PJ Vogt

It was the very first time I made Doug chuckle.

Although, unfortunately, I was not joking.

After the break, bro, what is this?

The Bermuda Triangle, the actual one, not the metaphor for our listeners' crotches, in real life is a patch of ocean in between the coasts of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda.

It's an unofficial place with no defined boundaries.

People draw and redraw its lines all the time.

The Bermuda Triangle is not quite real.

It's true-ish, story true, the way a lot of things are these days.

The facts tell us that planes and ships really do disappear in that area.

Famously, the USS Cyclops and its 306 crew and passengers vanished without a trace there in March 1918.

And people tell the story of Flight 19, a group of five Navy bombers who disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1945.

The idea that there's something deeply mysterious causing disappearances like these comes from a 1960s magazine article from a writer named Vincent Gaddis.

Gaddis, a lousy reporter and a great storyteller, exaggerated almost everything about this place he named the Bermuda Triangle.

He left out anything inconvenient to the legend.

For example, while yes, the disappearances there are mostly real, they make more sense once you include their obvious explanation, which Gaddis left out.

The area he calls the Bermuda Triangle is a very busy corridor, a high-traffic shipping lane with lots of islands and shallow water.

The higher traffic alone explains the higher incidence of accidents.

Once you adjust for just that fact, the Bermuda Triangle as a statistical phenomenon disappears.

Except as a story, the Bermuda Triangle never goes away.

It's in our imagination as a useful metaphor for something else.