Theme: The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle is an area that supposedly covers around a million square mile area with its vertices at Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. The term first originated in a newspaper article in 1950, which speculated about the large number of ships and aircraft that have disappeared in the area. The idea was soon taken up by fringe science theorists who have offered all manner of explanations for the disappearances that have included everything from UFOs, timewarps and aliens to technology leftover from Atlantis and more natural explanations like weather and human error.

The idea of the Bermuda Triangle disappears under sceptical examination. For one, nobody is certain of the exact area, which has often been expanded anywhere between a half and 1.5 million square miles by differing authors in order to include incidents within its area. Sceptics, the US Coast Guard and marine experts have conducted examinations – showing that some of the claims made of ships that vanished in mysterious circumstances have been wildly distorted – and have demonstrated that statistically no more vessels sink or disappear in the Bermuda Triangle that would be uncommon for any similar area in the world. This does not appear to have stopped the popularity of the myth.

In genre cinema, The Bermuda Triangle is a place where “strange things happen.” It can be the base for alien invaders, can house time portals and sunken cities, is a place from where people return from changed, or be transported through time or from other places.