This is Sleepy History. Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To listen, add free... Get access to bonus episodes and support the ongoing production of this show. Check out our premium feed. This is The Sleepy History of the Bermuda Triangle, narrated by Arif Hansik, written by Alicia Stefan. What happened? to Flight 19, the group of five Avenger torpedo bombers that went missing over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. And what happened…
to the countless other craft that have disappeared under mysterious circumstances over the years in the exact same place. Or so the stories go. In the words of writer Vincent Gaddis, what is it about this particular slice of the world that has destroyed hundreds of ships and planes without a trace? We'll dive into these questions and more tonight as we explore the rumors, tales, and truths of this area nestled between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda.
So just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of the Bermuda Triangle. At just after 2 p.m. on the afternoon of December 5th, 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers left the U.S. Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the United States. The aircraft were part of a normal training flight, led by a lieutenant named Charles Carroll Taylor, and consisting of 13 airmen, some of whom were trainees. It became known as Flight 19.
Lieutenant Taylor was very experienced. In addition to having flown about 2,500 hours in the past, he had also fought in the Pacific. during World War II. The training mission was, therefore, in excellent hands. Furthermore, the weather was normal. with just a little bit of rain. For the first part of the mission, everything went to plan. The aircraft reached the planned destination and the crews completed their instructions. A recording later…
showed that the last airman had discharged his training duties at 3pm and that the group had turned toward home. According to an article, that later appeared in Naval History magazine. This was the point where events took a strange turn. At 4pm… A radio message from the flight was intercepted, which sounded like a conversation between Lieutenant Taylor and a pilot from one of the other four planes.
In it, a crewman appeared to be asking one of the student pilots for a compass reading. But the pilot replied that he didn't know where they were. and that they might have gotten off course. This was followed by Lieutenant Taylor, saying that both of his compasses were malfunctioning. and that he was attempting to find Fort Lauderdale. It was not long before a call was made from the planes to the air station in Fort Lauderdale, reporting…
that they were lost. As weather conditions worsened and the daylight seeped away, the operators at the naval airbase made multiple suggestions to Lieutenant Taylor, recommending ways that he could improve navigation. Oddly, These efforts appeared to be ignored, not just by Taylor, but by all the pilots. At one point, a pilot was heard exclaiming, If we could just fly west, we could get home. Head west. However, Taylor ordered the planes to go east. Apparently,
Numerous radio operators on land were able to pinpoint the flight's location, which was closer to the Bahamas than it was to Florida. However… Poor communication with the Naval Air Base meant that this information was not useful. The final message heard from the flight was at 6.20pm. And it was Lieutenant Taylor expressing the unfortunate truth that their fuel was low. This was the last that was heard of the 14 men on Flight 19. However, the tale becomes even more incredible.
By the time the Avengers would have run out of fuel, a rescue mission was already underway. Most notably, an airplane took off… from Brevard, Florida, with 13 personnel on board, hoping to offer aid. Twenty minutes after takeoff, that plane also vanished. A merchant ship later reported having seen an explosion in the night sky and then passing through an oil slick in the general area. where the rescue plane had disappeared. Despite a search of 300,000 square miles lasting five days,
None of the six planes lost on that night were ever found. According to History.com, an official Navy report stated, that it was as if they had flown to Mars. There are many possible explanations for these two losses, which were the same evening but, in the end… could have simply been separate disasters. However, the coincidence that both the original flight and the rescue plane should be lost that same night…
and none of them ever found again, has proven powerful fodder for storytellers and investigators. Looking back at the arc of history… It is easy to see how the strange tale of Flight 19 was also the catalyst for a much larger story… that of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. In 1950, an author named Edward Van Winkle Jones wrote an article for the Miami Herald, ensuring that events surrounding Flight 19
would hold the public in their thrall for decades to come. Although the piece didn't focus on Flight 19, the author ruminated on the many mysteries of flights and ships lost at sea. In the article, he offered a laundry list of disappearances that had occurred in the same general vicinity where the Avengers vanished. Included was a diagram showing the locations of the numerous lost voyages, marked
roughly by the boundaries of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. Two years later, a man named George X. Sand picked up where Van Winkle Jones had left off. He wrote an article for Fate magazine called, See Mystery at Our Back Door. In it… He elaborated on what he called a watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Sand proceeded to work backwards. as far as World War II, citing other disappearances of planes and ships in the vicinity. These included a steamer,
four passenger planes, and a fishing skiff. In 1962, an article by novelist and playwright Alan W. Eckert was published in American Legion magazine, revisiting the strange events surrounding Flight 19. The mystery of the Lost Patrol, it was accompanied by dramatic illustrations with the feel of a comic book. Perhaps Eckert was an inspiration, because it only took two more years for the implications about the importance of that mysterious area to form completely.
