Bermuda Triangle: A manufactured mystery

Christopher Columbus – on his initial voyage of discovery to the New World in 1492 – was the first to have recorded anomalous activities in the seas around Bermuda.

But the genesis of the modern Bermuda Triangle legend can be traced to a September 16, 1950 Associated Press dispatch in which reporter

E V W Jones noted what he described as a series of "mysterious" disappearances of ships and aircrafts between the Florida coast and Bermuda beginning in the late '40s .

Soon after this, nearly every popular book on "true mysteries" included chapters on the Bermuda Triangle or, as some called it, the "Devil's Triangle" or the "Hoodoo Sea."

Ivan T Sanderson, author of "Invisible Residents "(1970), cited the Bermuda Triangle as evidence of an intelligent, technologically advanced underwater civilisation which is responsible for, among other mysterious phenomena, UFOs.

The first book specifically on the subject was a self-published work by John Wallace Spencer titled, "Limbo of the Lost" (1969), which as a 1973 Bantam paperback found a huge readership.

The Bermuda Triangle fever peaked in 1974 with the publication of "The Bermuda Triangle", a major bestseller — five million sales worldwide — written by Charles Berlitz with J Manson Valentine.

That year two paperbacks, Richard Winer's "The Devil's Triangle" and John Wallace Spencer's "No Earthly Explanation", also racked up impressive sales.

The articles and books on the subject betrayed little evidence of original research. 

Attentive readers could not help noticing that mostly the Triangle's chroniclers cannibalised each other's work.

In 1975 Larry Kusche, a librarian at Arizona State University, published a devastating debunking of what he called the "manufactured mystery."

In the book, titled "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved", he did the archival digging the other writers neglected.

These books caught the imagination of their readers. 

Weather records, reports of official investigating agencies, newspaper accounts, and other documents indicated that the Triangle literature had played fast and loose with the evidence.

For example, calm seas in the literature turned into raging storms in reality; mysterious disappearances became conventionally caused sinking and crashes; the remains of ships "never heard from again" turned out to have been found long since.

Theories about the Bermuda Triangle have been rampant for decades. Some suggest the Triangle's mysteries are a result of alien activity.

Others believe it is the powerful workings of the mythical underwater city Atlantis. Some theories even suggest gigantic magnet which fell from the sky, pirates, ghost ship and monster squid that dwells in the area.

No matter how many evidence you have to prove it as hoax, they will never be enough for the mystery hungry humans, as strange things really happened in that place. 

Given a choice between the horrifying idea of a giant squid's tentacles wrestling an innocent ship to the sea floor, or an alien abduction, versus human error, shoddy engineering, and a temperamental Mother Nature – who could resist the legend of the Bermuda Triangle?