Where's the Bermuda Triangle? Location, Corners and Myths

Where’s the Bermuda Triangle on a map?

The short answer to where’s the Bermuda Triangle: in the western North Atlantic Ocean, off the southeastern coast of the United States. The most widely repeated version uses three corners:

• Miami, Florida, on the US mainland, the western point.
• Bermuda, the isolated island group far out in the Atlantic, the northern point.
• San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean, the southern point.

Join those three dots and you get a long, lopsided triangle that encloses a great deal of open ocean. A rough center point often given for the region is around 25°N, 71°W, which falls in open water far from any of the three corners.

So where’s the Bermuda Triangle in political terms? Nowhere, officially. Its corners sit on land governed by different authorities, but the triangle itself belongs to no one, because as far as any government is concerned it does not exist.

For a closer look at how those corners plot out, the guide to the Bermuda Triangle on a map walks through why the shape drifts from one telling to the next.

Why the borders keep moving

Here is the strange part. No government, navy or mapping agency ever drew the Bermuda Triangle. The US Board on Geographic Names does not list it as an official place. Its borders were drawn by writers, and writers did not agree.

The first outline came in 1952, when a short article in Fate magazine described a watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. In 1964, Vincent Gaddis tightened it in Argosy magazine, naming Miami, San Juan and Bermuda as the three vertices. That is the version most people picture today.

Later authors were not bound by it. Some gave the triangle different corners and boundaries, and at least one version stretched the danger zone all the way to the coast of Ireland. Depending on who drew it, the triangle has covered somewhere between about 500,000 and 1.5 million square miles (roughly 1.3 to 3.9 million square kilometers).

This matters more than it seems. If the edges move, so does the list of incidents. A wreck counted inside the triangle by one author sits well outside it for another. Asking where’s the Bermuda Triangle is therefore really asking which writer you are reading.

Common versions compared

The companion piece on the Atlantic Ocean Bermuda Triangle map goes deeper into the corners, the size estimates and the myths attached to each.

Devil’s Triangle and Bermuda Triangle: one place, two names

The Devil’s Triangle is simply another name for the same stretch of water. The two terms are used interchangeably, and both point to the region between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Whichever name is used, the answer to where’s the Bermuda Triangle stays the same. The darker name also served as the title of Richard Winer’s 1974 book, The Devil’s Triangle, one of several books on the subject published that year.

The older reputation of nearby waters helped. The Sargasso Sea, which lies close by, already had a reputation as a mysterious region where ships might become lost, so this part of the Atlantic carried a whiff of menace before anyone drew a triangle on it.

How the legend was built, decade by decade

The Bermuda Triangle is a modern legend with a surprisingly traceable paper trail.

1. 1950. A Miami Herald writer, Edward Van Winkle Jones, wrote an article on disappearances in the Bermuda area that the Associated Press distributed to newspapers across the country on September 17. It is the earliest known suggestion of a pattern.
2. 1952. George X. Sand’s “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door” in Fate magazine sketched the triangular area and listed losses since World War II, including the tramp steamer Sandra, Flight 19, a 1948 fishing skiff carrying three men including the jockey Albert Snider, a DC-3 charter flight lost between Puerto Rico and Miami in December 1948, and the airliner Star Ariel in January 1949.
3. 1962. Allan W. Eckert revisited Flight 19 in The American Legion Magazine, attributing to the flight leader a now-famous line about everything looking wrong and the ocean not looking as it should.
4. 1964 and 1965. Vincent Gaddis coined the name in Argosy with “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” argued for a pattern dating back to at least 1840, then expanded the idea into the book Invisible Horizons.
5. 1969 to 1974. John Wallace Spencer’s Limbo of the Lost, Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle and Winer’s The Devil’s Triangle carried the idea to a wider audience, several of them leaning on supernatural explanations.

By the mid-1970s, the question of where’s the Bermuda Triangle had been answered in print many times over, each time a little differently, and the region had become one of the best-known mysteries in the world, a staple alongside tales like the Philadelphia Experiment.

The famous cases and what the record shows

A handful of losses carry most of the legend’s weight. They are real events, and some involved real loss of life. The question is whether anything about them was unusual, and in a few cases whether they even fit the usual answer to where’s the Bermuda Triangle at all.

