What Happens To Ships and Planes in the Bermuda Triangle? | Unveiled

What Happens to Ships and Planes in the Bermuda Triangle?

One particular region of the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean has been a mystery for decades. A number of ships and planes which pass through it have seemingly vanished from the face of the Earth. Also nicknamed the “Devil’s Triangle”, it spreads from Miami to Puerto Rico to Bermuda and, while measurements vary, it’s up to 1.5 million square miles in size. Around 8,000 lives have been claimed by the Triangle over the years, but how?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what happens to ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle?

One of the most mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle is also one of the earliest. In March 1918, the USS Cyclops, an enormous warship, disappeared after departing Barbados en route to Baltimore. Because the First World War was ongoing the Cyclops’ disappearance was attributed to German U-boat action; it had, after all, been loaded with large quantities of manganese ore, which was used to make munitions, meaning it would’ve been a valuable target. But, when they searched their records after the war, the German authorities could find no record of an attack on the Cyclops. To this day, whatever happened to the Cyclops remains the largest non-combat loss of life in the US navy – all 306 people on board were never seen or heard from again. The ship never even sent an SOS before it disappeared, with its last message declaring simply that the weather was “fair,” and all was well. Because the Cyclops was carrying so many men and so much valuable cargo, the Navy undertook extensive searches for it, but zero trace of the ship has ever been discovered. Even stranger, though, two of the Cyclops’ three sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, also vanished without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle within two weeks of each other in late 1941. Rumours of a curse quickly began to surface.

After the Cyclops, the other most famous case is probably that of Flight 19. In December 1945, five Avenger torpedo bombers carrying fourteen US airmen took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for what should have been a routine training exercise - but the planes never returned to base. Then, when a PBM Mariner was dispatched as part of the rescue mission it also disappeared, meaning another thirteen men mysteriously vanished in the same place on the same day. Ultimately, it was the unknown fates of Flight 19 and the Mariner which began to seriously popularize the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, and in fact, the nickname “Bermuda Triangle” was coined in a 1964 article about the incident.

Up to the present day, strange occurrences still plague this area of sea, and they’ve given rise to many supernatural explanations. One of the most popular theories suggests that aliens may be abducting planes and ships from this region, while another supposes that the ancient lost city of Atlantis resides deep underwater here and is, in some way, responsible. The third most common and equally eerie explanation supposes that there’s some kind of wormhole or interdimensional rift in the region, and that the missing vehicles have been transported to another universe entirely, or even to the past or the future. Hoax news stories about ships and planes taken by the Triangle suddenly reappearing decades later are, for this reason, often wildly popular. And finally, some theorists even blame some kind of sea monster, like an exceptionally giant giant squid, for dragging ships to the depths. Quite how that monster would take planes from the sky, too, isn’t usually addressed.

In short, the Triangle is a sci-fi dream, but there are other, perhaps more logical explanations for the phenomenon, too… including for what happened to the USS Cyclops and Flight 19. After Proteus and Nereus sank in 1941 and the case of the Cyclops was looked at again, it was found that all three of these ships had suffered a design flaw: the I-Beams used for support were liable to corrosion, which could have led to the ships sinking, especially when overloaded with heavy cargo… which all of them were. Retrospectively, it was calculated that even a relatively mild storm could have torn the Cyclops apart, too quickly for the sailors on board to send out a distress call… and there is evidence that, at the time the Cyclops disappeared, such a storm did occur. As well as that, it was alleged that the captain of the ship, George Worley, was a violent drunk who attacked his crew and had a dangerous habit of assigning inexperienced men to important jobs. As a result, many believe that Worley’s mismanagement may have been directly to blame for the seemingly unexplained tragedy.

However, the opposite is true for Flight 19. Its flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, was an experienced and respected airman - though perhaps he and his crew did make some mistakes. Before the planes disappeared, they were in regular radio contact with other aircraft and with base. It’s generally thought, though, that the Flight 19 bombers got lost when their compasses malfunctioned. This, combined with the fact Taylor wasn’t wearing a watch that day, and the planes didn’t have clocks in them, meant navigation became next to impossible. According to the final radio messages, Taylor believed that the planes had flown over the Florida Keys when in fact they had flown over the Bahamas. It’s thought that what followed was a journey northeast, in a bid to return to Florida… but, flying northeast from the Bahamas just took Flight 19 further and further out over the Atlantic. If this theory is what truly happened, then all five planes will have eventually run out of fuel and crashed. As for the PBM Mariner sent to rescue them, well, it was notoriously combustible, and liable to blow… and there were reports from ships in the area that a plane was seen exploding and ditching at around the same time that the Mariner dropped off radars. Nevertheless, no wreckage from any of Flight 19’s Avengers or the Mariner has ever been found.

As for all the other disappearances that have been recorded there, the fact is that the Bermuda Triangle is actually a very well-travelled area of sea with many ships sailing through it every day. The odds of any one vessel getting lost are still very low - statistically no higher than anywhere else, in fact - but with more ships it’s perhaps only natural that there would be more unexplained occurrences… especially when it’s considered that the Bermuda Triangle has an ominous third nickname: “Hurricane Alley”.

This region is notably prone to hurricanes and severe storms, many of which can spring up as if out of nowhere, more than powerful enough to sink a ship. In fact, many Bermuda Triangle “disappearances” have been officially attributed to storms - something which many early, sensationalist writers “forgot” to mention. What’s more, the Triangle is also home to the largest marine trench in the Atlantic Ocean, the Puerto Rico Trench, which was and still is far too deep to be effectively searched for wrecks… which means that, as scientists work on mapping the ocean floor in greater detail, it’s possible that we’ll stumble across many of the wreckages that were previously “unexplained”. A lost Bermuda Triangle ship was already identified in 2020, for example, ninety-five years after it vanished: the SS Cotopaxi had been sailing to Havana when it disappeared in 1925, thought to have been downed by a violent storm near St Augustine. What exactly happened to it is still a little mysterious, but in finding the wreck we do at least know that it wasn’t taken by aliens or warped to another dimension!

Of course, another count against the Bermuda Triangle harbouring some kind of unique, supernatural quality is that there are plenty other weird stories from the ocean the world over, that are nothing to do with the Sargasso Sea. In 1928, for example, the Danish ship København was lost while sailing from Buenos Aires to Australia. It was the largest sailing ship around at the time, so you might think it would have been easy to find its wreckage… but no, it disappeared without a trace. There was also the famous case of the Mary Celeste, a seemingly abandoned boat discovered near the Azores in 1872. The cargo was all intact and the ship was in good order, but the entire crew and one of the lifeboats was missing - never to be seen again. More recently there’s the case of Kaz II, a small yacht found adrift near Australia in 2007. It was also missing its entire crew (who have never been found), though it did have working computers with GPS and radio on board when it was discovered. These are mysteries of the sea to match anything the Bermuda Triangle has seen, and yet they’re nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle at all.

Ultimately, hundreds of ships and planes have been lost with little to no explanation over the years; most likely most of them in freak storms or accidents. But, despite its reputation, the Bermuda Triangle is statistically no different from any other stretch of water. It’s only that its legend far surpasses anywhere else in the sea. The tales of aliens, monsters and time travel ramp up the intrigue and fear factor… but that’s what really happens to ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle.