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The Bermuda Triangle
Since 1943 hundreds of plane and ships, and thousands of people, have disappeared in the ocean between Bermuda and the Florida coast, the Bermuda Triangle. A squadron of five aeroplanes have gone missing, a ship was found abandoned with no sign of the crew or passengers. Charles Berlitz set out to investigate and has spoken to numerous people who have escaped the terrifying forces of the Bermuda Triangle. The explanations he finds seem to be impossible but no-one has found more plausible Are UFO's responsible? Is it due to space-time warps created by long-vanished civilisations? What is the connection to the lost continent of Atlantis?
206 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
147 people are currently reading
1781 people want to read
About the author
Charles Berlitz
118 books72 followersBorn in NYC, Berlitz was the grandson of Maximilien Berlitz, who founded the Berlitz Language Schools. As a child, Charles was raised in a household in which (by father's orders) every relative & servant spoke to Charles in a different language. He reached adolescence speaking eight languages fluently. In adulthood, he recalled having had the delusion that every human spoke a different language, & wondering why he didn't have his own like everyone else. His father spoke to him in German, his grandfather in Russian, his nanny in Spanish.
He began working for the family's Berlitz School of Languages, during college breaks. The publishing house, of which he was vice president, sold, among other things, tourist phrase books & pocket dictionaries, several of which he authored. He also played a key role in developing record & tape language courses. He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after he sold the company to publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale Univ.
Berlitz was a writer on anomalous phenomena. He wrote a number of books on Atlantis. In his book The Mystery of Atlantis, he used evidence from geophysics, psychic studies, classical literature, tribal lore, archeology & mysteries & concluded that Atlantis was real. Berlitz also attempted to link the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis. He claimed to have located Atlantis undersea in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. He was also an ancient astronaut proponent who believed that extraterrestrials had visited earth.
Berlitz spent 13 years on active duty in the US Army, mostly in intelligence. In 1950, he married Valerie Seary, with whom he had a daughter, Lynn. He died in 2003 at the age of 89 at University Hospital in Tamarac, FL.
He began working for the family's Berlitz School of Languages, during college breaks. The publishing house, of which he was vice president, sold, among other things, tourist phrase books & pocket dictionaries, several of which he authored. He also played a key role in developing record & tape language courses. He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after he sold the company to publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale Univ.
Berlitz was a writer on anomalous phenomena. He wrote a number of books on Atlantis. In his book The Mystery of Atlantis, he used evidence from geophysics, psychic studies, classical literature, tribal lore, archeology & mysteries & concluded that Atlantis was real. Berlitz also attempted to link the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis. He claimed to have located Atlantis undersea in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. He was also an ancient astronaut proponent who believed that extraterrestrials had visited earth.
Berlitz spent 13 years on active duty in the US Army, mostly in intelligence. In 1950, he married Valerie Seary, with whom he had a daughter, Lynn. He died in 2003 at the age of 89 at University Hospital in Tamarac, FL.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 141 reviews
August 17, 2017
This was the first book of this ilk I read, and I read it while still in college, so I was enthralled by it. I would have given it 5 stars had I reviewed it in those days! But since then, I have come to realise that most of these "conspiracy theories" are based upon very nebulous evidence at best, and out-and-out hoaxes at worst.
Still, giving it 3 stars for entertaining me. However, I would recommend it only if you enjoy crackpot theories.
Still, giving it 3 stars for entertaining me. However, I would recommend it only if you enjoy crackpot theories.
February 25, 2023
Esto más o menos me lo creí cuando era adolescente. Me prestó el libro una compañera de colegio. Hay teorías extravagantes sobre las desapariciones en el triángulo, después vería que no son tantas en relación al tráfico que hay allí, pero en el momento lo tomé como un libro bien documentado. Con el tiempo lo olvidé, hasta que hace unos años encontré un ejemplar en la sala de espera del médico y no pude evitar leer un poco con una sonrisa.
March 4, 2016
An interesting (and dated) look into what caused the massive amount of disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. I remember this being a thing when I was a kid in the 80s, maybe into the 90s, but I can't think of a single instance where this has come up since the major computer era of today. This book is from 1974, so it's from a different time entirely. I like to think there are still mysteries that are unsolved, and I read this book without researching any follow up to keep that air of mystery, though I'm sure there are plenty of explanations by now. The book takes on all kinds of possible explanations to the highly improbable, be it just getting lost in weather to alien abductions, magnetic gravitational oddities, to undersea intelligences including Atlantis, to something to do with prehistoric civilizations. While I found most of it fascinating, I didn't believe the vast majority of it. The author points to supposed proofs of flying machines and nuclear war before the history of mankind (12,000 years ago is a number mentioned frequently) but then includes no footnotes or hardly any passages quoted from these ancient texts. He does also mention where archaeological digs, or core samples, show clues as to this buried beneath, well, basically everything, but then without a footnote, I'm supposed to just go along with what he says, I guess. So, it could be nothing more than a flight of fancy.
Anyway, a dubious imaginative story at best, but it was still fun to read.
Anyway, a dubious imaginative story at best, but it was still fun to read.
July 14, 2022
This was a fun read from a 'nostalgia' point of view... as a child of the 70's I was a huge fan of UFO and other 'unsolved mysteries'... even back then I kind of knew, in the back of my mind, it was all just sensationalized material.
Now I find that I enjoy reading these sort of books just for that warm comfortable feeling of nostalgia... I recognize that so much of the content of books like this (and this book is a prime example) is either a bunch of misinterpreted facts or outright fabricated facts (and often the author isn't being false on purpose, he/she is just repeating false facts 3rd-hand or even 4th-hand without any fact-checking) and then wild unlikely conclusions.
So, I rate this book two ways ... if I see it as a legit non-fiction book, 1 star... as entertainment, 3-stars :)
Berlitz has an annoying habit of presenting his "facts" and quoting possible "conclusions" but he won't commit his own belief to any of the crockpot theories he puts forward... he just quotes other writers and lets them take the heat for the outlandish proposals while protecting himself from harsh judgement with a safe air of non-committal "maybe-maybe-not" attitudes throughout the book
Now I find that I enjoy reading these sort of books just for that warm comfortable feeling of nostalgia... I recognize that so much of the content of books like this (and this book is a prime example) is either a bunch of misinterpreted facts or outright fabricated facts (and often the author isn't being false on purpose, he/she is just repeating false facts 3rd-hand or even 4th-hand without any fact-checking) and then wild unlikely conclusions.
So, I rate this book two ways ... if I see it as a legit non-fiction book, 1 star... as entertainment, 3-stars :)
Berlitz has an annoying habit of presenting his "facts" and quoting possible "conclusions" but he won't commit his own belief to any of the crockpot theories he puts forward... he just quotes other writers and lets them take the heat for the outlandish proposals while protecting himself from harsh judgement with a safe air of non-committal "maybe-maybe-not" attitudes throughout the book
October 14, 2020
Not a bad read. You need to take into consideration that it was released in 1973. (The version I read was printed in 1975, the version pictured here is from 1978). Of course technologies have changed dramatically. But the accounts of the plane/ship disappearances is pretty interesting. And even though the latter part of the book fades off the subject, it does discuss some very interesting phenomenons of history. Like the giant carvings in Peru that can only be viewed in their entirety from up in a plane. How where they made by ancient man with primitive tools and no aircraft? That sort of thing. Yes, some of the info is outdated due to the book being 40 years old, but if you go into it with that in mind, it's kinda cool to read some of the theories and beliefs people came up with at that particular time in history. Not a great, grab ya' and keep you up all night kinda read, but has some very interesting parts and overall not a bad book.
December 20, 2012
While the book began as a good recounting of the disappearances of the various ships, planes, and people in the Bermuda Triangle, after the first five chapters the author branches off into so many ludicrous theories involving ancient civilizations and aliens that it was hard to get through one paragraph without rolling my eyes.
April 19, 2023
Charles Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle is a classic entry in the '70s pulp paranormal genre - certainly one of the most successful. Berlitz, a linguist-turned-paranormal investigator, was not the first to write about the Triangle (Vincent Gaddis, Richard Winer and others beat him to the punch) nor is his the best or most thorough account of the mystery, which supposedly claimed dozens of ships, airplanes and untold numbers of human victims between 1492 and the present day. Like most entries in this genre, Berlitz's book is thin on substance, lacking a bibliography or even an index; it's full of sloppy copy-editing (names of several ships and people are misspelled) and embellished details. The final chapters unwind into bonkers theorizing about Atlantis, alien abductions and the Philadelphia Experiment (to which Berlitz devoted a later book) which even devotees of pulp literature might find tiresome. But, let's face it - if you're reading a book like this you know exactly what you're getting into. It's a compendium of just-so stories - ships discovered adrift without a crew and planes that vanish after sending routine radio signals; sightings of UFOs and mysterious weather phenomena; discoveries of (supposed) ancient artifacts and underwater cities by scuba divers; long-form interviews with a few people lucky enough to escape the Triangle's clutches. Those expecting a sober, factual exploration of unsolved phenomena will likely chuck the book against the wall; readers who enjoy mysteries for their own sake will find it irresistible, reading and re-reading it until the pages yellow, the cover crumbles and the book winds up at your uncle's rummage sale.
November 1, 2018
The author describes and discusses an area known as the Bermuda triangle, an area of the Atlantic ocean located between Florida and Bermuda. Since 1945, over 1,000 people and numerous planes and ships have vanished, many without a trace.
There are many theories in circulation about the Bermuda triangle. Some think it is mere coincidence that people, planes and ships have disappeared in this area. Others think it has to do with the magnetic pull of the earth's gravitation. Yet others think it is an area of UFO activity. This book, though written over four decades ago, provides a well-written historical perspective as well as an account of many of the incidents that occurred in this area up to 1973.
The other thing I found so interesting about this book is the discussion concerning the actions of mankind and the possible ramifications for our future beyond the 1970s. It makes for interesting reading, since many thing discussed in this book are now coming to pass. If you have an interest in the subject, I highly recommend this book.
December 4, 2010
An extremely interesting nonfiction book about the strange disappearances in and around the Bermuda Triangle, this brief (208 pages) hardcover that I purchased at a library book sale discusses known disappearances and other anomalies (such as maelstroms or whirlpools) within a region of the Atlantic Ocean that the U.S. Navy doesn't officially recognize. Several theories explain the strong magnetic forces at work, including the idea that it is one portal to Hell (the Sea of Japan is said to be the other); that the Triangle is a prime area of alien abduction; and that the forces may be signals from a long-lost, superior civilization (e.g., Atlantis).
Dr. Berlitz discusses all of these theories and more in an easy-to-understand manner, as well as the geological origin of the region. I found all the stories of the disappearances fascinating, especially when one considers that the Florida Keys and much of the Caribbean Sea, a cruise destination, is within it.
Dr. Berlitz discusses all of these theories and more in an easy-to-understand manner, as well as the geological origin of the region. I found all the stories of the disappearances fascinating, especially when one considers that the Florida Keys and much of the Caribbean Sea, a cruise destination, is within it.
August 27, 2023
When I was a kid I was fascinated by the “big four” of supernatural mysteries. And while UFOs suggested encounters with the universe, the Loch Ness Monster with a prehistoric past, and Bigfoot with the mysteries of evolution, the Bermuda Triangle seemed a true enigma. Much of that was stoked by Charles Berlitz’s book, which detailed the most famous mysteries associated with the region. While I appreciate now the sensationalism in his account and the more mundane explanations of some of the key events in his account (such as Flight 19), it will always hold a sentimental place in my memory.
Read
September 26, 2019It was pretty scary and contained some wild theories about an area of the ocean in which ships and planes were supposed to disappear without a trace.
January 25, 2011
This 1973 examination of the Bermuda Triangle starts off as a scientific and factual examination of the myth and events that led travelers to request flights that avoided the western Atlantic ocean, but quickly descends into campy theories that makes the book hard to take seriously. Nonetheless, Berlitz treads the line between science and science-fiction in a way that makes both interesting. There is enough credible research to make you doubt the naysayers and actually get a little creeped out at times.
The bottom line, though, is that despite the author's ability to reasonably present information in a way that makes you view the Triangle and other urban legends with a fresh perspective, he still pushes his love for Atlantis way too hard in this forum (probably to make up enough material for a full sized book), and also the fact that this "#1 bestseller" is tied directly to the "blockbuster movie" titled the Bermuda Triangle completely destroys the last shred of dignity. I had to look the movie up online, and it is a complete mockery of any aspect of the triangle that might be real.
This book is for lovers of urban myths and Atlantis.
The bottom line, though, is that despite the author's ability to reasonably present information in a way that makes you view the Triangle and other urban legends with a fresh perspective, he still pushes his love for Atlantis way too hard in this forum (probably to make up enough material for a full sized book), and also the fact that this "#1 bestseller" is tied directly to the "blockbuster movie" titled the Bermuda Triangle completely destroys the last shred of dignity. I had to look the movie up online, and it is a complete mockery of any aspect of the triangle that might be real.
This book is for lovers of urban myths and Atlantis.
September 9, 2017
It starts off as a well-documented account of the eerie disappearances of ships and airplanes in the Bermuda triangle, told a bit like spooky bedtime stories. Then it's attempting to explain it sort of scientifically. An then it turns into the silliest thing ever. I'm not saying that there are no extraterrestrial life or anything. There probably is and it's probably another life form entirely, like a unicellular thingy or bacteria. And I suppose it's the same with life forms at the bottom of the ocean. There probably are creatures we still don't know anything about. But why on earth would they want to watch us or abduct us ??!! Come on, that's our ego talking. Also I'm not saying that ancient civilizations hadn't knowledge that we lost along the way but that they had planes and electricity and atomic bombs... It doesn't make any sense. I'm not buying it, sorry. The book is a bit old now and I would be really interested in researches that might have been made more recently about the bermuda triangle and whether there still are strange phenomena.
September 29, 2017
Alternative facts, from before the time of social media. This book in itself isn't badly written, and if one feels generous, one may assume that the writer actually believed what he wrote. And it might be added, that it unfair to use modern scientific knowledge on a book more than 40 years old. Still this book suffers from cherrypicking of facts and some of the statements "cryogenics will soon give us the opportunity to preserve life indefinately" have been proven patently false. However, it is enjoyable to read about the conjenctures of the early tinfoilhat people
July 27, 2021
Un libro Interesante y entretenido, con una gran recopilación de acontecimientos extraños en el triángulo de las bermudas, teorías y posibles argumentos. Sin embargo, el final del libro termina desviándose por teorías fantásticas que incluyen a Ovnis y civilizaciones prehistóricas con tecnología nuclear, entre otros.
January 9, 2023
This is a non-fiction book about the disappearances of boats, planes, and people in the Bermuda Triangle from the 1940s-1970s (when the book was written). It recounts the numerous disappearances, what the causes could be, and even recounds the history of this part of the world.
This was a pretty good book. A little dry, but I was interested in learning more about The Bermuda Triangle. I am still amazed at how many boats and planes disappeared without a trace here. I need to find a more current book to see if these diappearances are still happening and if they have ever located any of the missing planes and boats.
In a side not - Charles Berlitz family runs the Berlitz language school which I am familiar with - that was a neat discovery.
This was a pretty good book. A little dry, but I was interested in learning more about The Bermuda Triangle. I am still amazed at how many boats and planes disappeared without a trace here. I need to find a more current book to see if these diappearances are still happening and if they have ever located any of the missing planes and boats.
In a side not - Charles Berlitz family runs the Berlitz language school which I am familiar with - that was a neat discovery.
April 1, 2011
Although most of the sensational "mysteries" and disappearances of ships and airplanes in the "Bermuda Triangle" have since been proven to be the result of either human error or ordinary bad weather, this is still an entertaining read. For a while. After running to the computer every few pages to check on recent developments in the searches for these crafts and finding out that either wreckage has been found, or that recordings of distress signals have been digitally enhanced and turned out to be far less ominous than reported, I got more and more disenchanted. That this book is frequently listed as non-fiction is unfortunate. Nevertheless, Berlitz is a compelling writer, and it's not difficult to read. I'm sure if you like this genre and aren't terribly distracted by "facts" you may enjoy this book.
November 28, 2025
It was quite an experience to read a 40 year-old book about the Bermuda Triangle. I read an old Hebrew translation of it, which was archaic (I should have known) and badly edited, and that ruined it for me a little. The book could have been shorter had the author hadn't exaggerated with history and archeology and focused more on the subject matter (it WAS interesting, but I think it could have been a subject for a different book).
August 16, 2025
Exciting & Thrilling reading all through the book, the author has written another book after this called Ocean Triangle which is also a horror. I read these books in my school days when my mind got completely occupied with a fright for these haunted places. There may be actual Bermuda & yes it is there & things might have happened there for a coincidence still the language in the book is enchanting & ties you with the book completely.
August 29, 2017
Mistery is always atractive, and this topic, The Bermuda Triangle was one that always caught my eye. Of course, being an old book, the theories that it gives about the mysterious dissapearance of planes and boats of differents sizes and origins, are also old.
Anyway this was good for a fast reading, just to learn more about an old topic from human general culture
Anyway this was good for a fast reading, just to learn more about an old topic from human general culture
September 14, 2017
Many of the theories postulated in this famous 1974 release have been debunked. Still, the Bermuda Triangle mystery reminds us that there is still much to be learnt about mankind's history along with the Earth's natural history. Outdated but still a fun read!
October 20, 2017
Muy entretenido, era uno de mis favoritos en la infancia.
En la adultez me enteré que el 90% de los datos del libro eran una fabricación del autor, aún así el libro es entretenido, pero no para tomárselo en serio
En la adultez me enteré que el 90% de los datos del libro eran una fabricación del autor, aún así el libro es entretenido, pero no para tomárselo en serio
July 8, 2014
Oh, mysteries, strange events, inexplicable occurrences. Now I know that the whole Triangle idea is bogus, but at the time, I thought this kind of stuff was so cool.
May 12, 2016
اولين تجربه ي علمي تخيلي زندگيم
December 31, 2014
An engaging account of the unexplained mystery of the triangle.
More here:
http://inkquilletc.blogspot.in/2014/1...
More here:
http://inkquilletc.blogspot.in/2014/1...
May 5, 2017
I still think the writing could have been better.
May 12, 2021
Estuvo bien y fue interesante hasta la mitad... Después de ello fue demasiado no sé.
September 21, 2025
There's an unwritten contract when you're reading a nonfiction book, especially as a kid: that everything you're taking in is factual information. You assume that authors are honest, their chief goal is to present the world as it is, and that someone, somehow would have caught any mistakes before they made their way to print. With that assurance, readers read in the spirit of unguarded absorption, rather than the slow and painstaking resistance of active fact-checking. The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz is a betrayal of that trust. Almost nothing it has to say withstands scrutiny. It misrepresents history and science. And yet, it's bold enough to claim on the back cover: "These unexplained disappearances ... are not scenarios for a science fiction movie but recorded events of one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time". As a result, with 30 million copies in print and countless spinoff TV "documentaries", this book is primarily responsible for multiple generations of the public not only knowing the term "Bermuda Triangle", but falsely associating it with danger and disappearances.
The Bermuda Triangle itself is an invented region: it doesn't show up on standard maps, and its boundaries are inconsistently defined by proponents. The term was introduced in the 1964 Argosy article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" by Vincent Gaddis. Here's how Gaddis defined it: "Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this area, known as the 'Bermuda Triangle,' most of the total vanishments have occurred." Note the heavy lifting of the word "most"*, as well as the fact that "Florida" does not describe a single point on a map. Miami is typically substituted as the third point. Gaddis reported a handful of mysterious incidents, but his chief exhibit was the 1945 disappearance of five bombers and their 14-member crew off the coast of Florida (more on that later). The event had been written about in 1952 (Fate Magazine) and 1962 (American Legion Magazine), but even with Gaddis's new moniker, "The Bermuda Triangle" did not yet catch on with the public.
Shoot forward a decade, and trade books started covering the story, including 1973's Limbo of the Lost and 1974's The Devil's Triangle. The breakaway star, however, was 1974's The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. The author's name will sound familiar if you've heard of the Berlitz Method of language learning. That's no coincidence: Maximilian Berlitz - Charles's grandfather - founded the company in 1878. Part of the lore is that Charles was intentionally raised by diverse language speakers: his father only spoke to him in German, his mother in French, his grandfather in Russian, his nanny in Spanish, and so on. On various book jackets, he is described as speaking "thirty languages, give or take a few" (1969), a "master of thirty languages" (1974), "fluent in twenty-seven languages" (1977), and speaking "twenty-five languages with varying degrees of fluency" (1989). Whatever the number, it's impressive, but the image of Charles Berlitz as a cultured sophisticate further lent him the imprimatur of reliability. That's fine when it comes to language, but Berlitz sold the company in the 1960s and started writing books on fringe topics in addition to his works on language acquisition. The first of these was 1969's The Mystery of Atlantis (my review here), followed by 1972's Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (my review here). The Bermuda Triangle was his third effort. After its colossal success, Berlitz went on to write about unsubstantiated topics like Roswell, the Philadelphia Experiment, the search for Noah's Ark, and the coming end of the world in 1999 (we all remember that).