Flight 19 (1945)

In December 1945, five US Navy torpedo bombers on a training mission never returned. It is the case most often cited as proof that something odd happens in these waters. The haunting quotation describing a disoriented flight leader, with everything strange and the ocean looking wrong, comes from a magazine article published in 1962, seventeen years after the flight.

USS Cyclops

The Navy collier Cyclops was carrying a full load of manganese ore when she was lost. Her loss remains the largest single loss of life in US Navy history not related to combat, which is why she appears on nearly every Triangle list. Her fate is a genuine maritime tragedy, though a heavily loaded ship lost at sea does not require an exotic cause.

HMS Atalanta (1880)

The British sail training ship left Bermuda’s Royal Naval Dockyard for England in January 1880 and disappeared with her crew. A powerful storm crossed her route a couple of weeks after she sailed, and much of the crew were inexperienced trainees. Decades later she was pulled into Triangle lore, a claim researcher David Francis Raine examined and rejected in 1997.

V. A. Fogg (1972)

One Triangle author described the tanker’s bodies as having vanished, except for a captain found at his desk clutching a coffee cup. The Coast Guard, in fact, photographed the wreck and recovered several bodies after an explosion. The ship also sank off the coast of Texas, nowhere near the commonly accepted Triangle.

Documented versus claimed

What investigators and scientists concluded

The turning point came in 1975, when Larry Kusche published The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved. His method was patient rather than dramatic. He went back to period newspapers and records for each reported incident and checked them against the popular retellings.

What he found, in summary:

• The number of losses in the area was not unusually high in proportion to the traffic passing through it.
• Storms were often present, yet the stories sometimes described the disappearance as happening in calm weather.
• Some vessels reported missing had later turned up, but the return was never reported.
• Some incidents happened elsewhere entirely. One ore carrier said to have vanished three days out of an Atlantic port had actually been lost after leaving a Pacific port with the same name.
• One plane listed as having disappeared in 1937 crashed off Daytona Beach in front of hundreds of witnesses.

Kusche’s work showed the cost of a vague border: once the triangle could be almost anywhere, almost any wreck could be added to it. His verdict was blunt: the legend was a manufactured mystery, built from misconceptions, faulty reasoning, sensationalism and hoaxes.

Others followed. When a 1992 British television documentary asked the marine insurance market Lloyd’s of London whether unusually large numbers of ships had sunk there, Lloyd’s said they had not, and it does not charge higher rates for passing through. US Coast Guard records support the same conclusion. A 1976 Nova and Horizon documentary concluded that when researchers went back to original sources, the mystery evaporated. A 2013 World Wide Fund for Nature list of the ten most dangerous waters for shipping left the Bermuda Triangle off entirely. Australian scientist Karl Kruszelnicki has made the same point: on a percentage basis, accidents there match those anywhere else.

Ordinary explanations and stranger ones

Even if the numbers are ordinary, people still want to know why losses happen at all. Much of the answer is geographic. Where’s the Bermuda Triangle? In warm water crossed by a fast current and by the tracks of tropical storms. Both skeptics and believers have offered explanations.

The ordinary explanations

• Violent weather. Many Atlantic hurricanes pass through the region as they curve away from the Eastern Seaboard, and before weather satellites, ships often had little warning. Sudden downbursts of cold air are another hazard; one was suspected in the 1986 sinking of the Pride of Baltimore, whose crew reported winds leaping from about 20 mph to somewhere between 60 and 90 mph.
• The Gulf Stream. This powerful current flows from the Gulf of Mexico through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic, moving at up to about 6.6 feet per second at the surface. A disabled boat or ditched plane can be carried far from its last reported position.
• Compass behavior. Magnetic north and true north line up in only a few places. Around 2000, in the United States, that alignment ran along a line from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. Compass readings that shift across a huge ocean area are normal, though they can seem eerie to someone not expecting it.
• Human error. Official inquiries cite it constantly. Sailing into a storm, as businessman Harvey Conover is thought to have done aboard his yacht Revonoc south of Florida on New Year’s Day 1958, is the kind of decision that ends in loss anywhere.
• Shallow waters. NOAA points to hurricanes, Gulf Stream weather shifts and hazardous shallows as the main causes of losses in the region.

