When a writer creates a piece for publication about a potentially dangerous and fatal situation such as the Bermuda Triangle, there are at least three important issues he must consider if he or she wants to be taken seriously by discerning readers.
A primary issue is to let his readers know where he found the information he is espousing. He must divulge his sources, exactly and specifically. If a writer does not do so, the reader should be especially curious. Failure to divulge sources is a waving red flag to the observant reader.
The section of this website entitled “Gaddis’s Sources” shows where he found his information. In most cases, he listed it right down to the page number in his 1965 book, Invisible Horizons, True Mysteries of the Sea. Good job, Vincent! Not many of those who followed in your footsteps did that. Many showed no source information at all.
The second factor to consider is the validity, or lack thereof, of the information the writer used from his sources. Just because information from a previous source is used does not mean it is true or accurate or even relevant. In many cases, the source that a writer listed did not give its source. It is a dead end. Copycatting of unverified material, and the failure to verify if it is accurate, was a major procedure in the growth of the Bermuda Triangle story. It still is being done today, some forty some years later.
The third, very important factor to be considered is where the source information was originally published. If the Bermuda Triangle is a matter of scientific importance, as the Mysteryans claim, there are many credible publications that could have warned of its dangers, as so many are doing today with global warming. If there truly were a lot of ships, planes, boats, and people mysteriously disappearing close to our shore, wouldn’t a warning have come from some expert in the field, in a journal such as Scientific American, National Geographic,Popular Science, American Journal of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, or Geology, just to name a few of the hundreds of journals that are published in the various subject fields touched by the Triangle?
Did the late astronomer Carl Sagan, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and popular science communicator warn us about the Bermuda Triangle? After all, one of the suggested answers to the Triangle “mystery” is UFOs, and Dr. Sagan was a major player in the research for extraterrestrial life. He even wrote a screenplay and book named Contact that became a movie starring Jody Foster as a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientist who finds strong evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make the first contact with them. He believed there was a possibility of intelligent life somewhere out there.
If Dr. Sagan suspected that extraterrestrials were already here, close to our shore, he surely would have been all over it. But he wasn’t. Nor was Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer and editor of more than 500 works of science and science fiction. Nor was Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, a sailor and America’s most distinguished naval historian. He won Pulitzer Prizes for biographies of Christopher Columbus and John Paul Jones. He knew the ocean. His concern about the Bermuda Triangle, and the concern of Sagan and Asimov, was that so many people believed such stories just because they heard them so much.
The scientific journal Geo, which deals with geophysics, the physics of the earth, including its gravitational and magnetic fields, the dynamics of the ocean, electricity and magnetism of the atmosphere -- did they show concern about the dangers of the Bermuda Triangle? The Journal of Geophysical Research, which has a section that deals with oceans, or the International Journal of Oceanography -- did any of them issue a warning? Nope.
But one publication did have the courage to warn the world of the sinister dangers closer to our shores than the island of Cuba. It was Argosy! Argosy Magazine!!
Argosy was an American magazine that was published from 1882 until its demise in 1978. It was known as the pioneer and probably was one of the most popular among the publications known as “pulp” magazines. They were inexpensive, and for many years were mostly fiction and adventure weeklies or monthlies, called pulps because of the cheap wood-pulp paper that was used so they could be sold cheaper than the “slicks” or the “glossies” that were printed on higher quality paper.
They were very popular in the early twentieth century, using the stories of famous, well-respected writers such as Zane Grey (westerns), Upton Sinclair (muckraking novels), Rex Brand and Mary Roberts Rinehart (mysteries), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and sci fi). Argosy was known for its sensational cover art, explosive stories, sea adventures, swashbucklers, Zorro stories, crime fiction, Irish soldiers, horror, fantasy, and more. The pulps would eventually become known as the predecessor of comic books, which were cutting into their market. As the pulps began to fade in the 1950s, their emphasis turned to science fiction and mystery. There might even be an occasional photo of a woman in a swim suit, but a lot more was hidden back then than it is today.
Argosy published “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” by Vincent Gaddis in its February 1964 issue. That article caught the attention of other writers who added to the growing story. Saga, a competitor of Argosy, had some articles on the Triangle, as did a growing number of other magazines, even including Cosmopolitan. Who would have thought?
Ten years later the Bermuda Triangle was a world-wide multi-million book-selling phenomenon.
A list of writers who wrote for the pulps, some still well remembered, can be found on the internet. Vincent Gaddis is not on the list but he probably should be because of that one article.