Berlitz is even inconsistent in how he defines the location of the triangle. On page 11 he more than doubles its size by shooting out the bottom edge far, far past Puerto Rico. "From Bermuda in the north to southern Florida, and then east to a point through the Bahamas past Puerto Rico to about 40° west longitude and then back again to Bermuda." [see illustration above] He then presents the myth: "This area occupies a disturbing and almost unbelievable place in the world's catalogue of unexplained mysteries. ... More than 100 planes and ships have literally vanished into thin air ... more than 1,000 lives have been lost in the past twenty-six years, without a single body or even a piece of wreckage from the vanishing planes or ships having been found." Berlitz cites stories of devices malfunctioning, compasses spinning, and blue skies turned yellow and hazy. His offered explanations include "sudden tidal waves caused by earthquakes, fireballs which explode the planes, attacks by sea monsters, a time-space warp leading to another dimension, electromagnetic or gravitational vortices which cause planes to crash and ships to lose themselves at sea, capture and kidnapping by flying or submarine UFOs manned by entities from surviving cultures of antiquity, outer space, or the future..." But don't worry, he's just getting warmed up. There will be many more potential culprits. One key source for Berlitz is Edgar Cayce, the clairvoyant who not only predicted that Atlantis would rise again from the sea near Bermuda in 1968 (we all remember that), but also pointed to an Atlantean crystal power source as the cause of disappearances. As he concludes in one chapter: "The deeper we go into the problem ... the more we begin to wonder whether there even exists, within our familiar framework of scientific reference, what might be called a logical explanation." You may have spotted the trend: Berlitz isn't actually interested in solving mysteries; he just likes spinning them.
Though Berlitz produces a list of 19 major ship/crew disappearances and 16 aircraft disappearances, it's worth focusing on the aforementioned 1945 disappearance of five U.S. Navy bombers: the incident know as Flight 19. The actual events are fairly well understood. The bombers set off eastward on a training exercise from Fort Lauderdale, successfully dropped their payload, turned north, but then flight instructor Charles Taylor became unaccountably confused and refused to follow protocol. In the ensuing mess of inconsistent communication, ignored advice from the tower, and the students' inability to take command, Taylor led the crew of 14 farther out into sea where they eventually ran out of fuel. The real mysteries are what was going on in Taylor's head, and where the planes eventually crashed in the Atlantic. To complicate things (and add to the lore), one of the rescue planes sent after Flight-19, a PBM Mariner flying boat, exploded mid-air, adding 13 lost lives to the day's tragic tally. That's a compelling enough story on its own, but Charles Berlitz wanted to amplify the mysterious elements. Instead of reporting on the day's rough seas and rain, Berlitz describes the planes as disappearing out of a bright, cloudless sky. Each plane normally had 3 crew members, but one person stayed on the base that day. Berlitz concocts an elaborate story about the missing crewman's psychic intuition that something wasn't right. In reality, the man had just completed his necessary flight hours and requested to be excused from the flight. The worst bit of Berlitz's fabrication involved adding dialog to the transcripts from the control tower. He cites "other listeners" as saying Taylor described anomalous white waters. He also has Taylor saying he doesn't know which way west is, everything looks different, and even the water doesn't look right. When confronted directly about these additions in a 1976 NOVA documentary, Berlitz claims he heard them from then-Lieutenant Wirshing. The documentary crew followed up with Wirshing, who said he did not keep contemporaneous notes as Berlitz had stated, and that he could not corroborate any of the added dialog because he arrived at the control tower after those communications concluded. (That documentary is fantastic, by the way. You can watch it on YouTube. Berlitz even more irresponsibly appends new dialog provided 29 years after the event (from a reporter who claims a ham radio operator told him): "Don't come after me ... they look like they are from outer space."
Berlitz has a fondness for crackpots and conspiracy theorists, and uncritically presents their pet theories alongside official sources. We've already mentioned the "Sleeping Prophet" Edgar Cayce, but Berlitz recruited another as his collaborator: Dr. J. Manson Valentine. The doctorate is in entomology, but the two connected over an obsession with the lost continent of Atlantis. Valentine gets a small credit at the intro of the book, and is the source of many of the photograph illustrations, but is also frequently cited as an independent expert in the book. For example, he is quoted as saying about the missing crew from Flight 19: "They are still here, but in a different dimension of a magnetic phenomenon that could have been set up by a UFO." Sigh. Berlitz also promotes the theories of Ivan Sanderson, who claimed "vile vortices" of magnetic aberrations were responsible for the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea (a similar triangle of doom off the coast of Japan). Berlitz also gives air time to Immanuel Velikovsky, the catastrophist whose Worlds In Collision postulated that ancient myths preserved the records of massive impacts between the planets in our solar system. He also promotes John Spencer's speculation that UFOs may be abducting people and equipment in order to ensure that we haven't developed to a degree threatening to the rest of the galaxy. Add to that Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Ralph Barker... it's a long parade of kooky white men. At one point, Berlitz expresses irritation with the Coast Guard for offering prosaic explanations and relegating his favorite "experts" to a brief bibliography. When Berlitz doesn't have someone to champion a theory, he is perfectly happy to invent one. For example, anonymous sources tell him they saw Atlantean ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Great. What are we supposed to do with that? How did they know the ships belonged to an ancient, unestablished culture? Elsewhere, he quotes an "information officer" of the U.S. Navy as saying, "It’s almost as if the ships have been suddenly covered by some sort of electronic camouflage net." Great. Just great.
I promised more phenomena offered to explain the Bermuda Triangle occurrences, so here's a handful: mists, fogs, atmospheric anomalies, electrical anomalies, blue holes (caves under the water that pull boats down?), whirlpools, tidal waves, tsunamis, seiche waves (new to me: waves caused by wind, seismic activity, or a variety of other unusual factors), clear air turbulence (also new to me), inter dimensional passageways, anti-gravitational particles of matter, and sargassum. Oh yes! How can I forget sargassum? It's a seaweed that creates huge mats of floating matter that creates all kinds of [known and understood] problems for ships. The Sargasso Sea covers a large swath of the Atlantic that overlaps the Bermuda Triangle.
