The Bermuda Triangle
Episode 171: How This Infamous Sea Thoroughfare Is More Click Bait Than Mystery
"Flight 19" a military training mission involving 5 planes that disappeared in the area of the Bermuda Triangle in 1945
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I was sitting at my son’s soccer practice recently when my sister pulled up a news article on her phone to show me. “Did you hear about this plane that went missing over the Bermuda Triangle?” she asked. It was a medical transport plane carrying 6 passengers that left Bermuda for Boston, Massachusetts on October 3rd. As it neared the coast of Nantucket, the plane lost all contact and then vanished. It’s honestly a really sad story but, I realized, the only reason it had such big headlines at all was because it departed from Bermuda. Bermuda, vanished airplane, Bermuda Triangle… it was a hot news story because it tip toed over the line of news and into the realm of mysteries, fringe theories, the paranormal, and people absolutely eat that stuff up. My sister asked me if I’d talked about the Bermuda Triangle on History Fix yet. I hadn’t. “But, you know what,” I said, “it is Spooktober, so why not now.” And so here we are. Later, I pulled up that breaking news article and actually read it. A few things stuck out to me immediately. First, while the plane took off from Bermuda, it vanished off the coast of Massachusetts which isn’t even in the Bermuda Triangle. Second, the US Coast Guard found the wreckage of the plane. It definitely crashed and wasn’t pulled into some extraterrestrial vortex or swallowed up by an unknown seamonster. With those two conclusions, I realized this article wasn’t really about the Bermuda Triangle at all. Throwing that term in there was just click bait. But it had still led me to this topic, the Bermuda Triangle, and the more I dug into the history of it, of claims of strange phenomena happening there, the shipwrecks, the plane crashes, the theories, each one more absurd than the last, the more I realized, maybe it’s all just click bait. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. The Bermuda Triangle found me and it inserted itself right on into my Spooktober line up. But, like many times before on History Fix, the story I thought I was going to be telling is not the story I actually found when I started to dig. The news article that started it all wasn’t even the news article I thought it was. And that, come to find out, that’s kind of a recurring theme when it comes to the Bermuda Triangle. We’ll get into all that but first, what even is the Bermuda Triangle? Gosh I hope you all have at least heard of it or the whole first bit of this episode has probably made very little sense. The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely defined geographic area off the southeastern coast of the United States. It’s a triangle shape, essentially, which is where the name comes from with vertices, corners, at Miami, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. Bermuda is the northernmost point of the triangle. Now when I say loosely defined, I mean loosely defined. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “The exact boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle are not universally agreed upon. Approximations of the total area range between 500,000 and 1,510,000 square miles. By all approximations, the region has a vaguely triangular shape,” end quote. Okay so anywhere from 500,000 square miles to 1,510,000 square miles. That is a huge range. They’re like it might be this big or might be literally three times bigger than this but it’s definitely shaped like a triangle. Okay. That should be a red flag right there.
I also want to point out that this is not like a legit geographical term, Bermuda Triangle. That term, that name, doesn’t appear on any world maps. The US Board on Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as a place at all. That name came from a 1964 magazine article written by American author Vincent Gaddis. He came up with the term Bermuda Triangle to explain this area where strange things happen and where many lives, he said, had been lost. That term was first coined in 1964 but reports of these strange things happening go back much farther, all the way back to Christopher Columbus in 1492.
In 1492, actually on October 11, 1492 which first of all is my birthday and second of all is the literal day I’m researching this episode. I mean not 1492 but October 11th so, weird, I’ll take it as a sign. I’m right on schedule. Anyway on October 11, 1492 Columbus wrote quote “The Admiral, at ten in the previous night, being on the castle of the poop, saw a light, though it was so uncertain that he could not affirm it was land,” end quote. So, for some context, Columbus is nearing the islands of the Caribbean. He is nearing land and he knows it. There are signs right you can tell when you’re getting close to land. There are birds and the water’s different, stuff like that. He knows they are getting close to land and so they are looking for it. He wrote about this Admiral seeing a light. He reports that he saw it himself a couple of times and described it as quote “like a wax candle rising and falling,” end quote. So this has gotten a bit of a paranormal twist in the centuries since. This report by Columbus has been sort of twisted into Columbus saw these strange, unexplained lights in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. Now, a couple of observations, rising and falling, it’s like, yeah you're on a boat guy, everything is rising and falling. Second observation, they did actually spot land the next day on October 12th. So, could it have been a distant fire? Could it have been a fire in a canoe? Something atmospheric? I don’t know.
