Growing up you solve so many puzzles – picture puzzles, riddles, and word quizzes – so that your mind gets accustomed to questioning everything around you. This develops in you an inquisitive nature and you start to see mysteries in everyday things around you. You try to question the existence of some things and the non-existence of others. In this world full of mysteries, one such mystery is that of the Bermuda Triangle.

Also known as the Devil’s Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle is a section of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Mythical literature revels in the stories of ghost ships, of airplanes disappearing forever, and of instruments going haywire around the Bermuda Triangle. But these are just fanciful theories; there is no solid proof that these types of mysterious disappearances occur less in the other well-traveled sections of the ocean than they do in the Bermuda Triangle. As a matter of fact, there are many people who navigate the Bermuda Triangle on a daily basis without any incident. So why do we still think of Bermuda Triangle as an unsolved mystery?

Covering about 500,000 square miles of the ocean, the area was sailed through by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage. He reported that a great flame of fire crashed into the sea which was probably a meteor. Also, his observations about the erratic compass readings could be explained by the fact that at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on earth where the true north and the magnetic north aligned together.

Reports of unexplained disappearances started capturing people’s interest around the early twentieth century when the USS Cyclops, a 542-meter long navy ship with 300 men and thousands of ton of manganese onboard, sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay in 1918. Although they were equipped to do so, the Cyclops never sent an SOS distress call and the extensive search yielded no wreckage.

After that, an alleged pattern started to form when five navy bombers carrying 14 got severely lost in the area in 1945. The nave bombers were forced to ditch at sea when they ran low on fuel. A rescue plane with 13 men also disappeared while searching for them. Even a weeks-long investigation failed to turn up any evidence.

In a 1946 magazine article, author Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” for the first time after which it became a sensational legend with reports of planes going down despite having just sent “all’s well” messages. Paranormal writers blamed the triangle’s lethality on everything from aliens and Atlantis to time warps and reverse gravity fields while scientific theories, on the other hand, pointed to magnetic anomalies, waterspouts, and methane gas eruptions from the ocean floor.

In all probability, however, many don’t recognize the Bermuda Triangle as a hazardous place. There is no single theory that solves the mystery but there has been nothing discovered indicating the casualties were a result of anything other than physical harm. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.

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