At some point, Berlitz grows weary of talking about the Bermuda Triangle and devotes multiple chapters to ancient alien hypotheses and various other collected oddities. Having read quite a few of his books, I can say that he recycles material continuously. Vast swaths of this book are repackaged presentations of material he covered in The Mystery of Atlantis and Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds. Here we learn about items and artwork found in Maya ruins that have been interpreted as ancient astronauts, flying craft, or navigation markers for space travelers (short research summary: they were none of those things). He talks about the Nazca lines (Peruvian geoglyphs visible from the sky), the Baghdad battery (not a battery), Egyptian illustrations of giant lightbulbs (absurd), advanced mathematics baked into the pyramids (arbitrary and absurd), maps from hundreds of years ago that foretold modern discoveries (selective logic), reincarnation and inherited memories (unproven), psychokinesis experiments (with poor controls), and the assertion that we only use 10% of our brains (nope). And, as with all ancient alien theorizing, there's plenty of subtle racism, especially when it comes to stories of ancient white visitors who brought advanced knowledge to primitive cultures. Sometimes the racism is not so subtle: "...with the advanced Cro-Magnon type replacing the brutish Nanderthal man, it was still possible during Earth's long history for both these types, and others as well, to coexist, a situation we find existing even today in a world population which includes atomic scientists and Australian aborigines." Jeeeesus.
On rare occasion, Berlitz will nod to actual, factual answers or established science, but without much fanfare and very much in the spirit of let's-keep-moving. "There are many marine or aeronautical authorities who would observe that it is perfectly natural for planes, ships, or yachts to disappear in an area where there is so much sea and air travel, subject to sudden storms and the multiple possibilities of navigational mistakes and accidents. These same authorities are likely to make the comment that the Bermuda Triangle does not exist at all, and that the very term is a misnomer, a manufactured mystery for the diversion of the curious and imaginative reader." Well, yes... that sounds quite rational, Berlitz! But that doesn't give you much to write about, now does it? In that 1976 PBS NOVA, The Case of the Bermuda Triangle, they also interview Richard Winer, author of that other 1974 triangle book. He says, "Anything we don't know is mysterious. And if I didn't try to make my book mysterious, I would have another book like... [Lawrence] Kusche's is just a bunch of facts and incidents, which most of the reviewers say is just plain, dull reading. I try to make my book interesting." And there we have it: the quiet part said out loud. Some authors, when faced with what they see as a choice between telling the truth or selling more books, choose the latter.
*Fun fact: if you plot the most famous cases in the Bermuda Triangle mythos, almost all of them actually occurred outside of the triangle. Hundreds of thousands of ships and planes travel into and out of the triangle every year without incident. I traveled there myself earlier this year, and had a great time. And yet, many people wished me luck: some with smiles, and others in all seriousness. As it turns out, there has never actually been a higher incident of disappearances of any kind. As the great Ray Hyman said: "Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is something to be explained."
The Bermuda Triangle itself is an invented region: it doesn't show up on standard maps, and its boundaries are inconsistently defined by proponents. The term was introduced in the 1964 Argosy article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" by Vincent Gaddis. Here's how Gaddis defined it: "Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this area, known as the 'Bermuda Triangle,' most of the total vanishments have occurred." Note the heavy lifting of the word "most"*, as well as the fact that "Florida" does not describe a single point on a map. Miami is typically substituted as the third point. Gaddis reported a handful of mysterious incidents, but his chief exhibit was the 1945 disappearance of five bombers and their 14-member crew off the coast of Florida (more on that later). The event had been written about in 1952 (Fate Magazine) and 1962 (American Legion Magazine), but even with Gaddis's new moniker, "The Bermuda Triangle" did not yet catch on with the public.
Shoot forward a decade, and trade books started covering the story, including 1973's Limbo of the Lost and 1974's The Devil's Triangle. The breakaway star, however, was 1974's The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. The author's name will sound familiar if you've heard of the Berlitz Method of language learning. That's no coincidence: Maximilian Berlitz - Charles's grandfather - founded the company in 1878. Part of the lore is that Charles was intentionally raised by diverse language speakers: his father only spoke to him in German, his mother in French, his grandfather in Russian, his nanny in Spanish, and so on. On various book jackets, he is described as speaking "thirty languages, give or take a few" (1969), a "master of thirty languages" (1974), "fluent in twenty-seven languages" (1977), and speaking "twenty-five languages with varying degrees of fluency" (1989). Whatever the number, it's impressive, but the image of Charles Berlitz as a cultured sophisticate further lent him the imprimatur of reliability. That's fine when it comes to language, but Berlitz sold the company in the 1960s and started writing books on fringe topics in addition to his works on language acquisition. The first of these was 1969's The Mystery of Atlantis (my review here), followed by 1972's Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (my review here). The Bermuda Triangle was his third effort. After its colossal success, Berlitz went on to write about unsubstantiated topics like Roswell, the Philadelphia Experiment, the search for Noah's Ark, and the coming end of the world in 1999 (we all remember that).
Berlitz is even inconsistent in how he defines the location of the triangle. On page 11 he more than doubles its size by shooting out the bottom edge far, far past Puerto Rico. "From Bermuda in the north to southern Florida, and then east to a point through the Bahamas past Puerto Rico to about 40° west longitude and then back again to Bermuda." [see illustration above] He then presents the myth: "This area occupies a disturbing and almost unbelievable place in the world's catalogue of unexplained mysteries. ... More than 100 planes and ships have literally vanished into thin air ... more than 1,000 lives have been lost in the past twenty-six years, without a single body or even a piece of wreckage from the vanishing planes or ships having been found." Berlitz cites stories of devices malfunctioning, compasses spinning, and blue skies turned yellow and hazy. His offered explanations include "sudden tidal waves caused by earthquakes, fireballs which explode the planes, attacks by sea monsters, a time-space warp leading to another dimension, electromagnetic or gravitational vortices which cause planes to crash and ships to lose themselves at sea, capture and kidnapping by flying or submarine UFOs manned by entities from surviving cultures of antiquity, outer space, or the future..." But don't worry, he's just getting warmed up. There will be many more potential culprits. One key source for Berlitz is Edgar Cayce, the clairvoyant who not only predicted that Atlantis would rise again from the sea near Bermuda in 1968 (we all remember that), but also pointed to an Atlantean crystal power source as the cause of disappearances. As he concludes in one chapter: "The deeper we go into the problem ... the more we begin to wonder whether there even exists, within our familiar framework of scientific reference, what might be called a logical explanation." You may have spotted the trend: Berlitz isn't actually interested in solving mysteries; he just likes spinning them.