Columbus also reported his compass acting strangely as they neared land. He wrote quote “the needle of the compass, which hitherto had turned towards the north-east, turned a full quarter of the wind to the north-west,” end quote. He also wrote that he saw lots and lots of seaweed floating in the water and that the water was unusually calm. Those last two things aren’t weird at all but he said them with the compass bit so they felt like they needed to be included. He was actually in an area that’s known as the Sargasso Sea, sargasso because of a type of seaweed called sargasso so it’s not at all weird to see sargasso in the sargasso sea. She sells seashells by the sea shore. Anyway, so those are the first mentions of somewhat strange happenings, Christopher Columbus 1492 we have unexplained rising and falling lights and we have his compass acting strangely.
Now, the compass thing is easily scientifically explainable because this area, this Bermuda Triangle area, there is something kind of special about it. It is one of only two places on Earth where magnetic north and true north line up. The other place this happens is off the east coast of Japan and it has a similar reputation to the Bermuda Triangle. It’s called Devil’s Sea. So in these two places where magnetic north and true north line up, this can cause compasses to act kind of funny. But, honestly compasses are kind of always acting funny. In reality these two places are places where compasses don’t act funny but we’re so used to them acting funny that when they don’t act funny we think they’re acting funny, if that makes sense. Everywhere else on Earth, to read a compass you have to account for this difference between magnetic north and true north which is called magnetic declination. Here, where they are the same, you don’t have to account for that. But it throws us off cause it’s different. So there’s that. So yeah, compasses act funny in this area, the Bermuda Triangle, and Christopher Columbus was the first to document that.
It’s all pretty quiet in Bermuda Triangle until 1609 despite lots of ships passing through that area. In 1609, a supply ship called Sea Venture was heading to the English colony of Jamestown in Virginia and it became the first wreck tied to the Bermuda Triangle. But the tale of the Sea Venture is pretty different from later tales of Bermuda Triangle victims. For one, it didn’t just vanish, poof, mysteriously. It was separated from the other supply ships it was traveling with by what was probably a hurricane, in July of 1609 and it wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. There were survivors, though. The survivors were stranded on Bermuda for about 10 months. Eventually, they built two small ships they called Patience and Deliverance and they used them to sail the rest of the way to Jamestown. This story is actually insane the more I think about it. They roll up in Jamestown in 1610. So they spent the winter of 1609 leading into 1610 stranded in Bermuda, in like literal paradise. They had all kinds of stuff to eat, they built two ships, they were doing pretty great. Meanwhile that same time, winter of 1609 leading into 1610 is called the “starving time” in Jamestown. People were literally eating dead bodies. I think the crew of the Sea Venture hit the dang jackpot with that whole situation. They literally missed the starving time while they were just chillaxing in a tropical paradise sipping on coconuts. Coconuts are not native to Bermuda but whatever you get the point. So the Sea Venture is technically kind of the first victim of the Bermuda Triangle, if you can even call it a victim. I feel like those guys came out on top.
Throughout the following centuries several other ships wrecked in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and quite a few of these were not recovered. No wreckage or anything like that was ever found. But I mean honestly it’s insane that the crew of the Sea Venture was recovered. It’s not surprising to me at all that these ships 200, 300, 400 years ago were not recovered. What kind of technology did we have then to even recover a ship. There’s no GPS, there’s no helicopters, airplanes, submarines. Like, is anyone really surprised that they weren’t recovered? A ship doesn’t turn up at port, they don’t go “let’s go scour the entire ocean until we find it.” They go “eh, I guess everybody’s dead now. Oh well.” So anyway, missing ships, not mysterious at the time, will become more mysterious later in hindsight when the context is less understood.
