Located around 600 miles east of the nearest continent, Bermuda is one of the nine smallest places in the world. Bermuda is vulnerable to frequent harsh weather due to its location on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and its small size (only 21 square miles). More than 50 ships and 20 airplanes are thought to have vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, a region of the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North America.
The mysterious reputation of the Bermuda Triangle has been attributed to anything from extraterrestrial gateways and temporal vortexes to paranormal events and even the lost city of Atlantis since the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Charles Berlitz helped publicize the enigma. Despite the panic, the triangle is not depicted on any official maps used by governments or shipping firms, and experts from the United States Coast Guard to Lloyd's of London insist that there is no increased risk of marine tragedies in this area. Other critics point out that the triangle is located in a region prone to freak storms and waves, and they attribute any disappearances to the Gulf Stream and the great depths of the ocean.
Several ships have gone down in the waters around Bermuda over the past 500 years. Bermuda has been infamously known as 'Shipwreck Island' of the Western Atlantic due to the fact that there have been 13 official major shipwrecks there since 1940. Several large ships are also thought to have run aground during World War 2, in addition to a large number of yachts. It's not unreasonable to expect a shipwreck within a mile of Bermuda, given the island's complex reef system and the availability of navigational technology dating back to the 1800s. Even the most skilled native skippers use extreme caution when passing in and out of the reef.
Most, if not all, of the disappearances might be attributable to environmental factors. Many ships have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle due to the high frequency with which tropical cyclones and hurricanes in the Atlantic pass through this region. The Gulf Stream can sometimes bring about unexpectedly severe weather shifts. In addition, there are many regions of shallow water that might be dangerous to ship navigation due to the huge number of islands in the Caribbean Sea. As an added bonus, there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Bermuda Triangle is a location where a "magnetic" compass occasionally indicates "true" north rather than "magnetic" north.
Despite the fact that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished halfway across the world, some have speculated that the disappearance may be related to the Bermuda Triangle. The five "Flight 19" Navy planes vanished in the triangle on a training flight in 1945. There was never any sign of the planes or their 14 missing crewmembers, leading many to believe they ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. The mysterious sinking of the SS Marine Sulphur Queen at Key West, Florida, in 1963 is another well-known event. The wreck was never found, but life preservers and other objects were subsequently found floating in the ocean. The reason of the accident is still unknown.
No international map features the Bermuda Triangle, and the United States Board on Geographic Names does not consider it to be a legitimate part of the Atlantic Ocean. Many vessels and aircraft reported lost in the area have yet to have their wreckage located. The causes of the mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle remain a mystery.
When bad weather or faulty navigation enter the picture, the ocean can be an extremely dangerous environment for humans. This holds true wherever you go. There is no proof that the Bermuda Triangle has a higher rate of strange disappearances than any other huge, well-traveled area of the ocean. Until recently, the dominant scientific philosophy for the mysterious disappearance of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle was that pockets of Methane Gas exploded to the surface of the ocean. The idea explains the sudden bursting of methane gas on the ocean surface as a result of massive amounts of the gas being trapped on the ocean floor around Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico. Any ships nearby would be swallowed by the resulting gas explosion, sink, and be swiftly covered by the roiling mud.