Though Berlitz produces a list of 19 major ship/crew disappearances and 16 aircraft disappearances, it's worth focusing on the aforementioned 1945 disappearance of five U.S. Navy bombers: the incident know as Flight 19. The actual events are fairly well understood. The bombers set off eastward on a training exercise from Fort Lauderdale, successfully dropped their payload, turned north, but then flight instructor Charles Taylor became unaccountably confused and refused to follow protocol. In the ensuing mess of inconsistent communication, ignored advice from the tower, and the students' inability to take command, Taylor led the crew of 14 farther out into sea where they eventually ran out of fuel. The real mysteries are what was going on in Taylor's head, and where the planes eventually crashed in the Atlantic. To complicate things (and add to the lore), one of the rescue planes sent after Flight-19, a PBM Mariner flying boat, exploded mid-air, adding 13 lost lives to the day's tragic tally. That's a compelling enough story on its own, but Charles Berlitz wanted to amplify the mysterious elements. Instead of reporting on the day's rough seas and rain, Berlitz describes the planes as disappearing out of a bright, cloudless sky. Each plane normally had 3 crew members, but one person stayed on the base that day. Berlitz concocts an elaborate story about the missing crewman's psychic intuition that something wasn't right. In reality, the man had just completed his necessary flight hours and requested to be excused from the flight. The worst bit of Berlitz's fabrication involved adding dialog to the transcripts from the control tower. He cites "other listeners" as saying Taylor described anomalous white waters. He also has Taylor saying he doesn't know which way west is, everything looks different, and even the water doesn't look right. When confronted directly about these additions in a 1976 NOVA documentary, Berlitz claims he heard them from then-Lieutenant Wirshing. The documentary crew followed up with Wirshing, who said he did not keep contemporaneous notes as Berlitz had stated, and that he could not corroborate any of the added dialog because he arrived at the control tower after those communications concluded. (That documentary is fantastic, by the way. You can watch it on YouTube. Berlitz even more irresponsibly appends new dialog provided 29 years after the event (from a reporter who claims a ham radio operator told him): "Don't come after me ... they look like they are from outer space."
Berlitz has a fondness for crackpots and conspiracy theorists, and uncritically presents their pet theories alongside official sources. We've already mentioned the "Sleeping Prophet" Edgar Cayce, but Berlitz recruited another as his collaborator: Dr. J. Manson Valentine. The doctorate is in entomology, but the two connected over an obsession with the lost continent of Atlantis. Valentine gets a small credit at the intro of the book, and is the source of many of the photograph illustrations, but is also frequently cited as an independent expert in the book. For example, he is quoted as saying about the missing crew from Flight 19: "They are still here, but in a different dimension of a magnetic phenomenon that could have been set up by a UFO." Sigh. Berlitz also promotes the theories of Ivan Sanderson, who claimed "vile vortices" of magnetic aberrations were responsible for the Bermuda Triangle and the Devil's Sea (a similar triangle of doom off the coast of Japan). Berlitz also gives air time to Immanuel Velikovsky, the catastrophist whose Worlds In Collision postulated that ancient myths preserved the records of massive impacts between the planets in our solar system. He also promotes John Spencer's speculation that UFOs may be abducting people and equipment in order to ensure that we haven't developed to a degree threatening to the rest of the galaxy. Add to that Hugh Auchincloss Brown, Ralph Barker... it's a long parade of kooky white men. At one point, Berlitz expresses irritation with the Coast Guard for offering prosaic explanations and relegating his favorite "experts" to a brief bibliography. When Berlitz doesn't have someone to champion a theory, he is perfectly happy to invent one. For example, anonymous sources tell him they saw Atlantean ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Great. What are we supposed to do with that? How did they know the ships belonged to an ancient, unestablished culture? Elsewhere, he quotes an "information officer" of the U.S. Navy as saying, "It’s almost as if the ships have been suddenly covered by some sort of electronic camouflage net." Great. Just great.
I promised more phenomena offered to explain the Bermuda Triangle occurrences, so here's a handful: mists, fogs, atmospheric anomalies, electrical anomalies, blue holes (caves under the water that pull boats down?), whirlpools, tidal waves, tsunamis, seiche waves (new to me: waves caused by wind, seismic activity, or a variety of other unusual factors), clear air turbulence (also new to me), inter dimensional passageways, anti-gravitational particles of matter, and sargassum. Oh yes! How can I forget sargassum? It's a seaweed that creates huge mats of floating matter that creates all kinds of [known and understood] problems for ships. The Sargasso Sea covers a large swath of the Atlantic that overlaps the Bermuda Triangle.