Then we have the infamous Mary Celeste in 1872 which I covered last Spooktober, episode 136. The Mary Celeste was discovered adrift and completely abandoned by her crew over near the Azores Islands. The cargo was intact, the crew's personal belongings were still on board, but the crew, the people who were on the ship seemed to have vanished. Now, Azores Islands, those are over near Portugal. They are much closer to Europe than they are to the Americas. And I swear this is where the 1,510,000 square miles figure comes from, people desperately trying to include the Mary Celeste in the Bermuda Triangle. They’re like “Yeah the Azores are part of the Bermuda Triangle, of course they are, what’s a million more square miles anyway? But you better believe it’s still a triangle.” But what the mystery of the Mary Celeste really did, whether or not it happened in the Bermuda Triangle, it got people fascinated with these sorts of maritime mysteries. People started paying attention. Shipwrecks were boring before. Now they are mysterious and therefore fun, thanks to the Mary Celeste.
So, in the 1900s people are paying more attention to shipwrecks and whatnot, especially the more interesting mysterious ones. In 1909 a high profile disappearance happened that piqued everyone’s interest, the disappearance of Joshua Slocum. Slocum was the first person to circumnavigate the globe solo, by himself. He did that in the 1890s on his 36 food sloop which was called the Spray. Well, in 1909 Slocum was taking the Spray from Massachusetts to Venezuela, a trip that brought him right through the Bermuda Triangle. He was seen resupplying in Miami, so we know he made it to Miami at least. After that, he left Miami heading for Venezuela and he disappeared. He never turned up. Now there was some evidence to hint at what might have happened. There’s some evidence to suggest that his fairly small boat was run over by a large steamship during the night. But even if it wasn’t that, even if he just fell overboard or hit a storm or something, something happened to the boat, I should note that he wasn’t a spring chicken. He was 65 years old, oh and also he couldn’t swim. Yes, the first person to solo circumnavigate the globe could not swim. So, there’s that.
In 1918 we have the disappearance of a US Navy cargo ship called the USS Cyclops shortly after it left Barbados. The Cyclops was carrying a load of manganese ore that the US needed during World War I. It also had 300 people onboard. There was no distress call made and wreckage of the ship was never found. It seemed to have just disappeared. This remains the largest non-combat loss of life in US Naval history.
But probably the most famous disappearance happened in 1945. This is the one that Vincent Gaddis talked about in that magazine article in 1964 when he literally came up with the term Bermuda Triangle. That’s the disappearance of Flight 19. Flight 19 is kind of misleading because it was actually 6 different planes that disappeared. So what happened was, on December 5, 1945, 5 military airplanes, TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers took off from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for a routine training mission carrying a collective 14 men. I feel like this stuff always starts with a routine training mission. They take off, they are under the command of their instructor, Lieutenant Charles Taylor. They’re gonna go out, drop some practice bombs, that sort of thing, come back. It doesn’t go according to plan. If you’re watching the video version on either YouTube or Patreon, the red triangle is the area they’re supposed to be flying in. The yellow dots are where they dropped the practice bombs or whatever. The yellow circle is where they ultimately lost track of the plane. Like, pretty dang far away from where they were supposed to be. According to a National Geographic article by Hillary Mayell, quote “Taylor, in an age before GPS became commonplace for navigation, got hopelessly lost shortly after the bombing run. Pilots flying over water in 1945 had to rely on compasses and knowing how long they’d been flying in a particular direction, and at what speed. Both of the compasses on Taylor’s plane were apparently malfunctioning. Transcripts of in-flight communications suggest he wasn’t wearing a watch. There are no landmarks in the middle of the ocean. The planes flew in one direction then another as balmy daylight turned to stormy seas in the darkness,” end quote. Apparently Taylor made a radio call saying quote “We are entering white water. Nothing seems right. We don't know where we are. The water is green, not white." He’s also heard coming up with a plan. As soon as the first plane’s fuel tank dips below 10 gallons, they are going to make an emergency landing on the water. This is not likely to result in any survivors though. These planes they are in weigh 10,000 pounds. They’re known as “Iron Birds” because they’re so heavy and they would sink pretty much immediately after a water landing attempt.
They lose communication with the planes. They send out a search and rescue mission. Then one of the rescue planes also goes missing. This one was carrying 13 people and it was a PBM Mariner nicknamed a “flying gas tank.” The Navy actually stopped making these 4 years later in 1949 because they were so prone to spontaneously explode. The slightest spark or even a lit match could cause an explosion on these planes. A ship in the area reported seeing a huge fireball and then later passing through an oil slick in the location where the rescue plane should have been. So, we’re pretty sure that that bad boy blew up.
