The Bermuda Triangle is for Real!, Part II

As much as I would like believe that my plane got lost in the Bermuda Triangle, a little research on the interwebs has led me to the conclusion that, like pretty much every other urban legend or conspiracy theory, the Bermuda Triangle is an invention of book authors and other folks who are out to make a buck. There simply is no empirical evidence (aside from my personal experience!) suggesting that there is anything special about the Bermuda Triangle. Plus, there are all kinds of truly cacamamey ideas about aliens abducting ship captains and the like. What the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon basically boils down to, in my opinion, is that flying an airplane long distances over open water is no walk in the park. With zero land-based markers to use when navigating, it is easy to get disoriented and lost. And if navigation equipment malfunctions, as they are wont to do, then a pilot is in deep trouble. The Caribbean has a high density of air and ship traffic. This leads to a high number of accidents.

As a side note, there is a rather fascinating story about a squadron of fighter pilots getting lost over the Florida keys during a training mission and having to ditch into the ocean, never to be found. The piecing together of what might have happened to “Flight 19,” as it is now called, is worth checking out.

My Bermuda Triangle experience aside, I’ve been struck recently by the number of people I meet who buy into conspiracy theories. The most popular is the 9/11 theory that it was a missile that hit the pentagon and not an airplane. Another one I heard recently was from a Minnesota resident who tried to convince me that Paul Wellstone’s plane was taken down by a U.S. military fighter jet on orders from Dick Cheney. This was supposedly done because of Wellstone’s upcoming re-election and his strong opposition to Gulf War II. With all due respect to Mr. Wellstone, I’m hard pressed to believe that Cheney and Co. were really all that afraid of one Senator from Minnesota, however outspoken. The war train was well on its way to leaving the station at that point and Mr. Wellstone was not going to be able to stop it.

The appeal of conspiracy theories is that they seem plausible at first glance and are usually impossible to definitively prove as false. (You can’t prove that something did NOT happen.) A useful way to immunize yourself from silly theories is to think about the conspiracy theories out there that you know are just plain wrong. My favorite is the idea, popular in the Middle East, that 9/11 was a conspiracy of the Israeli government. Didn’t you know that many of the Jews who worked in the twin towers got phone calls that morning not to go in to work? Clearly preposterous. But a lot of people believe in it for the simple reason that it fits into their framework for how the world works, plus it is impossible to know that, for sure, those calls were NOT made. The pentagon missile theory and the Paul Wellstone-Dick Cheney theory are popular here in the United States for the same reasons. Casting Cheney or the CIA as the evil doers fits nicely into the framework for how many people have looked at the world over the last 8 years. And hey, you can never know for sure that Cheney didn’t give that order.