THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE DELUSION
“You may fool all the people some of the time. . .”
A delusion is something that is accepted as true when, in reality, it is false or unreal. It is a mistaken belief that is maintained despite the existence of contradictory evidence from creditable sources. The perpetrator of a delusion may be unaware of the truth, or s/he could be a deliberate perpetrator of it.
Delusions may be due to incompetent research, chicanery, deception, trickery, deceit, fake, fraud, fantasy, yet it often becomes “common knowledge” due to uncritical copying and constant repetition. It is the opposite of reality. Consider, for example, current-day politics.
In my 1975 book, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved, I concluded that the Bermuda Triangle is a “manufactured mystery.” I chose those words because I did not want to declare that the writers of the articles and books that had created the “mystery” were deliberately perpetuating a fraud. They were simply getting paid for cranking out articles and books on a popular topic that the early (1950s) UFO books, the men’s adventure magazines such as Argosy and Saga, the tabloids, and other books were pushing at the time. Perhaps the creators of the “mystery” (the Mysteryans) actually believed that what they were writing was true.
My conclusion, now almost 40 years later, still is that the Bermuda Triangle is a “manufactured mystery” based upon a flood of false, inaccurate, poorly researched, poorly analyzed and distorted information that was widely publicized by the media in the 1970s and has regained life on the Internet.
The Bermuda Triangle a worldwide delusion. It has been repeated so many times that many people accept it as truth while knowing almost nothing of its specific details. The state of current-day politics again comes to mind.
An obvious question then, is, what does it matter if people believe that forces “beyond the laws of science as we now know them,” out there in the Triangle, are capturing ships, boats, planes, and people, and that scientists, the Coast Guard, Navy, Lloyd’s of London, and other experts are said to be baffled by it all?
If those alleged strange unknown forces are only fiction -- light entertainment for the masses -- what does it matter? So what if some people believe there are paranormal forces in the Bermuda Triangle, or if they believe in other topics such as UFO captures, psychic powers, astrology, ancient astronauts, and ads to make themselves rich or to lose 30 pounds by the end of the month? What is the harm in it?
For most of us, the alleged mysterious losses in the Bermuda Triangle have no impact on our lives. They are merely topics of interest, an enigma, a puzzle to ponder and to entertain us. Few of us will ever be affected by whether or not there are strange, unknown forces out there, or anywhere else.
The words “Bermuda Triangle” have become part of the language. In baseball it is any part of the field where a batted ball cannot be caught. It is the late innings when a relief pitcher enters the game with the lead and loses it. In finance it is where invested money disappears. It is the part of the brain where logic fails to work. In politics it is where the votes of people go who let their emotions rule, rather than becoming informed on the issues and their unintended consequences.
Yes, there is an issue regarding the Bermuda Triangle that is of much greater importance than whether ships, planes, and people are mysteriously disappearing because of alleged paranormal or other supposed mysterious forces.
“You can even fool some of the people all the time. . .”
The answer is that, in this age of information explosion, it is worrisome that so many people are so easily fooled, that they readily believe so many things without requiring any evidence, that they employ so little skepticism, have such a lack of curiosity and attention to detail. Skepticism seems to be in short supply today, unless politicians are debating each other.
The need for healthy skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of crucial importance in everyday life. A healthy dose of skepticism and attention would have saved billions of dollars from disappearing during the dot com debacle in the early 2000s. It would have kept trillions of dollars from vanishing during the more recent housing bust and Ponzi schemes.
Paying closer attention might have prevented the November 2009 massacre at Ford Hood, Texas. It might have stopped the Christmas Day 2009 bomb-attempter from boarding the Detroit-bound airplane. There were many Red Flags and Unconnected Dots in both cases that were ignored due to a lack of paying attention, a lack of skepticism. Another example that went on for years was the failure of numerous adults in high places of authority to pay attention to the Red Flags in the child abuse situation at Penn State.
Then there are the elections. How many are won because people are entranced by a smooth talker’s promises rather than by the candidate who makes hard decisions based upon logic, experience, and knowledge? Why does the public rant about throwing out all the politicians, then re-elect most of them time after time? Do we live in a modern-day variation of the Emperor’s New Clothes, of lemmings running into the sea because all the other lemmings do, but with consequences of far greater importance?
Here are some of the questions I asked when I began my research on the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1970s:
The stories that the mystery writers (the Mysteryans) were telling – are they true?
What were the sources of information they used, incident by incident?
If the issue is so important, why do they rarely show their sources of information?
What, exactly, is the evidence that supports the mysteries that are still being told?
Are the “disappearances” being told accurately, without distortions or dramatizations?
The area where the disappearances are said to be occurring -- is it really a relatively small wedge of the ocean, as they say. Does it actually have boundaries?
A crucial part of the “mystery” is that the weather is good when a “vanishment” occurs. Is that true? Is there information that proves it?
Those seemed to be fair questions for me to ask while investigating the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1970s.
What hard evidence is there that the mystery is real?
The need for healthy skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of crucial importance in everyday life. A healthy dose of skepticism and attention would have saved billions of dollars from disappearing during the dot com debacle in the early 2000s. It would have kept trillions of dollars from vanishing during the more recent housing bust and Ponzi schemes.
Paying closer attention might have prevented the November 2009 massacre at Ford Hood, Texas. It might have stopped the Christmas Day 2009 bomb-attempter from boarding the Detroit-bound airplane. There were many Red Flags and Unconnected Dots in both cases that were ignored due to a lack of paying attention, a lack of skepticism. Another example that went on for years was the failure of numerous adults in high places of authority to pay attention to the Red Flags in the child abuse situation at Penn State.
Then there are the elections. How many are won because people are entranced by a smooth talker’s promises rather than by the candidate who makes hard decisions based upon logic, experience, and knowledge? Why does the public rant about throwing out all the politicians, then re-elect most of them time after time? Do we live in a modern-day variation of the Emperor’s New Clothes, of lemmings running into the sea because all the other lemmings do, but with consequences of far greater importance?
Here are some of the questions I asked when I began my research on the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1970s:
The stories that the mystery writers (the Mysteryans) were telling – are they true?
What were the sources of information they used, incident by incident?
If the issue is so important, why do they rarely show their sources of information?
What, exactly, is the evidence that supports the mysteries that are still being told?
Are the “disappearances” being told accurately, without distortions or dramatizations?
The area where the disappearances are said to be occurring -- is it really a relatively small wedge of the ocean, as they say. Does it actually have boundaries?
A crucial part of the “mystery” is that the weather is good when a “vanishment” occurs. Is that true? Is there information that proves it?
Those seemed to be fair questions for me to ask while investigating the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1970s.
What hard evidence is there that the mystery is real?
“You can’t fool all of the people all the time.” Abe Lincoln.
9/15/13 Larry Kusche (Kusche rhymes with bush)
The Bermuda Triangle