Bermuda

Bermuda, the British territory that gives the Bermuda Triangle its more familiar name, sits at one corner of the roughly triangular stretch of ocean blamed for a startling run of disappearances through the twentieth century. The most famous case is Flight 19, five US Navy torpedo bombers that vanished on a routine training run out of Fort Lauderdale on December 5, 1945, along with the rescue plane sent to find them — fourteen men lost without a trace. Locals point to genuinely difficult local conditions: sudden squalls, the powerful Gulf Stream, and magnetic compass variations near the islands that can throw off unwary navigators. 'Bermuda didn't ask for the Triangle,' islanders sometimes joke, noting that most disappearances happened well beyond their waters, yet the association has stuck since a 1964 magazine article popularized the name.