"The Bermuda Triangle" by Charles Berlitz

 A classic attempt to blame the unexplained on anything but natural causes, with a predisposition towards UFOs and Atlanteans. "One theory ... presupposes the actions of intelligent beings based beneath the sea, while another, more popular theory ... deduces that extraterrestrials periodically visit the earth and kidnap or ‘spacenap’ men and equipment to ascertain the stage of our technological development.” (Ch 3) Is a perfect example of the irrational rhetoric used to convince the reader: first he only offers two alternatives (a classic salesman's technique) and second he uses words such as 'deduces' rather than more honest words such as 'speculates'.

The problems include: 

• Berlitz is scientifically illiterate (in chapter 5 he uses 'knots per hour' as a measure of speed and confuses melting with dissolving, in chapter 8 he seems unaware that lines going due north will pass through the north pole from wherever they start); 
• He illustrates natural phenomena with fictional accounts (whirlpools with Poe's short story about the Maelstrom) and then uses the fiction to discredit the scientific explanation;
• He never checks his sources:

• He refers to an Egyptian papyrus of doubtful provenance
• He repeats a story about Alexander the Great which first appeared in a magazine in the 1950s
• He repeats a story about an abandoned ship which appears to be based on an oral legend first recorded nearly 100 years after it allegedly happened; he even gets the date of this occurrence wrong;
• He repeats an urban myth about a plane experiencing a time lapse without any check on the original source;
• His story about Byrd's flight over the south pole in 1929 observing greenery, primitive people and bisonlike animals has no evidence ... he claims it has been suppressed;
• He uses 'experts' without authenticating their expertise as unquestionable authorities ("scientifically competent observers", ... “of considerable scientific and disciplinary preparation” [whatever that means]) provided they say what he wants them to say.

In short, this is the sort of nonsense that, if it had been included in an undergraduate's essay, should have failed.

Selected quotes:

• “interdimensional changeover through a passageway equivalent to a ‘hole in the sky’ (which aircraft can enter but not leave) ... entities from inner or outer space ... still functioning man-made power complexes belonging to a science considerably older and very different from ours.”
• “Theories concerning antigravity warps have been advanced, presupposing areas where the laws of gravity and normal magnetic attraction no longer function”
• "It may be that exists, in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and other nodal locations of electromagnetic gravitational currents, a door or window to another dimension in time or space”

July 2022;

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God