The Bermuda Triangle's loss rate is statistically ordinary.
The Bermuda Triangle is the most famous of the so-called Vile Vortices, but its reputation for unusual vessel losses does not survive a quantitative look. Lloyd's of London — the marine-insurance market that would have the strongest commercial reason to flag it — has repeatedly stated that the Triangle's loss rate is not unusual for the volume of traffic it carries. The NOAA National Ocean Service has published the same conclusion. The Vile Vortex literature has been culturally durable. The statistical case for it has not been.
Lloyd's of London has issued the same finding in commercial advisories.
Racetrack Playa, Death Valley. A dead-flat mud floor scattered with rocks, and behind each one a long groove cut into the clay — the record of something dragging a stone across the desert with nobody watching. For almost a century, that was the whole mystery: the tracks were real, the movement was real, and no human being had ever seen it happen.
In 1997, NOAA's Pacific hydrophone array picked up an ultra-low-frequency sound powerful enough to register across sensors more than 3,000 miles apart. The signal was named the Bloop. For fifteen years it sat in NOAA's unidentified catalogue. In 2012, Christopher Fox publicly attributed it to a non-tectonic icequake — a large iceberg cracking off the Antarctic ice shelf. The rest of NOAA's unidentified catalogue (Julia, Upsweep, Train, Whistle, Slow Down) is still active.
