The CBS news program “60 Minutes” recently did a report on the sinking of El Faro. Overall, they did a reasonably good job for a mainstream media report on shipping. There were a few minor glitches but overall, not a bad job. There was, however, one glaring problem. The report was titled, “Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.”  Really? The Bermuda Triangle? Why dredge up that tired old scam?  Why hasn’t the Bermuda Triangle nonsense just gone way?

For anyone fortunate enough to have escaped the foolishness, the Bermuda Triangle is an area of the Atlantic in the triangle formed by Miami; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the island of Bermuda, where it is claimed that ships and planes regularly disappear under highly mysterious circumstances. The proponents of this tale claim that the disappearances have to do variously with magnetic anomalies, the lost city Atlantis, space aliens or all  perhaps all of these.  The stories have been the subject of best-selling books, television programs, and countless articles.

The problem is that none of the claims are true. The US Coast Guard, the US Navy and the marine insurance market, Lloyd’s of London, all say the same thing — the number of ship and plane casualties is moderately low given the incredibly large number of ships, boats, and planes which transit the area.  The whole concept of the Bermuda Triangle has been repeatedly debunked, which sadly, has not seemed to diminished its popularity.

The term Bermuda Triangle was the creation of Vincent Gaddis writing in men’s pulp magazine, Argosy, in 1964. The myth really took hold a decade later with the publication of Charles Berlitz’s best seller, The Bermuda Triangle. In the book, Berlitz claims that the Bermuda Triangle was actually a by-product of the destruction of Atlantis.

The most commonly cited “mysterious disappearance” associated with the Bermuda Triangle is Flight 19, a group of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers which disappeared on December 5, 1945, while on a training flight from Fort Lauderdale over the Atlantic.  Given that close to 60 million passengers fly in and out of the primary airports in Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda every year, there are a lot of planes flying through the “Triangle” without disappearing. If the best story to be told is about five missing planes from 70 years ago, the “Bermuda Triangle” storytellers are very short on material. For example, just last year, the internet was awash with claims that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370 had been found in the Bermuda Triangle, notwithstanding that the missing plane disappeared over the Indian Ocean.

The same is true of the stories of ships disappearing in the Bermuda. Many of the ships said to disappear did so well outside of the “Triangle” and most of the remaining “mysterious disappearances” generally have perfectly conventional explanations. In the case of the El Faro tragedy, while many questions remain unanswered, it is safe to say that space aliens and Atlantis were not involved. Sadly, the sinking of a ship in the path of a Cat 4 hurricane is not a mystery.

So, why did CBS choose to mess up an otherwise well-done report on a tragedy with the invocation of the mythical  and magical Bermuda Triangle?  I only wish I knew.  It is time that the idiotic myth of the Bermuda Triangle be allowed to simply go away.