Logic dictates that if Kansas can have a city called Manhattan and Eurasia get its own Georgia, there’s no reason why the Great Lakes can’t cop a little of Bermuda’s thunder and enjoy their own mysterious, supernatural Triangle. Sometimes referred to as the Michigan Triangle, this ookity, spookity polygon is attributed solely to Lake Michigan, but the events it aims to explain – freak storms, odd disappearances and unexplainable tragedies – are similar to the misdeeds attributed to Lake Erie’s Storm Hag. Unlike the Storm Hag, the triangle (its corners are situated at Ludington, Manitowoc and Benton Harbor) is even blamed for attracting UFOs, as well as for an historic sea monster sighting reported by a Catholic priest. To give you an idea of the multifarious weirdness ascribed to the invisible danger zone, here are two of its best-known tales:

In April of 1937, the O. M. Mcfarland, its holds packed to capacity with coal, was on its way back to Michigan from Erie, Pennsylvania. A few hours out of Port Washington, the exhausted captain put his first mate on alarm clock duty and then retired to his cabin. Upon nearing the harbor, Officer Snooze Button went to rouse his sleeping commander, only to find the captain’s quarters empty… and locked from the inside. “It’s as if [he] evaporated straight through the walls,” explains Ben Kingsley in the unrelated “Shutter Island” trailer.

Then! June! 1950! Northwest Airlines flight 2501 left New York and flew west toward Minneapolis. As the pilot changed the plane’s course in order to avoid a storm outside Chi-Town, giving his last radio update from 20,000 above Battle Creek, Michigan, the flight’s 55 passengers munched peanuts and whispered presciently about the recent birth of Stevie Wonder. Later, rescue crews searching Lake Michigan salvaged fragments of the travelers and the interior fixtures, but the body of the aircraft was never recovered. The crash remains unexplained. (My film adaptation of the disaster ends with a long shot of floating debris that slowly zooms in on a drifting five dollar bill. As the shot gets closer, we see that the bill was minted in 1997 and has a picture of Hitler on it. The movie is called “Cold Hypotenuse.”)

Many Triangle enthusiasts believe that Lake Michigan is host to a dimensional vortex that can stretch and compress time, and perhaps even allow passage through to another dimension. UFO fanatics have even gone as far as to say that areas like the Great Lakes and Bermuda Triangles are commuter portals created by the same race of intergalactic proctologists whose seemingly bottomless research grant has allowed them to abduct us for centuries. Meanwhile, disbelievers are all, “Seriously? It’s a huge lake with correspondingly giant weather, massive cold and treacherous geological formations… saying that the largest of the lakes is afflicted by sinister geometry makes as much sense as saying that the smallest of the lakes is haunted by some mythic weather elemental!” To which the enthusiasts reply, “Uh, yeah… we know… the Storm Hag. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you!”