Is the Bermuda Triangle Actually More Dangerous?
Fifty-some ships and planes, one stretch of ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and a name that's been shorthand for "unexplained disaster" since the 1960s. The debunking is almost as famous as the myth itself by now — dozens of pages exist purely to say "it's not really more dangerous." That made it worth checking not whether the debunking is right, but whether the specific evidence it leans on is as solid as its confidence suggests.
The claim
Ships and aircraft disappear inside the Bermuda Triangle at a rate meaningfully higher than in other heavily-trafficked parts of the ocean, and maritime and insurance authorities treat the area as measurably more hazardous than they treat comparable waters.
Source trail
The name and the mystery both trace to a specific chain: a 1964 Argosy magazine article by Vincent Gaddis coined "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle," and Charles Berlitz's 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle turned it into a bestseller. The debunking side has its own specific origin: in the early 1970s, reference librarian Larry Kusche re-investigated the same widely-cited cases and, according to multiple secondhand accounts of his research, contacted the U.S. Coast Guard and Lloyd's of London directly while writing his 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. The claim that "Lloyd's doesn't charge higher insurance rates for the area" — repeated in nearly every debunking page we found, including Wikipedia's own — appears to originate there: a fifty-year-old piece of research, filtered through decades of secondary retelling, not a document Lloyd's currently publishes or that anyone can check firsthand today.
What's confirmed
- NOAA's own page states plainly there's no elevated disappearance rate, and that the area isn't even an officially recognized place. NOAA's "What is the Bermuda Triangle?" (checked 2026-08-17, last updated by NOAA 16 June 2024) states: "The U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name," and that "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 same page reports that "the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard contend that there are no supernatural explanations for disasters at sea," attributing incidents to natural forces and human error.
- A 2013 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) study of global shipping accidents did not place the Bermuda Triangle among the world's most dangerous waters. The Christian Science Monitor's report on the study (checked 2026-08-17, published 10 June 2013) names the actual hotspots the study found — the South China Sea and East Indies, the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, and the North Sea and British Isles — with the South China Sea/East Indies region alone logging 293 shipping accidents since 1999. We tried to fetch WWF's own underlying report directly; the file loaded as unreadable binary/metadata rather than readable text, so this figure is reported here as quoted by the outlet that read it, not independently re-derived from the original PDF.
- The closest existing explainer we could find agrees with the "not dangerous" verdict but cites only one authority, and paraphrases it rather than linking it. How Everything Works's Bermuda Triangle page (checked 2026-08-17) states "the World Wildlife Fund concluded that the Bermuda Triangle is not actually dangerous — at least, not statistically" and that it "didn't even make the top 10 list of the world's most dangerous seaways" — matching what we found directly above — but does not link to WWF's report or quote its own wording, and does not mention Lloyd's, the Coast Guard, or NOAA at all.
What isn't confirmed
- The single most-repeated piece of evidence — that Lloyd's of London itself has confirmed the area is no riskier to insure — does not trace to any page Lloyd's currently publishes. We checked directly for a Lloyd's-of-London-controlled page making this claim and found none. Wikipedia's own article repeats the claim ("Lloyd's determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there. Lloyd's does not charge higher rates for passing through this area.") but its footnote for that sentence points not to Lloyd's, but to an archived U.S. Geological Survey page about gas hydrates — a page about a completely different subject (whether methane eruptions from the seafloor could sink ships), which happens to repeat the Lloyd's claim as an aside. We tried to fetch that USGS page directly this session and it returned HTTP 403 (forbidden), so we could not confirm what it says or where it, in turn, got the claim from. The furthest back any account traces this is Larry Kusche's 1975 book, which by several independent summaries' account involved contacting Lloyd's directly around 1972–73 — but that is secondhand, decades-old, and not a document we could locate and read ourselves.
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The U.S. Coast Guard's own official wording could not be checked directly. Its
FAQ page (
history.uscg.mil), the page most debunking articles attribute the Coast Guard's position to, returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch this session. NOAA's own page (cited above) independently reports the Coast Guard's position in NOAA's own words, so the substance is confirmed by one government agency describing another — but the Coast Guard's exact original wording is not something we verified ourselves. - A recent, widely-syndicated revival of this claim adds no new evidence. Science communicator Karl Kruszelnicki's line — "the number that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis" — has circulated since at least 2017 and was still being re-reported in August 2025 by multiple outlets we checked. Every version we found cites the same two sources already covered above (the Coast Guard and Lloyd's) rather than a study, dataset, or percentage of his own — so this is the same claim being repeated again, not independent confirmation of it.
Verdict
Every named authority we could directly check — NOAA, and through NOAA's own page, the Coast Guard and Navy, plus WWF's 2013 global shipping-accident study — agrees the Bermuda Triangle isn't statistically more dangerous than other well-traveled waters. On that conclusion, there's no real disagreement to report. What doesn't hold up as well is the single most-cited piece of supporting evidence: that Lloyd's of London itself has confirmed this. That claim, repeated almost everywhere including Wikipedia, traces back through a science-agency page we couldn't load to a fifty-year-old book's secondhand account of a conversation — not to anything Lloyd's has published that we, or apparently anyone else recently, can actually go and read.