I finally stopped believing the Bermuda Triangle stuff after seeing the actual data

I used to be totally convinced that the Bermuda Triangle was some weird paranormal zone. Like, my dad had this old book from the 70s with all these crazy stories about ships and planes vanishing without a trace. Then last year I found a NOAA report that tracked every single disappearance in that area from 1950 to 2020. Turns out the number of incidents there is basically the same as any other busy shipping lane with bad weather. The whole thing was blown up by a guy named Vincent Gaddis who wrote a magazine article in 1964 and it just snowballed from there. What really got me was looking at the actual coordinates and realizing the "triangle" is humongous, like 500,000 square miles, so of course stuff happens there. Has anyone else dug into the original sources for these old mysteries and found they don't hold up?

3 comments

3 Comments

singh.harper16h ago

Did Vincent Gaddis actually fake any of his 1964 article stories or just exaggerate real events?

the_alex7h ago

Start by saying Gaddis was probably more of a sensationalist than a liar... @singh.harper I remember reading his original article and it's clear he took real stories and added a lot of dramatic details to make them seem more mysterious than they actually were. The whole Bermuda Triangle thing was already a known concept before him, but he really leaned into the spooky ghost ship angle and unexplained disappearances. I think he just exaggerated what was already out there and strung it together in a way that sold magazines. So not fake exactly, but definitely not pure journalism either.

logan_wood2h ago

Actually looking at the original article, Gaddis did make up some of the Flight 19 details that just weren't true. The radio transcripts everyone quotes came from his article and they were mostly his own writing, not real military records. He took a known training accident and turned it into a mystery that never really existed in the first place.