In their final report, the Navy blamed the loss of flight 19, those 5 planes out for a training mission, they blamed it on quote “pilot error.” Lieutenant Taylor obviously got lost and panicked and just didn’t handle the situation well at all. But, after his family protested, they changed their ruling to quote “causes of reasons unknown,” which is far more mysterious and lends itself to the whole Bermuda Triangle theory quite well. I feel like this was done to protect Taylor’s reputation but it definitely clouds and obscures the reality of what happened. Lieutenant Taylor had a bit of a reputation for getting lost. He reportedly got lost 3 times while serving in World War II. He had also been forced to ditch planes into water on more than one occasion. Why this guy was the training instructor, I do not know. They were like “mmkay you kind of suck at this, you can just teach other people how to do it. Maybe they’ll somehow be better at it than you are.”
But, they never found any wreckage from those 5 planes, which isn’t that surprising considering they weighed 10,000 pounds and likely went down in water that was at least 19,000 feet deep. Also, it was ruled as "causes of reasons unknown.” So Vincent Gaddis latches on and he’s like look guys, look at this big mystery that happened in this triangular shaped area that’s sometimes near Bermuda. Let’s call it the Bermuda Triangle. After Gaddis’ article, several books were published that discussed this new concept of a Bermuda Triangle: Limbo of the Lost written by John Wallace Spencer in 1969 and then The Bermuda Triangle written by Charles Berlitz in 1974. Berlitz was a linguist and a paranormal enthusiast. In this book, Berlitz connected the Bermuda Triangle with the lost city of Atlantis, that’s episode 14, claiming that Atlantis was responsible for the disappearances. We’ll come back to that when we start talking about theories here in a sec, but Berlitz' book is really what catapulted the Bermuda Triangle into what it is now. It’s what made the masses aware of this concept on a grand scale.
So let’s get into some theories now. All sorts of theories have been proposed to explain these mysterious disappearances. Some of them decent, some of them quite far-fetched. We’ll start with some slightly more realistic theories. First is the theory of methane bubbles. It has been scientifically proven that there are pockets of methane gas beneath the ocean floor. These pockets can erupt if the pressure builds up too much or if there’s some sort of event like a landslide or a seismic wave. So that’s basically like a bubble popping. The methane would erupt up through the water, bursting through to the surface, kind of like the ocean farting. That’s essentially what this theory is proposing. These bursts of methane gas could cause a ship to lose buoyancy and sink. I know, I know, what about the airplanes? The theory proposes that the eruption of methane would reach high into the air, stalling an airplane engine or igniting and erupting into flames kind of like what happened to that rescue plane that was sent out to look for flight 19. So this theory is at least somewhat rooted in science - the science of ocean farts. However, hate to burst your bubble, pun very much intended, but the United States geological survey has found no evidence of a methane gas eruption in the area of the Bermuda Triangle for the past 15,000 years. Does that mean it’s impossible, no. But not very likely. It’s not like these things are erupting left and right. It’s not a very common occurrence.
Another somewhat scientific theory is the comet theory. This one proposes that 11,000 years ago, a comet, or possibly an asteroid, crashed to Earth and landed on the ocean floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. This comet possibly has some strange electromagnetic properties, being from outer space and all, and so it disrupts compasses and navigational tools. We already know compasses can get thrown off here but not because of a comet, it’s because of that magnetic north true north alignment, so I don’t know how much this theory actually explains.