In 1964, a writer named Vincent Gaddis published an article on the topic in a men's magazine called Argosy. In it… He gave a name to the triangular area suggested by Sands, proving that the packaging of the idea was one of its most compelling aspects. The title of the article was The Deadly Bermuda Triangle, and it fanned out from the Flight 19 mystery, sucking other disasters into his new concept like a whirlpool.
Gaddis pinpointed the vertices of the triangle as being Miami, Florida, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. It is worth noting that the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle have shifted loosely over the years, resulting in designations that varied from 1.3… to 3.9 square kilometers. This has certainly accommodated plenty of fodder for disaster seekers who claim there is a pattern.
Gaddis presented his Bermuda Triangle argument with plenty of dramatic license. He began his article with the question, What is it about this particular slice of the world that has destroyed hundreds of ships and planes without a trace? Gaddis started his investigation. with the story of a Navy tanker called the Marine Sulfur Queen, which disappeared in 1963 on a voyage between Texas and Virginia.
Then he added the loss of two Air Force jets in 1963 to the tally. Then a fishing boat and an Air Force tanker followed. After this, he made the assertion that the Bermuda Triangle had claimed over 1,000 lives in the previous two decades, with not one body recovered. As he proceeded in the article, his claims were so broad and nonspecific that it would be impossible to confirm them.
Before the critical reader could begin to ask questions about those two decades he mentioned, Gaddis made an even bolder move. He pulled Christopher Columbus into the story and implicated him in the Bermuda Triangle as well, saying, its history of mystery dates back… to the never-explained enigmatic light observed by Columbus when he first approached his landfall in the Bahamas. Gaddis does not elaborate on this actual experience, which was recorded by Columbus on October 11, 1492. However…
More information on the encounter can be found in further sources. As he approached the shores of the Americas after his long journey, The explorer did relate, seeing a glimmer in the distance. He said it was so small a body that he could not confirm it to be land. He described it like the light of a wax candle moving up and down. Modern experts have suggested it was bioluminescent worms.
or even a meteor. With so little information to go on, it's easy to imagine any number of scientific explanations. for that brief sighting of light over the water. But Gaddis managed to link it to modern disappearances, thus creating a story that reached back.
hundreds of years. The Bermuda Triangle mystery grew in magnitude with one well-chosen suggestion… Gaddis then pivoted to a dramatic retelling of the Flight 19 disappearance, putting forth his own breathless theories about what happened on that fateful day. All of this culminated in his own theory. He suggested the culprit was an unknown type of atmospheric aberration. He said it might be called a hole in the sky. Although he then openly admitted that the aberration's exact nature
and why it was localized to semi-tropical waters within and near the Bermuda Triangle were not known. Humorously, He then felt it important to add, officially, the Navy does not go along with this theory. But it didn't matter what the Navy officially thought. about the loss of Flight 19. Gaddis had put his own ideas out there in a very eye-catching manner.
The tale of the Bermuda Triangle was now a compelling story, and it became unstoppable. After all… Regarding the deadly reputation of the Bermuda Triangle, Gaddis warned provocatively, before this article reaches print, The mysterious menace might strike again, swallowing a plane or ship, or leaving behind a derelict with no life aboard.
However questionable one might find Gaddis and his conclusions, he had no hesitation in expanding upon his ideas. He released a book the next year on the same topic… with the title Invisible Horizons. The concept of the Bermuda Triangle took on a life of its own at this point. In the early 1970s, Several other men published their own writings on the topic. Perhaps the most notable was Charles Berlitz, who would take considerable heat in later years.
from debunkers of the Bermuda Triangle theories. In general, Berlitz didn't seem like an outlier when it came to society. Hailing from the prosperous family that started the Berlitz language learning empire, he had been educated at Yale and served as vice president in his family's publishing house. He reportedly spoke 25 languages to some degree. At the time of his death, he was reported as having sold more books than any other linguist in history.
thanks to the booming family business. However, under his exterior, which fit right in with the establishment, Charles Berlitz pursued a lot of paranormal research topics. An article written for Skeptic magazine after his passing in 2004 said, he was responsible for some of the greatest pseudoscientific hoaxes in history. As far back as his teens in the 1930s,
Berlitz had been dabbling in science fiction writing. In 1969, his passion for scuba diving converged with his interest in the paranormal. leading him to write a book called The Mystery of Atlantis. The publication was well-received, but its success would soon be nothing. compared to the effect of his 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle. In a stroke of luck, he released it at the same time that Richard Weiner produced the film
The Devil's Triangle, voiced by the iconic actor Vincent Price. As a promotion, Weiner promised a $10,000 reward to anyone who could solve the mystery of the triangle. Together, Berlitz and Weiner seemed to have created a surge of interest on the topic. The book eventually sold 18 million copies and was translated into 30 languages. Anyone who bought the book…
Hoping to uncover real scientific leads would have been very disappointed, however. The theories Berlitz confidently put forth were wildly imaginative. For example, prompted by his great interest in Atlantis, he suggested that the remnants of the lost city were disrupting communications from the ocean floor.
