Simple Facts Sink Silly Superstition
Newcastle Herald
Saturday October 30, 2004
WHAT'S the deal with the Bermuda Triangle? It's a great big, huge truckload of hooey, that's what the deal is.
The story goes that there's this big patch of water that spells death for any ships or planes that stray into it. Seems an extraordinary number of craft go missing in the triangle. Maybe they get abducted by aliens, maybe they get sucked into some wormhole and are living happily in 2212, maybe giant water lizards with laser beam eyeballs shot the planes out of the sky and sunk the ships. It doesn't matter because none of it is true. The triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. It can vary immensely in size based on which conspiracy buff you're talking to. Now, making the triangle bigger means the number of planes or ships that came to grief in the area also gets bigger. They've also been known to add air crashes that didn't happen in the triangle to its statistics, they've fudged some evidence and ignored other explanations. For instance, the Bermuda Triangle is right next to the area where most Atlantic hurricanes start, and the Gulf Stream flows turbulently through it as well. It seems more likely those conditions are the reasons why ships and planes can hit trouble there. Also, the depth of the water varies from pretty shallow right down to 9000 metres. That explains why wreckage is never found.The simple fact is the triangle receives a lot of traffic, so the number of wrecks isn't really that unusual at all.
© 2004 Newcastle Herald