The Bermuda Triangle

The most famous stretch of water on earth: a rough triangle with its corners at Miami, San Juan and Bermuda, blamed since the 1950s for swallowing ships and aircraft, most famously Flight 19, the five Navy bombers that vanished on a training run in 1945. Later writers stretched the boundary as far as Ireland when it suited the story. Here is the part that rarely makes the paperback: the number of ships and aircraft lost here is NOT proportionally greater than any other busy piece of ocean, and the honest explanations are mundane and quite enough on their own, hurricanes, the Gulf Stream carrying wreckage far from where it went down, compass variation, and plain human error. Many of the vanishings happened in storms the storytellers left out. Go for the sailing and the wrecks, which are real and spectacular.