Ships and boats have gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean for centuries, and airplanes since not long after they took off, but the concept of a specific region where they disappear off the southeastern coast of the United States for reasons unknown is fairly recent, historically speaking.
The idea that the area is haunted by unknown forces that cause mysterious disappearances was given a clever, catchy name by Vincent H. Gaddis in his February 1964 article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” that appeared in Argosy, a popular but now defunct men’s pulp adventure and occasional girlie magazine. A shortened version of the article appeared in the July/August 1964 issue of Flying Saucer Review. See a description of Argosy in the Details section of this website.
The Argosy article, with a few changes, then became Chapter 13, “The Triangle of Death,” in Gaddis’s 1965 book, Invisible Horizons; True Mysteries of the Sea. In what would be a rarity among the throng that would eventually write about the “mystery of the Bermuda Triangle,” Gaddis listed the sources that he used as the basis for his information.
Gaddis’s input was the snowball that started the avalanche of Bermuda Triangle magazine articles, books, documentaries, movies, and the popular belief in strange forces just off the coast of the United States.
(One current website includes, among a multitude of other errors, the claim that the book Wings of Mystery by Dale Titler, rather than the writings of Gaddis, created the concept of the Bermuda Triangle and that Titler, not Gaddis “set the tone” for the Triangle phenomenon. That error, one of many mistaken attempts in that website to declare that my analysis of the solution to the Triangle “mystery” is wrong, is explained in Gaddis/Titler in the Details section of this website).
Gaddis’s Definition of the Bermuda Triangle:
Gaddis wrote “draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this roughly triangular area, known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle,’ most of the total vanishments have occurred. Others have happened in adjacent areas to the north and east in the Atlantic, south in the Caribbean, and west in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Gaddis did not mention how far the “adjacent areas” extended in the other directions, while at the same time adding that “this relatively limited area is the scene of disappearances that total far beyond the laws of chance.” He presented no information as to what the laws of chance were, or what, if anything, was his source of information about any such “laws,” or if it was merely a phrase that was crafted to sound scientific and well-researched.
An examination of the world globe lends perspective to the area described by Gaddis. The Florida to Bermuda to Puerto Rico to Florida triangle, which is close to 1000 miles on a side, measures approximately 433,000 square miles. A reasonable estimate would double, at least, his “adjacent areas,” which brings it to roughly 1,000,000 square miles, or about one third the size of the Continental United States. Is that relatively limited? But wait, there’s more. While declaring how small/ limited the Bermuda Triangle is, roughly half of Gaddis’s “mysteries” came from well outside his “extended areas.” Way far outside, yet he still listed them as mysteries of the “relatively limited” area. See the Gaddis Map in the Details section for those “mysteries.”
Despite the Gaddis “mysteries” that are included from the “adjacent” undefined areas, and other additions added by later Mysteryans, the Bermuda to Puerto Rico to Florida concept continues to be touted by the Mysteryans as a “limited area” of unexplained “vanishments.”
The Gaddis Map also shows the intended routes and/or last known or estimated positions of roughly half of his “Bermuda Triangle mysteries” that are the basis of many of the stories that have been copied and repeated by later Mysteryans, many of whom did little or no research of their own to find the true locations and routes of the missing vessels. As can be seen on that map, approximately half of his “mysteries” occurred nowhere near the Triangle. Also, when properly researched, most are logically and realistically explainable. There is a significant difference between a mystery and a lack of accurate and truthful information.
See Triangle Size in the Details section for an analysis of the delusion that has long been perpetrated about the “relatively limited size” of the alleged mystery area by various Mysteryans who followed Gaddis’s lead.