You won't find it on any official map and you won't know when you cross the line, but according to some people, the Bermuda Triangle is a very real place where dozen of ships, planes and people have disappeared with no good explanation. Since a magazine first coined the phrase "Bermuda Triangle" in 1964, the mystery has continued to attract attention. When you dig deeper into most cases, though, they're much less mysterious. Either they were never in the area to begin with, they were actually found, or there's a reasonable explanation for their disappearance.
The boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle vary with the author; some stating its shape is akin to a trapezoid covering the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas, and the entire Caribbean island area east to the Azores; others add to it the Gulf of Mexico. The more familiar, triangular boundary in most written works has as its points somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, with most of the accidents concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.
A substantial body of documentation exists showing numerous incidents to have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have gone on record as stating that the number and nature of disappearances is similar to any other area of Ocean, however proponents of paranormal phenomena claim that many incidents remained unexplained despite considerable investigation
To my knowledge the first documentation that anything was a miss in the area came from Christopher Columbus, who reported compass malfunctions and a bolt of fire that fell into the sea. He also reports of a light on the horizon. The rest is history.... sort of. Since that time there have been hundreds of disappearances in the area. A full time job for the Coast Guard no doubt. In the past, extensive, but futile Coast Guard searches prompted by search and rescue cases such as the disappearances of an entire squadron of TBM Avengers (Flight 19) shortly after take off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., or the traceless sinking of USS CYCLOPS and MARINE SULPHUR QUEEN have lent credence to the popular belief in the mystery and the supernatural qualities of the "Bermuda Triangle."
Also, many newspapers carried a December 22, 1967 National Geographic Society news release which was derived largely from Vincent Gaddis' Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea (Chilton Books, Philadelphia, 1965. OCLC# 681276) Chapter 13, "The Triangle of Death", in Mr. Gaddis' book, presents the most comprehensive account of the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Gaddis describes nine of the more intriguing mysteries and provides copious notes and references. Much of the chapter is reprinted from an article by Mr. Gaddis, "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle", in the February 1964 Argosy. The article elicited a large and enthusiastic response from the magazine's readers. Perhaps the most interesting letter, which appeared in the May 1964 of Argosy's "Back Talk" section, recounts a mysterious and frightening incident in an aircraft flying over the area in 1944.