For those who found Atlantis a bridge too far, he also suggested ancient alien interference. And if neither of those explanations rang true… The reader was asked to consider that the triangle might actually be a portal to hell, or a place where alien abductions regularly occurred. His eyewitness accounts of strange phenomena such as large sea monsters might have seemed dubious, but there was a little something for everyone in his list of ideas.
With Berlitz as a popular research source, unsurprisingly, nobody appears to have ever collected that $10,000 reward. However… In the Skeptic Magazine article, author Kirk Hagen jokes that it really should have gone to a reference librarian named Larry Cusha. To fully appreciate the role that Larry Cusha eventually played in the Bermuda Triangle story, it's important to understand his unique background. Kusha grew up mostly in Arizona, developing a fascination with airplanes at an early age.
He qualified for a commercial pilot's license at the young age of 19, actually becoming a commercial pilot at age 21. By 24, He was a flight instructor, and he also became an instructor for flight instruments. In short, he knew his way around a cockpit. Following that trajectory, Kusha attended Arizona State University and originally trained as a commercial flight engineer. However…
Before his career really got going, he decided the job wasn't for him. In an interview later, he explained that sitting behind a dashboard covered in instruments, didn't give him the flying experience he enjoyed. Instead, in a huge pivot, he became a high school math teacher. and a librarian. Eventually, he returned to college to get another degree, earning a Master of Arts in Library Science.
By 1969, when the article in the ensuing book by Gaddis had started stirring up Triangle Fever, he was working… at Arizona State University in the library. As Kusha later explained, he ended up with a lot of students coming into the library. looking for information about the Bermuda Triangle so they could write term papers on the topic. Keep in mind, this was a time…
when there was no such thing as digital research. Periodicals were often accessed via microfilm, and communication with other libraries was written or… via the telephone. In an attempt to better serve the students, Kusha and his fellow librarian, Debra Bluin, began writing letters to official agencies soliciting any available information about the Bermuda Triangle. He also placed some ads in library journals and began to receive articles from periodicals. Soon, he and Debbie…
had a bibliography put together. The two co-workers began selling the bibliography to interested researchers for $2. When the publishing company Harper and Rowe requested a copy of the bibliography, Kusha sent it with a note, asking if they might not be interested in a book on the subject. They were interested, and Kusha took a leave of absence from his job to write that book, one which has become a standard reference in debunking theories…
about the Bermuda Triangle. It was called the Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved. Many years later… Kusha wrote an article looking back on his research and explaining how he conducted it and what he discovered. Because the Flight 19 mystery had really been the catalyst for the entire conspiracy, that's what he focused on. He went straight… to the most reliable sources, completing 92 personal interviews, and reviewing records and reports.
Then he did something he was uniquely qualified for. He flew the route taken by Flight 19, making observations of his own. In his 2015 article about that research, he discussed his conclusion that the story of Flight 19, as previously retold by others, was a microcosm of how the delusion of the entire Bermuda Triangle story came about, and how he came to realize that the Bermuda Triangle is one of the biggest frauds.
that has ever been perpetrated. To illustrate this, he looked back at the genesis of the story as it evolved via one article after the other. he pointed out that the 1962 Eckert article had provided fictionalized, dramatized dialogue that was simply repeated by later writers. becoming accepted as fact. Further, the Gaddis article had been predicated on very questionable sources.
including bestsellers from the 1950s about UFOs. And from the Gaddis book onward, further sensational writing had appeared. simply accepting what Gaddis had written and embellishing upon it. This included the book by Berlitz. As a reference librarian, Kusha pointed out that nobody who had written about the Bermuda Triangle during that time, pushing its existence, had even used…
the official Navy report as a source. In the end, Kusha concluded that there were likely explanations for the loss of Flight 19. One of which was that Lieutenant Taylor had lost his bearings on a few occasions in the past. He was experienced, but he wasn't perfect. In all likelihood, human error had gotten the Avengers off course, and then they had run out of fuel before finding their way back.