Then we get into the weirder theories. We have theories about giant squids, which are real. There are giant squids but I don’t think they’re pulling airplanes out of the sky. We have theories about aliens. UFO enthusiasts have proposed that the Bermuda Triangle is like a portal, a “star gate” that extraterrestrials use for intergalactic travel. So the theory here is that ships and planes are accidentally getting pulled into this portal. Similarly, we have the time vortex theory. This one tries to be sciency. It relies on theories proposed by physicists like Ludwig Flamm, Albert Einstein, and Nathan Rosen that a curvature of space could cause light to bend through it - a wormhole basically. The theory is that it was possible to actually warp the space time continuum so that you could essentially jump from one place and time to another. This theory kind of melds with another theory which is the electronic fog theory. Both of these come from an experience reported by a pilot from Florida named Bruce Gernon in 1970. Bruce, his father, and a friend were flying toward Bimini Island in the Bahamas when they experienced some strange goings on. He reported seeing a strange elliptical cloud hovering about 500 feet above the ocean. He later wrote quote “Upon entering the cloud, we witnessed an uncanny spectacle. It became dark and black, without rain, and visibility was about four or five miles. There were no lightning bolts, only extraordinarily bright white flashes that would illuminate the entire surrounding area. The deeper we penetrated, the more intense the flashes became, so we made a 135-degree turn to the left and headed due south out of the cloud.[...] The remarkable thing is that we did not come out of the storm 90 miles away from Miami as we should have. . . .We had traveled through 100 miles of space and 30 minutes of time in a little more than three minutes,” end quote. He called this wormhole cloud thing an electronic fog. There’s really nothing scientific to back this up though outside of Bruce’s story. I don’t know, I kind of feel like somebody slipped something in Bruce’s drink. I’d like to hear from the other two people on the plane but they remained silent, never giving an account of what happened or corroborating Bruce’s story. Meanwhile Bruce wrote books and had all kinds of media appearances and stuff. I don’t know. It’s sketch. Did Bruce actually experience something crazy or is he just trying to sell books? Or is on drugs. It’s one of those three.
Another rather far fetched theory is one I mentioned briefly already, the Atlantis theory. This one was first put forth by the paranormal linguist guy Charles Berlitz in his book called The Bermuda Triangle which is what put the Bermuda Triangle on the map, figuratively not literally. It ain’t on the maps. Berlitz wrote about a psychic named Edgar Cayce. Back in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Cayce claimed to be able to channel answers about the Lost City of Atlantis. Cayce said that Atlantis now lay deep beneath the Bermuda Triangle and that the Bahamas were the last part of it to sink. He said that on one island, Bimini, which should sound familiar, it’s where Bruce Gernon was flying in the wormhole electronic fog theory example. The psychic Edgar Cayce said, you know 50 years before Bruce Gernon, that on the island of Bimini was a trail of energy crystals. These were once used to fuel the city but now they were interfering with airplanes and ships electronic systems and causing them to vanish. More evidence for Atlantis in that area came in 1968 when a scuba diver named J. Manson Valentine discovered a strange rock formation on the ocean floor. It looked like stones that had been intentionally laid out to form a road and so it got the name the Bimini Road. It is pretty striking. It’s a pretty crazy thing to find underwater but geologists claim that it is a natural rock formation and not a man made road.
And then of course there are theories about demons and curses and whatnot. Some have taken the great leap in assuming that the Bermuda Triangle is actually the gateway to Hell. But when we look at the reality of the situation, a much simpler explanation arises. So what is the reality of the situation? The reality is that this area, the Bermuda Triangle, is really, really deep. Most of the ocean floor in the Bermuda Triangle is at least 19,000 feet deep. Near Puerto Rico, in the Puerto Rican Trench, it gets even deeper, 27,500 feet deep. So if a ship or a plane wrecks into that water and sinks. You are not likely to find any trace of it. Then we have to consider weather patterns in that area. The gulf stream runs right through the Bermuda triangle. The Gulf Stream is basically a 40 to 50 mile wide river of warm water within the ocean. It flows from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic Ocean. So we have this warm water moving faster than the rest of the ocean water, this current, there’s some weather that comes along with that. Warm water means warm air which means rising air which means thunderstorms. So it’s stormy. This area is potentially quite stormy. Also, there's a potential for much larger waves because of the Gulf Stream. Dave Feit, chief of the marine forecast branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Prediction Center, says in that National Geographic article quote “If you have the right atmospheric conditions, you could get quite unexpectedly high waves… If wave heights are eight feet outside of the Gulf Stream, they could be two or even three times higher within it. Sailors can sometimes identify the Gulf Stream by the clouds and thunderstorms over it,” end quote.
