In the history of human observation, there has been no scientifically verified, publicly acknowledged sighting of either extra-terrestrial or meta-physical phenomena. None.
Conspiracy theorists will argue that officials will never acknowledge such sightings for fear of public unrest. I beg to differ. Government officials are human beings. Human beings are lousy at keeping secrets.
Any truly staggering piece of evidence would find the light of day. Maybe one piece of scientifically verified evidence would remain under wraps. Perhaps ten. But not hundreds. And certainly not the thousands of ‘reported’ UFOs, ghosts and other supposed metaphysical phenomena that Bob & Jill saw on a dusty road at 1AM.
But there is another reason that the Bermuda Triangle exists and it is a boring, simple statistical explanation.
Humans are really good at spotting patterns. If you view any section of a random number sequence of a million digits, then it is statistically likely that you will find short but surprising patterns within the string.
You may find at a glance an unusual repeating number sequence (777777), sequential numbers (123456), repeating patterns (121212) or a myriad of other recognisable patterns. The funny thing is, we don’t seem to realise that our brains are subconsciously trying to locate any pattern in order to make sense out of the mayhem.
We find a pattern and then think, oh…that’s amazing. But it’s really not amazing. It would be far more amazing if numbers never repeated and no recognisable patterns were found.
Now imagine that these numbers represented the geographical location of plane crashes.
If planes vanished in exact direct proportion to air traffic then this would be an astonishing result, given the relatively small sample size of unexplained accidents in the fairly brief period of human flight.
Statistically we expect that more planes will vanish in some areas compared to others. We expect to find patterns and clusters within a random sequence.
As it turns out, one of the places at the pointy end of the probability curve is a geographical area known as the Bermuda Triangle. But statistically this could have been any location.
We could be having this discussion about the Canary Islands triangle or the Vanuatu-Fiji triangle, but it just happens that one of the heaviest concentrations of vanishing aircraft lies in the Caribbean.
If you lived in the Caribbean then this may appear remarkable, but for the rest of us it should be nothing more than a curious anomaly.
There are also other factors that contribute to the high incidence of vanishing vessels in the area that multiply the incidence in this region: highly unstable tropical weather, less than optimum aircraft safety standards, poorer communication services and piracy to name but a few.
Consider also that we have outlined an arbitrary geographical region and highlighted the incidence of events within this arbitrary region. Completely arbitrary. No reason to draw the border lines other than it captures an unusually high incidence of like events.
You can perform the same exercise with population density. Draw a line from above Brisbane to the west of Adelaide and you will enclose an area roughly 10% of the size of Australia that sustains 90% of the population of Australia. A freak outcome? Not in the slightest.
If a Bermuda Triangle didn’t exist somewhere in the world then that would be extraordinary.
