“You do too much - college, a job, all this time with me… You’re not Superman, you know.” - Aunt May

I. The Setup

Because he has an obscene amount of disposable income, my Amateur Scientist Podcast co-host Richard Peacock, editor of SkepticalDigest.com, is currently traipsing about the crystal clear tropical waters of the Caribbean Sea on a Carnival cruise ship. No, I’m not jealous. He’s missing out on the preternaturally humid Louisiana air that just caked my lungs as I went outside to clear the garbage men’s debris from my driveway. (This is a little game I play with Waste Management. I fill my garbage cans with refuse, they spill it all over my driveway in an attempt to “pick it up”, and I fill it right back again. The cycle repeats. My soul blackens.)

Besides, there are untold dangers to be faced aboard a Carnival cruise ship. What if you needed to dry yourself off really quickly, but you couldn’t unfold the origami monkey your porter made out of your bath towel? What if you were caught in a tempest and washed ashore on a deserted island full of cannibals or buxom, sex-starved savages with sexy bronze skin? What if they ran out of all-you-can-eat jumbo shrimp, and you were forced to choke down all-you-can-eat regular sized shrimp?

And then I considered the chilling fact that Richard may very well be chugging along into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle itself. As the witty gender-based jokes of the ship’s lounge comedian pierce their reverie, the complacent cruise-o-nauts aboard the “Celebration” could be spinning toward an atom-annihilating temporal vortex.

Of course, I quickly realized I don’t know why I assume the Bermuda Triangle would be so scary. I’m not even really sure where it is. Bermuda?

Time for some research.

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Well, depending on who you ask, the Bermuda Triangle is the triple-sided area bounded by Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico-about 500,000 square miles. Or it’s about three times that size and includes most of the Caribbean Sea. Or it’s “extra-dimensional” and “phases” in and out of our reality according to its “vibrational frequencies”. Regardless, everyone seems to agree on its basic triangular shape. Roughly.

And just what do cruise-o-nauts have to fear from the Triangle? According to legend, there have been numerous disappearances of boats, planes, swimmers, and large fish unfortunate enough to find themselves in its heart. The first such mysterious disappearance can be traced back to 1945, when five Navy planes flew a training mission into the Triangle, never to be heard from again.

There are other stories, to be sure. If you look hard enough, you can find tales of European explorers meeting similar fates hundreds of years ago. But there’s no good evidence that those stories were ever discussed before 1945. Since then, the legend has grown to include just about every shipwreck, accident, disappearance, or misplaced course off the coast of Florida. The Bermuda Triangle suffers more blame than the international banking conspiracy. (They exist, dammit! And they control the world from their subterranean bunkers!)

But with so many goings on whispered about, you’d expect to find a higher than average number of shipwrecks within its borders. Turns out, not so much. Once again, the size of the Triangle is disputed, but even when considering its smallest supposed area, it gets a higher than normal amount of ship traffic. Compared to the open ocean, the Bermuda Triangle is a veritable traffic jam of cruise ships, cargo carriers, and drunken pirates. And even still, there are no more disappearances or sinkings reported there than anywhere else on the high seas.

In fact, most of the Bermuda Triangle’s greatest hits aren’t even sourced in the books that collect them. They’re little more than tall tales-rumors upon rumors upon rumors. Pick up a typical “Death in the Water: The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle!” book, and you’re likely to find all sorts of pseudoscientific explanations for the Triangle phenomenon-aliens, dimensional vortices, wormholes, electromagnetic fields, Al-Qaeda-but no evidence that there was ever any unexplained phenomenon in the first place.

III. The Conclusion

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The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the 1945 Navy mission was simply a faulty compass. The planes were flying through a thunderstorm and had no navigational equipment. If a compass broke, there was no way of knowing where they were. They were probably taken by the salty waters of the sea, but only after they fell to the surface, lost and out of fuel. One of the rescue planes sent after the mission exploded on takeoff due to a faulty fuel tank, only serving to compound the myth of the cursed Bermuda Triangle.

So of all the things that could spoil Richard’s trip and bring his enjoyment level down to mine, the Bermuda Triangle doesn’t hold much promise. Now if only there was an outbreak of scarlet fever. Try and enjoy a vacation when you’re cooped up in quarantine with only all-you-can-eat snow crabs to quench your hunger.

No, I’m not jealous.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

Can’t get enough amateur science? Join Brian and his co-host Richard Peacock for The Amateur Scientist Podcast.