So here we have the concept of a rogue wave, which is a very real although not very well understood natural phenomenon. According to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration quote “Rogue, freak, or killer waves have been part of marine folklore for centuries, but have only been accepted as real by scientists over the past few decades. Rogues, called 'extreme storm waves' by scientists, are those waves which are greater than twice the size of surrounding waves, are very unpredictable, and often come unexpectedly from directions other than prevailing wind and waves.Most reports of extreme storm waves say they look like "walls of water." They are often steep-sided with unusually deep troughs. Since these waves are uncommon, measurements and analysis of this phenomenon is extremely rare. Exactly how and when rogue waves form is still under investigation,” end quote. So could rogue waves explain at least some of the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle?
Then we have to look at the supposed disappearances themselves. Are they really that out of the ordinary? Are they exceptional in some way? We don’t know exactly how many ships or planes have vanished without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle. Most estimates sit at 50 ships and 20 planes. Guys. That’s not actually very much at all considering how highly trafficked this area is and has been for over 500 years. It’s a major thoroughfare. John Reilly, a historian with the US Naval Historical Foundation says in that National Geographic article quote “The region is highly traveled and has been a busy crossroads since the early days of European exploration… To say quite a few ships and airplanes have gone down there is like saying there are an awful lot of car accidents on the New Jersey Turnpike—surprise, surprise,” end quote.
Both the US Coast Guard and Lloyds of London which is a major insurance company, they insure ships and whatnot, they both claim that the area of the Bermuda Triangle does not have a high occurrence of maritime disasters. It’s comparatively much safer than a lot of other places. It doesn’t even make the list of top ten most dangerous places for maritime travel, not even close. Coast Guard Lieutenant A.L. Russel wrote quote “It has been our experience that the combined forces of nature and the unpredictability of mankind outdo science-fiction stories many times each year,” end quote.
So, when you consider the number of planes and ships traveling through that area, there are actually not that many wrecks at all. And then when you look closer at the confirmed wrecks and disappearances and what not, they aren’t even what they seem all the time. According to an article by Richard Sheposh quote “In 1975, a librarian from Arizona State University named Larry Kusche began investigating the Bermuda Triangle. In his book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved, Kusche found that many accounts of mysterious vanishings were based on inaccurate information or arrived at through sloppy research. Ships that were said to have disappeared in "calm" weather actually sank during storms; tales of "missing" vessels often ignored the fact that the wreckage was later found miles away; and some incidents never occurred at all or happened far outside of the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche's conclusion was supported by the maritime insurance carrier Lloyds of London and the U.S. Coast Guard. Both entities claim that this section of the Atlantic is not an unusually dangerous area, and the number of accidents in the region is proportional to its status as a highly traveled shipping route,” end quote.
So, you know, these theories are fun. The Bermuda Triangle is a fun idea. But when you really dig in, it just doesn’t hold up. There aren’t even that many disasters. It’s comparatively quite safe when you consider some other areas of the ocean. So how did we get here? How did we spiral so far with this? I think the really deep water plays into it. Shipwrecks happen a lot in shallow water. That’s definitely the case where I live on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Graveyard of the Atlantic where over 5,000 ships have gone down, most of them running aground on shallow shoals. Or, in other places, they hit rocks just below the surface. They hit something, right, something shallow. So we’re used to being able to find shipwrecks. They wreck in shallow water and they wash up later or whatever. Well the Bermuda Triangle is really deep. So if something happens to a ship or even a plane, we’re much less likely to find the wreckage. This makes it appear like these ships and planes are disappearing, vanishing without a trace which is quite mysterious, right? We can’t confirm what happened to them. They might have hit a storm or a rogue wave or run out of gas and sunk… or they might have gotten sucked into an Atlantis alien time warp wormhole electric fog vortex. We don’t know. It could be either. But which one is more fun to think about? Which one is more fun to read books about? Which one makes it easier to sell books? To get clicks on your news story? “Plane vanishes in Bermuda Triangle” nevermind the fine print explaining that the wreckage was found soon after near Nantucket so it wasn’t in the Bermuda Triangle and it didn’t vanish. Doesn’t matter, people already clicked the article. The advertisers are happy. The money is a flowing. It’s a similar theme to what I touched on last week with the story of Delphine LaLaurie, somehow, even though these stories seem so different. People are willing to mess with your perception of reality as long as there’s something in it for them. In both we see part truths get blown out of proportion, exaggerated, and sensationalized for the sake of selling books, selling ghost tour tickets, click bait. It’s all just click bait.
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