Strangest fact
In 1945 five Navy bombers vanished off Florida, and a rescue plane sent to find them with 13 men aboard vanished the same evening.
Why it is odd: One disaster turned into two in a few hours, which helped build the legend, though both have ordinary explanations.
The Bermuda Triangle is an area of the western Atlantic Ocean roughly between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. NOAA notes that no official maps mark its edges and that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names does not recognize it as an official name. The writer Vincent Gaddis coined the name in a 1964 magazine article, and Charles Berlitz made it world famous with a 1974 bestselling book.
The best-known case is Flight 19. On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers carrying 14 men took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a training flight. The leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, became convinced they were over the Florida Keys when they were not, and the planes flew in the wrong direction until they ran out of fuel and went down at sea. A PBM Mariner flying boat with 13 men sent to search for them also vanished; a passing merchant ship reported seeing a fireball and an oil slick. The Navy board listed the cause of the first loss as unknown.
An older case is the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot Navy cargo ship that disappeared in March 1918 somewhere between Barbados and Chesapeake Bay with more than 300 people aboard. It sent no distress call, and no wreck was found. President Woodrow Wilson is reported to have said that only God and the sea knew what happened to it.
Government agencies do not treat the area as special. NOAA, the U.S. ocean and weather agency, says the Navy and Coast Guard contend that there are no supernatural explanations for disasters at sea. The Coast Guard has said that in reviewing losses there it found nothing to show they were caused by anything other than physical causes. History.com reports that the insurance market Lloyd's of London does not treat the area as especially hazardous.
NOAA points to ordinary causes. Most Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes pass through the area, and before modern forecasting they sank many ships. The Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current, can cause rapid and sometimes violent changes in the weather. Many islands create shallow water that is dangerous for ships. And in parts of the area a magnetic compass can point toward true north instead of magnetic north, which could confuse a navigator who did not adjust for it.