrol became extremely popular. He mentioned reports from Flight-19 stating the ocean looks strange, all the compasses are going haywire, and that they could not make out any directions and so on. 

The name "Bermuda Triangle" is generally attributed to the writer Vincent H. Gaddis who first used it in a 1964 article he wrote for Argosy magazine. Gaddis wrote a book Invisible Horizons in 1965 that further helped spreading the concept of the Bermuda Triangle. 

In 1969, John Spencer stated that the area had no real shape and tried to include the Gulf of Mexico as well as New Jersey as part of the area. It sold in limited quantities, but was later reproduced in paperback in the early 1970s and did well.  

Dozens of magazine and newspaper articles came out in the early ‘70s, each author offering a shape and theory to the area. Richard Winer proposed the name The Devil’s Triangle and extended the area nearly to the Azores near Portugal.  

But it was Charles Berlitz’s in 1974, who produced the world's all-time best seller called, The Bermuda Triangle. It sold way over 5,000,000 copies in hardback and became a phenomenon by itself. However, he too cautioned that there was no real shape of Bermuda Triangle. 

Out of all the books that were published so far on Bermua Triangle, only one remains in reprint today: Larry Kusche’s book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved.

Natural explanations :

Compass variations:


Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area,such anomalies have not been found. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are only exactly the same for a small number of places – for example, as of 2000 in the United States only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico.But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.


Gulf Stream:

The Gulf Stream is a deep ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and then flows through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic. In essence, it is a river within an ocean, and, like a river, it can and does carry floating objects. It has a surface velocity of up to about 2.5 metres per second (5.6 mi/h).[27] A small plane making a water landing or a boat having engine trouble can be carried away from its reported position by the current.

Human error:

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error.[28] Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, the Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958.

Violent weather:

Hurricanes are powerful storms, which form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives lost and caused billions of dollars in damage. The sinking of Francisco de Bobadilla's Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

A powerful downdraft of cold air was suspected to be a cause in the sinking of the Pride of Baltimore on May 14, 1986. The crew of the sunken vessel noted the wind suddenly shifted and increased velocity from 20 mph to 60–90 mph. A National Hurricane Center satellite specialist, James Lushine, stated "during very unstable weather conditions the downburst of cold air from aloft can hit the surface like a bomb, exploding outward like a giant squall line of wind and water."A similar event occurred to the Concordia in 2010 off the coast of Brazil