The methane idea

One theory sits between ordinary and exotic. Large deposits of methane hydrates, a frozen form of natural gas, exist on continental shelves worldwide, including the Blake Ridge off the southeastern United States. Laboratory experiments in Australia showed that rising gas bubbles can sink a model ship by reducing water density. It is an interesting mechanism, but the US Geological Survey says no large gas hydrate releases are believed to have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle for about the past 15,000 years.

The stranger explanations

Triangle writers proposed far bolder ideas. Some blamed leftover technology from Atlantis, linking it to the Bimini Road, an underwater line of stones off Bimini in the Bahamas. Followers of the psychic Edgar Cayce saw its discovery as fulfilling his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would surface in 1968; the formation is of natural origin. Others proposed time warps or a doorway to a parallel universe, and some pointed to UFOs, a thread that runs through much of the UFO and UAP literature. No evidence has supported any of these, but they remain part of the story people tell.

Why the Bermuda Triangle still pulls at people

If the record is this clear, why does the legend endure? Part of the answer is geography. The area really is vast, deep and busy, and the search area for a small plane lost over open water can be enormous. As skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford has noted, a disappearance can be mysterious in the sense of unsolved without being paranormal.

Part of it is the market. Skeptical writers such as Ernest Taves and Barry Singer argued that mystery sells, so books and television specials supporting the legend tend to outnumber careful debunkings. The same dynamic shapes plenty of subjects in the journal’s conspiracy theories coverage.

And part of it is something older. Sailors have always told stories about waters that swallow ships, and the Bermuda Triangle gives that ancient unease a modern map. It belongs as much to living folklore as to maritime history.

Mistakes people make about the triangle

• Treating it as an official zone. It has no recognized boundary.
• Taking one map as the final word on where’s the Bermuda Triangle. Different authors drew different shapes.
• Trusting incident lists at face value. Check where and when each loss happened, and what the weather was.
• Assuming “never found” means “vanished without cause.” The ocean is deep and the currents are fast.
• Forgetting the traffic. The number of reported disappearances is small next to the number of ships and planes that pass through.

So, where’s the Bermuda Triangle? On the water, it is an ordinary, heavily traveled corner of the Atlantic between Miami, Bermuda and San Juan. In the imagination, it is wherever the last good story put it. For long-form conversations about mysteries like this one, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s archive, and the full journal has more cases from the strange edges of the map.

Questions and answers

Where is the Devil's Triangle?

The Devil's Triangle is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the stretch of the western North Atlantic roughly bounded by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Richard Winer used the name as the title of a 1974 book on the subject. Both names describe the same loosely defined area, which the US Board on Geographic Names does not list as an official place.

How many planes have gone missing over the Bermuda Triangle?

There is no reliable total. Each writer drew the triangle differently, so a crash counted inside it by one author falls outside it for another. Well-known losses include the five Navy torpedo bombers of Flight 19 in 1945, a DC-3 charter flight in 1948 and the airliner Star Ariel in 1949. Researchers found that the area does not lose ships or aircraft at an unusual rate for how much traffic passes through it.

When was the Bermuda Triangle discovered?

It was never discovered as a physical place; it was described into existence. A 1950 Associated Press article first suggested unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area. In 1952 a Fate magazine article outlined a watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, and in 1964 Vincent Gaddis named it the Bermuda Triangle in Argosy magazine.

What happens in the Bermuda Triangle?

Mostly ordinary sea and air traffic crossing a busy stretch of ocean. The legend says ships and aircraft vanish there at strange rates, but the marine insurer Lloyd's of London, US Coast Guard records and later researchers found no unusual pattern. Hurricanes, the fast-moving Gulf Stream, shallow waters and human error explain the documented losses that once fed the mystery.

Is the Bermuda Triangle dangerous?

It is no more dangerous than other heavily traveled ocean regions, according to researchers who have compared the records. A 2013 World Wide Fund for Nature review of the world's ten most dangerous waters for shipping did not include it. The real hazards are tropical storms, sudden squalls, a strong current and shallow waters that demand careful navigation.

Why is it called the Bermuda Triangle?

The name comes from a 1964 Argosy magazine article by Vincent Gaddis titled The Deadly Bermuda Triangle, which fixed its corners at Miami, San Juan and Bermuda. Bermuda, the most isolated of the three points, gave the shape its name. Earlier writing in 1952 had already sketched a watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.

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