Bermuda Triangle debunking ‘old news’

The Bermuda Triangle is the same as it ever was.

Which is to say, a mythic fisherman’s tale with no real grounding in science.

The area, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, grabbed headlines earlier this week, as The Sun-Sentinel, the largest paper in southern Florida, published a story saying that US federal officials had debunked the age-old myth of that area of the Atlantic being a supernatural vortex of bad luck and ill fortune.

The problem? The agency that featured the Bermuda Triangle blurb says that the news isn’t, well, new. A spokesman for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the entry was posted as an educational factoid in 2010. No matter, soon after The Sun-Sentinel’s reportage, the story had rattled around the echo chamber of 21st century media, appearing in weather blogs and local radio.

The area known as the Bermuda Triangle stretches from — you guessed it — Bermuda to Miami, Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The US Navy has denied the existence of that stretch of ocean being tied to any navigational problems for decades.

The myth is largely built on some high profile incidents where planes and ships were lost at sea, seemingly without explanation.

There was the USS Cyclops, a naval vessel that sunk inside the triangle in 1918. In 1945, a handful of naval planes were lost at sea inside the Bermuda Triangle.

There are other tales — a crew of a five-masted schooner went missing in 1919, while the ship was found run aground in North Carolina in 1921. In 1948, an aircraft disappeared while on a flight from San Juan to Miami.

Researchers over the years, however, have debunked the myth numerous times, finding that there are no more accidents in the area than in other, comparable ocean regions.