Split Thread The Bermuda Triangle

[Safe-Keeper]

I don't know enough about this video to fact-check it, but LEMMiNO's documentary on the Bermuda triangle is very informative and meticulously researched and sourced. It goes into detail about some of the incidents, coverage of said incidents, natural explanations, and how mystery magazines picked up the 'mystery' of the triangle and ran with it, turning it from a series of strange incidents, albeit with perfectly plausible natural explanations, into a massive 'urban legend' that's famous even to this day.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

OT but I have notes somewhere for an RPG scenario based around mysterious happenings involving the Hanger Lane gyratory, as people and vehicles drop through cracks in space-time....
It explains the loss of time experienced while traversing the gyratory.

I used to commute around Hanger Lane, I think you'd have to tone it down to be accepted by a fantasy audience.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

NVM

 

[Chanakya]

I don't know enough about this video to fact-check it, but LEMMiNO's documentary on the Bermuda triangle is very informative and meticulously researched and sourced. It goes into detail about some of the incidents, coverage of said incidents, natural explanations, and how mystery magazines picked up the 'mystery' of the triangle and ran with it, turning it from a series of strange incidents, albeit with perfectly plausible natural explanations, into a massive 'urban legend' that's famous even to this day.

Great vid, thanks for posting. Discusses the whole thing clearly, exhaustively.

Of course, the meat of it has already been discussed in this thread. But already I find two additional, and interesting, details. One would be the fact that it was this Sand character that first came up with the name itself, and also that the triangle shape per se was concocted out of whole cloth, for no reason at all. Another would be the connection with the Colombus's "inexplicable" "fireball", centuries earlier. (Not a valid connection at all, of course, and in any case explained easily enough: but still.)

I've only watched the first ten minutes or so of it for now. Although we already know how the story ends, but still, should be interesting to watch the rest of it as well, later when I'm free.

 

[Susheel]

The Riddle of Flight 19 - Skeptoid

The 1945 disappearance of five fighter planes in the Bermuda Triangle was real, but hardly how it's portrayed.

skeptoid.com

The guy's name was Charles Berlitz, and he published a book in 1974 called The Bermuda Triangle. He's the one who started all the buzz, and it was to sell his book.

I remember owning a copy of this book during my high-school days and it along with a copy of Colin Wilson's The Occult took me on a path to woo for a couple of years. Then I was given a copy of Begone Godmen by Abraham Kovoor and an article on James Randi that I read in a magazine made me realize it was ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

I remember owning a copy of this book during my high-school days and it along with a copy of Colin Wilson's The Occult took me on a path to woo for a couple of years. Then I was given a copy of Begone Godmen by Abraham Kovoor and an article on James Randi that I read in a magazine made me realize it was ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊.

I had a few Colin Wilson books myself. Here in the UK it was the time of 'Arthur C. Clarke's Unexplained Mysteries' and the 'The Unexplained' artwork, so there was a lot of woo woo to go around.

 

[malbui]

OT but I have notes somewhere for an RPG scenario based around mysterious happenings involving the Hanger Lane gyratory, as people and vehicles drop through cracks in space-time....
It explains the loss of time experienced while traversing the gyratory.

Robert Rankin’s ‘Brentford’ series deals with such goings-on in long and confusing detail with no shortage of call-backs, bizarre references and appalling jokes.

 

[malbui]

I had a few Colin Wilson books myself. Here in the UK it was the time of 'Arthur C. Clarke's Unexplained Mysteries' and the 'The Unexplained' artwork, so there was a lot of woo woo to go around.

Yeah, that stuff was all the rage when I was at school, late seventies and early eighties.

 

[Armitage72]

Yup. Some sound cooler than others, too. The Bermuda Triangle has a pizzazz that The Coney Island Trapezoid just can't pull off.

The New Jersey Parallelogram was prominent enough to be featured on an episode of "The Real Ghostbusters". It's hard to beat that kind of publicity.

 

[catsmate]

Robert Rankin’s ‘Brentford’ series deals with such goings-on in long and confusing detail with no shortage of call-backs, bizarre references and appalling jokes.

Ah yes, I remember them well, I picked up The Brentford Triangle back in the '80s.
Excellent low level 'urban fantasy' books.

One of my RPG campaigns is based around UNITs less capable investigatory groups, The Misfit Mob, who get the jobs no-one else wants to deal with.

 

[kookbreaker]

My amusement about the Bermuda Triangle was that there was even a small debunk of it on "Beakman's World".

 

[Spektator]

I used to haunt (not literally) a used-book store and from about the eigth grade up I bought usually tattered copies of every supernatural/weird mystery book I could find. Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, Lo! and Wild Talents. Frank Edwards, Stranger than Science and Strangest of All. I picked up about four or five years' worth of Fate Magazine for a dollar. And I had the Berlitz Bermuda Triangle book.

However . . . I read them the same way I read SF and fantasy stories, as entertainment. I recall one story that mentioned scientists knew that sound waves never die out, they just fade, and a lab was working on getting a recording of the original Sermon on the Mount. One story claimed that there's not just one Bermuda Triangle, but about thirty of them, fifteen in both the northern and southern hemisphere.

For a senior project, I superimposed the outline of the Bermuda Triangle over the U.S. map and found out that, wow, all manner of disasters had occurred within it! Many, many air crashes, in some of which the downed planes were never found! Auto crashes, ditto! And so on. It made sense to me that if a ship sank in the ocean, it would vanish, unlike a ship sinking in, say, Arizona. I do remember reading the Larry Kusche book in college. The library had a hardcover copy of it. Reading it led me to sign up for a subscription to The Skeptical Inquirer, and I still subscribe to it. Anyway, not very long ago there was a brief ruffle of "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery has finally been scientifically solved by a statistician!" Just Googled it: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a65643514/is-bermuda-triangle-mystery-solved/.

The mystery is why every few years someone has to solve something that wasn't mysterious to begin with.

 

[kookbreaker]

Every now and then some of the "educational" cable channels would try and bring the BT back into vogue. I think they made an effort about 20 years ago with a bunch of specials during sweeps week but it didn't really take.

These days TikTok'ers will try and bring it about but there is also other woo they can churn out, especially with bad AI art. Much more eye grabbing than some lost TBF Avengers.

 

[Chanakya]

For a senior project, I superimposed the outline of the Bermuda Triangle over the U.S. map and found out that, wow, all manner of disasters had occurred within it!

There was an interesting vid linked here in a post some days back. Of course, most things it discusses have also been directly discussed in this thread itself. But it did have one or two interesting additional points. One of those was that apparently the "triangle", that is to say that shape, the geography indicated, the area indicated --- is just a random construct. ...The vid discusses some 40 or so disappearances that are linked to the Bermuda Triangle, and finds that very few of them actually happened in or around the actual triangle! ...That is, nothing out-of-the-way about those disappearances in any case: but point is, basis the vid they didn't even happen anywhere in or near the triangle at all.

Of course, just like one takes the Triangle nonsense itself with a pinch of salt --- and more, with a laugh --- I suppose it likewise makes sense to also take what I said above (what I quoted the vid above as saying) also with a pinch of salt. Because while obviously I (now, after this discussion here) am happy treating the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon as complete nonsense; and nor am I inclined to waste any more time personally digging any deeper into this: but still, even so: to directly accept the unsupported "debunking" within the vid, specifically in context of what I said about those 40 or so disappearances, would surely amount to simply accepting bald ipse dixetisms simply because we happen to like the conclusions being argued for?

Where I'm going with this is: I mentioned one specific detail from the vid, those 40 or so disappearances they've studied and discussed. While like I said I'm not inclined to waste any more time over more vids and detailed reports over this, but you seem to have yourself, at first-hand, studied this specific thing, right? So, what has been your first-hand finding? Leaving aside the fact that they're statistically not surprising: But do you agree, basis your own work, that the vast majority of the disappearances that are reported to have happened in the Triangle, do not actually relate, even approximately, to that specific geography?

 

[Chanakya]

In another, unrelated thread, someone mentioned Brandolini's Law. That was a new one, that I hadn't heard of before! This seemed relevant to this thread, and specifically to what people, including me, were discussing here some days ago, about truth and lies and footwear.

For those who, like me, might not have been familiar with Brandolini:

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊-asymmetry-principle/

Brandolini’s Law and Dicks Law – Matthew Dicks

matthewdicks.com

Brandolini’s Law

I read a tweet [https://twitter.com/g_s_bhogal/status/1438972536465809409]: > Brandolini's Law (aka the ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ Asymmetry Principle): It takes a lot more energy to refute ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊. I considered and analyzed the tweeted idea...

criticalfallibilism.com