There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal human navigators with maps and sextants!

I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.

This story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated by this scene:

https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7

The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for mystery over mundane failure.

Flight 19 is a perfect case study. You have: inexperienced trainees, a leader with possibly shaky navigation skills, bad weather, limited radio and radar, and institutional reluctance to write "we lost them because of human error and poor procedures" in big letters. So the official story ends up fuzzy enough that later writers can pour anything they want into the gaps: aliens, Atlantis, magnetic fields, whatever sells this decade.

What gets lost is that the boring explanation is actually more damning. It's not a spooky ocean triangle, it's that in 1945 you could take off from Florida in a military aircraft and, through a few compounding mistakes and system failures, simply never come back, with no way to reconstruct what really happened. The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the map.

I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.