Is the Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle based on fact or fiction?
In the sixth century BCE, there were some pretty astute fellows, one of them referred to as Pythagoras. It so happens the this gent had an understanding of triangles that in his day was absolutely mind bending. For instance, he observed that if you added up all of the angles within any triangle, the sum will always be 180. He also figured out, that if you take any triangle that has one 90 degree angle, square or multiply the length of each of the perpendicular sides by them selves, then add them together and find the square root, presto, you will magically arrive at the length of the “hypotenuse”or third leg of the triangle. Pretty bizarre, but when you go back and take a look at a few other things Pythagoras came up with, it’s down right mysterious. In fact, apparently the effect of all the triangulation on poor Pythagoras’s brain forced him and some of his fellow triangulation enthusiasts to go into religious seclusion for the rest of their lives. I’m not making this up, you can check the history books and verify every word I have said.
Interestingly, about a thousand years after Pythagoras, another well educated fellow, a well know astrologist in the 15th century, got involved with Pythagoras’s magical triangles, threw in a few other geometric concepts from another ancient Greek fellow named Euclid and harnessed the mysterious powers of triangles to figure out that the Earth was going around the Sun and not the other way around. Wow, pretty awesome! I think if Nicolas Copernicus was around today he would certainly attest to the mysterious implications of triangles.
Hey here’s a notion: perhaps people jump of the Golden Gate Bridge because the cables that the bridge is hung from form triangles which exert some mysterious force over people who walk over the bridge. I have never heard of anybody driving a car off the bridge, so perhaps the metal in the car shields its occupants from the force. Sounds good enough to me, and if you did an expose on the History Channel about it, I’m quite certain you find an audience of sure believers out there who would swear that the “Golden Gate Triangles” evoke some mysterious power or force.
There’s only one problem with all of the mysteries about triangles. I should point out that Pythagoras, Euclid, and Copernicus, could all prove with absolute certainty the mathematical properties of triangles, so in reality, there is no mystery there. As for the Golden Gate Bridge? Well, I made that one up myself just to make this article a little more interesting, but it also suggests a valid point; that the mysterious imaginative powers of the human brain are capable of making all kinds of associations which in reality don’t exist. The problem with any presumption of paranormal phenomena, with respect to the Bermuda Triangle, the Great Lakes triangle or any other place on Earth bounded by three points, is “Proof.” Planes crash, boats sink, and be as it may that some have gone down in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle which represents a pretty fair chunk of the Atlantic, there is not one shred of statistical data that suggest that aircraft or boats go down with greater frequency in one area then they do in any other.
In the final analysis, the only real mystery about the Bermuda Triangle may be, why people buy into such superstitions and mysticism in the first place. If there are extra terrestrials out there somewhere and they are tuning into our TV broadcasts, they must think we’re a pretty demented species, when it comes to some of the things we believe.
