December 5, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bermuda Triangle

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how an urban legend develops, how it gets challenged, and what it tells us about the human power of such legends nonetheless.

The five naval jets known collectively as Flight 19 may have disappeared in 1945, but the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to develop with Edward Van Winkle Jones’s 1950 Miami Herald article “Same Big World: Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton age.” Or maybe it was two years later—Jones charted a number of such mysteries in his article, while George X. Sand devoted his entire 1952 Fate magazine article “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door” to the Bermuda Triangle specifically. Or maybe the legend really took off with Allen W. Eckert’s 1962 American Legion Magazine article “The Mystery of the Lost Patrol”; or with Vincent Gaddis’s 1964 Argosy magazine article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” which Gaddis expanded into the book Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea (1965). In truth, it was the cumulative effect of these multiple stories and others across a couple decades that firmly established this mysterious region as an full-fledged urban legend, one that was still very much in force when I was growing up a couple decades later.

Yet still in force doesn’t mean unchallenged, and indeed one of the most extended and successful takedowns of the legend had been published two years before I was born. In 1975 Larry Kusche, who as a research librarian and trained pilot was perfectly positioned to challenge the legend, authored the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (he would publish a follow-up, The Disappearance of Flight 19, five years later). What I really like about Kusche’s work is that he took the legend seriously, not only overall but also and especially in terms of the specific stories out of which it had been built—and then thoroughly investigated the details and realities of those stories, as well as those (such as weather events) which had often been left out. For an example of overall challenges, Kusche found that the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in this area was not proportionally greater than anywhere else on the world’s oceans; while for a specific challenge, he learned that a plane purported to have disappeared in 1937 had really just crashed near Daytona Beach in full view of witnesses. It seems difficult to imagine anyone reading Kusche’s work with an open mind and still giving unquestioning credence to this urban legend.

But at the same time, I hope this whole weeklong series has illustrated not just the prevalence and persistence of urban legends, but the power that they hold in our imaginations. And for an excellent explanation of that power, I think we need look no further than both main phrases in the title of that first 1950 newspaper article from Edward Van Winkle Jones. “Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age”: who wants to believe that our technological or scientific advancements can take all mystery out of the world? And “Same Big World”: as various factors and trends have made the world feel smaller and more understandable, it remains crucially important to recognize just how much of that world is still outside of our collective understanding, with the oceans at the top of that list to be sure. That’s a scary proposition, especially for those who find themselves confronted with those mysteries (as the pilots of Flight 19 seem to have been). But as someone who believes deeply in the power of stories and imagination, it’s also a comforting thing—and a great reason why we need, and hopefully will continue to create and propagate, our urban legends.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?