Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Make sure you come back to read all about the Bermuda Triangle Wednesday and Friday.

If certain versions of events are to be believed, Flight 19 – and the 14 skilled airmen who were desperately trying to navigate 5 TBM Avengers back to the safety and dry land of the Floridian coast – disappeared with their compasses inexplicably spinning and the crewmen babbling incoherently across a static-drenched radio connection. We know the planes took off from Fort Lauderdale’s Naval base on December 5, 1945, with instructions to perform a standard training exercise dubbed “Navigation problem No. 1.” We also know that navigation soon became the mission’s no. 1 problem. To quote flight leader Charles Taylor, “I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” We also know that Flight 19 pulled an impressive aerial abracadabra – five planes and 14 people, poof, gone, forever.

19 years later, “Argosy” magazine, a classic American pulp publication specializing in adventure stories, published a feature article written by Vincent H. Gaddis. The piece was entitled “The
Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and introduced America to a new and dangerous menace whose insidious machinations were as wily and mysterious as its three-sided geometry was certain. While past articles in various other publications had laundry listed notable boat and plane disappearances in the southern Atlantic, including a 1962 piece in America Legion magazine
– “The Lost Patrol” – that directly implicated supernatural forces in the vanishing of Flight 19, no one had previously assigned such a snappy, sensational title to the area, much less such a handily imagined shape.

Gaddis’ version of the triangle’s wily super powers read like something out of a Dharma Initiative file folder: “[The] aberration might be called ‘a hole in the sky’… It is obvious that it occurs only occasionally in the well-traveled triangle area, without warning, but frequently enough to be alarming.” The article goes on to talk about the possibility of severe, but highly localized, magnetic storms and gravitational anomalies. Gaddis never addresses the possibility
of designing a simple button that could be pressed to control these phenomena, but does make several cryptic Slusho! references.

Find out why the factual basis for the Bermuda Triangle is shoddy even by urban legend standards AFTER THE JUMP…

If you’re trying to picture the hypothetical borders of America’s most infamous polygon outside of the Pentagon and Times Square, don’t bother. The imaginary limits have been altered and expanded so many times by so many different authors desperate to scapegoat the death shape in explaining this or that oceanic disaster, it’s a wonder that the thing hasn’t metastasized into an octagon and sprawled its magnet-crazed ass out over half the continent. For what it’s worth, Gaddis described the triangle thusly: “Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda [I assume he means, like, on a map], another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas.” Boom. Bermuda Triangle.

Let’s be clear on one thing though: This is complete codswallop. And not in that urban legendy way where the facts aren’t explicitly true, but the story provides a narrative window into the culture clockwork of American social paranoia and phobias. It’s really just a heap of wanton data mangling and a butter-fingered handling of research reporting. Period. Proportionately speaking, the area doesn’t actually boast any more disappearances or accidents than any other like-sized chunk of aquatic real estate. Furthermore, many of the ships that supposedly “disappeared” in the triangle merely got lost and returned to port several days later than scheduled. FurtherGurthermore, the area is known for its abundance of tropical storms, and the invisible tugging mischief of the Gulf Stream, which can easily make trouble for carelessly piloted small water craft. Look, sundry debunkers have flapped their jaws numb on this topic, so I’m not gonna draw it out.

One last thing though – remember when flight leader Charles Taylor reported that his cadre of government bombers was lost, but chugging along, above the Florida Keys? Well, Taylor and his crew were actually wandering the skies above the Bahamas, which Taylor mistook for the Keys. Meaning Taylor’s report that all of the compasses had failed was most likely the result of the pilot’s faulty navigational assumptions rather than the compass’ functionality. The subsequent investigation, accordingly, placed full responsibility on Taylor, who, it turns out, had a prior record of plane ditching and ocean-rescue needing.

But, hey, let’s not let any of that truthy garbage spoil our fun. After all, The Bermuda Triangle is a cool idea… it’s just, you know, a colossally stupid theory. Five decades of triangle contemplation have led to some wild hypotheses and wonderful collisions between the deadly
new shape and existing folktales and legends.

Those of you who have been impatiently waiting for an excuse to exhume the playful, early-aughts slang exclamation “booyah!” – this would be it.

Wednesday: The Triangle and UFOs