At some point, Berlitz grows weary of talking about the Bermuda Triangle and devotes multiple chapters to ancient alien hypotheses and various other collected oddities. Having read quite a few of his books, I can say that he recycles material continuously. Vast swaths of this book are repackaged presentations of material he covered in The Mystery of Atlantis and Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds. Here we learn about items and artwork found in Maya ruins that have been interpreted as ancient astronauts, flying craft, or navigation markers for space travelers (short research summary: they were none of those things). He talks about the Nazca lines (Peruvian geoglyphs visible from the sky), the Baghdad battery (not a battery), Egyptian illustrations of giant lightbulbs (absurd), advanced mathematics baked into the pyramids (arbitrary and absurd), maps from hundreds of years ago that foretold modern discoveries (selective logic), reincarnation and inherited memories (unproven), psychokinesis experiments (with poor controls), and the assertion that we only use 10% of our brains (nope). And, as with all ancient alien theorizing, there's plenty of subtle racism, especially when it comes to stories of ancient white visitors who brought advanced knowledge to primitive cultures. Sometimes the racism is not so subtle: "...with the advanced Cro-Magnon type replacing the brutish Nanderthal man, it was still possible during Earth's long history for both these types, and others as well, to coexist, a situation we find existing even today in a world population which includes atomic scientists and Australian aborigines." Jeeeesus.
On rare occasion, Berlitz will nod to actual, factual answers or established science, but without much fanfare and very much in the spirit of let's-keep-moving. "There are many marine or aeronautical authorities who would observe that it is perfectly natural for planes, ships, or yachts to disappear in an area where there is so much sea and air travel, subject to sudden storms and the multiple possibilities of navigational mistakes and accidents. These same authorities are likely to make the comment that the Bermuda Triangle does not exist at all, and that the very term is a misnomer, a manufactured mystery for the diversion of the curious and imaginative reader." Well, yes... that sounds quite rational, Berlitz! But that doesn't give you much to write about, now does it? In that 1976 PBS NOVA, The Case of the Bermuda Triangle, they also interview Richard Winer, author of that other 1974 triangle book. He says, "Anything we don't know is mysterious. And if I didn't try to make my book mysterious, I would have another book like... [Lawrence] Kusche's is just a bunch of facts and incidents, which most of the reviewers say is just plain, dull reading. I try to make my book interesting." And there we have it: the quiet part said out loud. Some authors, when faced with what they see as a choice between telling the truth or selling more books, choose the latter.
*Fun fact: if you plot the most famous cases in the Bermuda Triangle mythos, almost all of them actually occurred outside of the triangle. Hundreds of thousands of ships and planes travel into and out of the triangle every year without incident. I traveled there myself earlier this year, and had a great time. And yet, many people wished me luck: some with smiles, and others in all seriousness. As it turns out, there has never actually been a higher incident of disappearances of any kind. As the great Ray Hyman said: "Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is something to be explained."
July 5, 2022
A classic attempt to blame the unexplained on anything but natural causes, with a predisposition towards UFOs and Atlanteans. "One theory ... presupposes the actions of intelligent beings based beneath the sea, while another, more popular theory ... deduces that extraterrestrials periodically visit the earth and kidnap or ‘spacenap’ men and equipment to ascertain the stage of our technological development.” (Ch 3) Is a perfect example of the irrational rhetoric used to convince the reader: first he only offers two alternatives (a classic salesman's technique) and second he uses words such as 'deduces' rather than more honest words such as 'speculates'.
This book has many flaws.
Berlitz is scientifically illiterate (in chapter 5 he uses 'knots per hour' as a measure of speed and confuses melting with dissolving, in chapter 8 he seems unaware that lines going due north will pass through the north pole from wherever they start).
He illustrates natural phenomena with fictional accounts (whirlpools with Poe's short story about the Maelstrom) and then uses the fiction to discredit the scientific explanation;
He never checks his sources: he refers to an Egyptian papyrus of doubtful provenance; he repeats a story about Alexander the Great which first appeared in a magazine in the 1950s; he repeats a story about an abandoned ship which appears to be based on an oral legend first recorded nearly 100 years after it allegedly happened, he even gets the date of this occurrence wrong; he repeats an urban myth about a plane experiencing a time lapse without any check on the original source; his story about Byrd's flight over the south pole in 1929 observing greenery, primitive people and bisonlike animals has no evidence ... he claims it has been suppressed.
He uses 'experts' without authenticating their expertise as unquestionable authorities ("scientifically competent observers", ... “of considerable scientific and disciplinary preparation” [whatever that means]) provided they say what he wants them to say.
In short, this is the sort of nonsense that, if it had been included in an undergraduate's essay, should have failed.
This book has many flaws.
Berlitz is scientifically illiterate (in chapter 5 he uses 'knots per hour' as a measure of speed and confuses melting with dissolving, in chapter 8 he seems unaware that lines going due north will pass through the north pole from wherever they start).
He illustrates natural phenomena with fictional accounts (whirlpools with Poe's short story about the Maelstrom) and then uses the fiction to discredit the scientific explanation;
He never checks his sources: he refers to an Egyptian papyrus of doubtful provenance; he repeats a story about Alexander the Great which first appeared in a magazine in the 1950s; he repeats a story about an abandoned ship which appears to be based on an oral legend first recorded nearly 100 years after it allegedly happened, he even gets the date of this occurrence wrong; he repeats an urban myth about a plane experiencing a time lapse without any check on the original source; his story about Byrd's flight over the south pole in 1929 observing greenery, primitive people and bisonlike animals has no evidence ... he claims it has been suppressed.
He uses 'experts' without authenticating their expertise as unquestionable authorities ("scientifically competent observers", ... “of considerable scientific and disciplinary preparation” [whatever that means]) provided they say what he wants them to say.
In short, this is the sort of nonsense that, if it had been included in an undergraduate's essay, should have failed.
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