And the rescue plane that went missing that same night? It was a type of aircraft known to be prone to explosions. And a ship… Did witness what appeared to be such an explosion in the sky that night? It's the most logical answer. In his broader research about other accidents attributed to the triangle, Kusha found a variety of inconsistencies. For example, He pointed out that the actual area defining the triangle was not standard from one account to another.
Many losses of planes and ships were pulled into the story by different writers, despite being outside the boundaries by as much as thousands of miles. In other cases, the disappearances were not that mysterious, having resulted from bad weather. Some aircraft or ships were reported as having disappeared, but then, in fact, the debris from those wrecks had eventually been found.
Some people who read his book felt cheated by the conclusions Kusha had drawn, since his title implied that he solved the mystery. They expected him to land on one of the existing theories, whether that be aliens or unusually strong weather patterns. Instead, he concluded,
that the mystery itself was manufactured. Of course, careful research and solid logic do not always find the greatest audience, and the myth… of the Bermuda Triangle was already a 1970s pop culture phenomenon that was tough to slow down. Steven Spielberg amplified the Flight 19 disappearance for a new generation of viewers when he included it as a plot point in his 1977 film.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movie began by featuring the discovery of the missing Avengers in the Sonoran Desert. and ended with the return of the pilots from an alien ship. Many movies have been made on this topic since then. IMDB, or The Internet Movie Database shows 21 fictional movies and documentaries were made featuring the Bermuda Triangle just between 1975 and… 2014. And the fascination definitely continued during the past decade. A casual internet search reveals…
many other Bermuda Triangle videos, and there are Reddit threads dedicated to discussing the best Bermuda Triangle films. As a result, The most exciting theories have persisted. There are those who stand by Berlitz and his favorite ideas. For example, Some argue that the triangle lies above those ruins of Atlantis, which are disrupting navigation with ancient energy crystals.
Others stick with tales similar to the ones shown in close encounters of the third kind, insisting the missing crafts have been taken by aliens. Or that ancient, alien ships lie underwater, disrupting passage with their technology. Fans of time travel… suggest the existence of a mysterious vortex, pointing to a pilot from 1970 who claimed he flew into a cloud tunnel and instantly ended up…
hundreds of miles away. Some say that a downed comet from 11,000 years ago rests under the waters of the Bermuda Triangle. providing yet another possible obstacle to correct navigation. However, nobody knows if such a comet even existed. There are also explanations loosely rooted in actual science. For example, some have suggested… the accidents were caused by eruptions of methane gas from the sea floor. In layman's terms, a surge of such gases from underneath the water
could decrease its density, disrupting the buoyancy of a ship above. The craft could then sink down deep into the water. and have its wreckage swept away, leaving no trace. In theory, this scenario is possible. However… The United States Geological Survey has not detected a gas emission of this magnitude in that area for the past 15,000 years. Another natural explanation is that of monstrously large rogue waves. Testing shows that waves like that could, theoretically, sink.
large vessels. But, again, there is no evidence of such a wave ever having taken out one of the ships in the Bermuda Triangle. It's just an idea." Other theories about the power of the Gulf Stream or the frequency of hurricanes… certainly offer plausible explanations for some accidents. However, weather events and currents are present the world over. And there is no indication that they cause more accidents in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else.
When popular science guru Carl Sagan was asked about the Bermuda Triangle in 1991, he went to the root of the question. He said, statistically, it's a fallacy, compared with other places in the world as well-traveled as that area of the Atlantic. Do airplanes and ships go down more? The answer is no. Why is it always planes and ships that get lost? It's because they can sink in water.
A majority of the people who are alive today grew up with the story of the Bermuda Triangle. A place where things vanish without explanation. will often be likened to the triangle, and everyone will know what is meant by it. Whether true or fanciful, The idea of the Bermuda Triangle has stayed with us. Delving into the history of Google searches worldwide, it's obvious that someone… Somewhere is searching information about the mysterious Bermuda Triangle every day. And if your only concern…
is whether or not you can safely make a vacation getaway to this storied part of the world. Perhaps it's most instructive to take advice from the experts. First, the United States Coast Guard and the United States Department of Defense have refused to designate the area as having any special significance. Second, the storied insurance company, Lloyds of London, has stated that the number of ships that have sunk in the area is not unusual.
and they are in the business of assessing risk. In the end, the Bermuda Triangle is, at very least, a testament to the power of storytelling. One person started it with a spark of curiosity and a string of inferences. And the world took off with the tale from there. And in a world where we face so many practical realities every day… Solving a mystery can sometimes be just what we need.