The Bermuda Triangle swallowed our reason Conspiracy culture was born in its depths

Draw a line on a map from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to San Juan, a third back to Miami. That’s the Bermuda Triangle, where planes fly into oblivion, skiffs sink without a trace, and abandoned ghost ships loll for eternity in the glassy aquamarine.

“The Bermuda Triangle is one of the most dangerous places on earth,” YouTube’s #1 creator, MrBeast recently declared as he introduced one of his infamous video shorts. “Over 100 ships and planes have gone missing with no explanation.” Beast and his bevy of tattooed-and-man-bunned bros, along with an arsenal of Lightsabers, begin their journey into the terrifying spiral of death by writing their wills. The act would prove unnecessary, as after 24 danger-free hours in a luxury yacht, they return safely to Miami — and 264 million views.

The myth of the Bermuda Triangle is now 80 years old. The inaugural date of the mystery is generally accepted as 1945, when a squadron of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers set off due east from Fort Lauderdale, never to return to base. Navy investigators attributed the loss of Flight 19 to navigational error and running out of gas, but later that year, four other fighter jets disappeared. Then, just two summers ago, in August 2023, a small plane left Fort Lauderdale only to dematerialise into the ether about 17 miles west of Eleuthera.

Scientists have sought to quell suspicions of some great, evil force with rogue wave simulations, high-altitude balloon launches, and aircraft searches. But to no avail. The white-coated eggheads continue to insist there is nothing unique about these one-million square miles of ocean, despite the incontrovertible evidence of an AI video making the rounds on Facebook of a drone catching a sea monster in the act of bearing hundreds of razor-sharp teeth.

“There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association declared in 2010. The insurance market Lloyd’s of London agrees, and there is no surcharge for ships passing through this dreaded neighbourhood. The US Coast Guard and the US Navy have both given the official “nothing to see here” — which is precisely what every conspiracy theorist would expect them to say.

The myth got juiced in 1964, when an article appeared in Argosy Magazine asking the not-so-innocent question: What is there about this particular slice of the world that has destroyed hundreds of ships and planes without a trace? The article was followed 10 years later by the “bestselling saga of unexplained disappearances” (straight from the jacket copy), The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz, which sold more than 20 million copies and became an ABC Friday Night Movie. The producer was none other than Arthur Rankin, Jr., who was also responsible for animated features such Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and the clearly conspiratorial Year Without Santa Claus. Rankin died in 2014, aged 89 — in Bermuda.

All of which begs the question: Why did the Seventies become such fertile ground for American conspiracy theory? Did all that LSD eaten at Woodstock cause a culture of hallucination? Was it marijuana-induced paranoia? The nightmare of the Vietnam War broadcast every evening into American living rooms? OPEC driving gasoline prices through the roof? Whatever the reasons, Pew Research Centers polls showed a 40% drop from 1964 to 1974 in the number of Americans who would trust the government “to do what is right just about always/most of the time”.

One thing is certain: the publication of books such as The Illuminatus!, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, and The Turner Diaries, alongside movies such as The Parallax View, Executive Action, and Soylent Green indicated a major uptick in Seventies conspiracy culture. Fleetwood Mac cashed in on the paranoia with “Bermuda Triangle” (“Nobody seems to know just what it is/And the Air Force won’t let on”), while Milton Bradley Corporation (purveyors of “Connect Four,” and “Twister”) released the Bermuda Triangle Board Game. The goal here was to earn $350,000 by moving different goods (lumber, sugar, bananas, oil) to different ports without being swallowed by a bluish ink stain in the middle of the board that somehow stood for the “sinister mystery cloud” that “hovers, weaves and sweeps”. In short, junior’s first lesson in contrails as a smokescreen for globalism.

Of course, it’s easy to mock disco era conspiracy, illustrated in that episode of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, “The Bermuda Triangle Crisis”, still being discussed by creepy nerds on YouTube who surround themselves with plastic replicas of Princess Diana of Themyscira (available on eBay for around $50). The episode featured a megalomaniacal arms dealer named Ramond Manta, played by Charles Cioffi of X-Files fame, who has taken over a secret island in the Triangle to build a secret army — coincidentally at the very same spot where the United States is building a confidential nuclear facility. Perhaps Jeffrey Epstein’s private island emerged from this same playbook? Little Saint James — aka, Paedophile Island — is located within the same general area.

All of which is to say that a seldom noted element of conspiracy culture is that the QAnons and MAHAs of today were board game-playing, FM-radio listening, cartoon-watching children of yesteryear. A November 1976 episode of Jabberjaw, a short-lived, third-rate popular animation starring a great white shark with a Brooklyn accent, was devoted to “The Bermuda Triangle Tangle”. Thus were a generation of kids initiated into conspiracy culture.

And once the kids understood the basics (devilish sect of subversives intent on global domination), the next step was to make it sexy. In 1975, the ABC Movie of the Week was Satan’s Triangle, featuring a requisite floating ghost ship, a failed helicopter rescue, and Seventies-style casual sex with a platinum blonde, Kim Novak, who just happens to be possessed by the devil. The femme fatale formula proved to be so successful that four years later came a virtual carbon copy called The Bermuda Depths. The screenplay was written by William Overgard, who was best known for comic strips, which makes a great deal of sense since there is always a cartoonish element to conspiracy.

The Bermuda Depths debuted Connie Sellecca, who tromps around in a bikini oblivious to the dangers posed by a Godzilla-sized evil sea turtle that brays like a pack of humpback whales as it makes its way through the turbid blue. Sellecca’s career would reach a peak of sorts when she made the cover of People magazine wearing a $30,000 bridal gown for her wedding with proto-MAHA New Age musician and health guru John Tesh, who would eventually suggest on Parler that we might combat Covid with a “world of divine healing”, which “does not involve Dr Fauci or the Dominion software”.

By the close of the Seventies, the Pentagon Papers, Agent Orange and Watergate had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was indeed a deep state involved in all sorts of nefarious deeds. And writers and producers had their ears to the ground. Roddy McDowall made as much clear in an episode of the science fiction series The Fantastic Journey, in which a ship filled with scientists passes through the emerald mist of the Bermuda Triangle, which compresses past, present and future into a single moment. The conflation of time has similarly become an essential element of modern conspiratorial thought, wherein the assassination of JFK, 5G and the dot-com boom coalesce into a single matrix of evil plotted by a secret sect of power-hungry evil-doers, intent on global domination.

The problem now is what was once the purvey of animated oversimplification has gone to the top: Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth with his Dr. Evil directive: Kill everyone. Kristi Noem as the ICE Barbie leading legions of masked goons. Presidents so old and doddering they cannot complete a grammatical sentence. Tech-meisters like Peter Thiel railing about the Antichrist. The idea that there will soon be trillionaires. Our present-day cartoon world is fit for the frayed neurons of MrBeast’s 300 million plus followers.

It seems America’s intellectual landscape, for all its super-tech whizz-bangery, has failed to advance beyond the tropes of Sunday morning cartoons, Movies of the Week, and plastic replicas of loin-cloth Diana. It should come as no surprise that as we reach the 80th anniversary of those evaporated TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, no celebration has been planned. The hoodoo of the triangle endures quite well without it.

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