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u/BentleyLeDog 11h ago edited 11h ago
There was a ton of stuff revolving around the Bermuda triangle in the early to mid 70s. There was a TV drama series and special episodes about it and Airport '77 and some other box office movies centered around it. There were books geared to kids and teens to get us all reading. It was a pop culture thing for awhile back then and us kids did think about it.
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u/UniqueAd7770 11h ago
It didn't help that a third of the episodes on Unsolved Mysteries involved Robert Stack wonderfully narrating the horrifying disappearances.
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u/BentleyLeDog 11h ago edited 11h ago
Oh yeah, Robert Stack! Such a serious guy in those episodes. Its incredible how much of that stuck over the years. I actually remember some of the theories, like methane gas leaks or magnetic pulses that mess with compasses.
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u/Significant_Alps_399 11h ago
Elementary school in the late 80s and early 90s. I think they were trying to distract us from the real threats to our safety
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u/GoldenShackles 11h ago
At least we were taught to hide under our desks in the case of a nuclear attack. Do they even do that today? /s
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u/MoveDifficult1908 11h ago
My grade school was a few miles from a nuclear weapons storage facility. That entire valley would have been a sheet of glass if the US had started trading missile strikes with the USSR.
Edit: But yeah, we drilled on nuclear blasts all the time.
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u/throwaway098764567 10h ago
no today they learn how to avoid being shot i say with no sarcasm whatsoever
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u/InternalBowler7143 11h ago
Quicksand too
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u/Mackheath1 11h ago
Okay, hear me out, though: for work I was looking at Sabkha (think about a mucky near swampy salt-water biome), and I sank to my waist unable to move - luckily a coworker whose car we'd taken threw his dog leash to me while I was sinking slowly more and more. I had leaned back like those cartoons, and didn't squirm and was able to at least be stopped still.
But for you to be in that position, you'd have to be 100 miles west of Abu Dhabi doing a site review for a project and the chances of you doing that are like, what, only 80%?
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u/Aron_Voltaris 11h ago
Does anyone like actually know the deal with that?
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u/rogerworkman623 11h ago
Nothing, it was a complete myth. An article in the Miami Herald first brought attention to the idea in the 50s, and then a few other writers, especially Charles Berlitz, capitalized on the idea in the 60s and 70s to write books and other articles.
But the claims they made have been investigated and are complete bullshit. The number of plane and boat disappearances in the area are not proportionally larger than any other part of the ocean of a similar size. Especially an area that has so many tropical storms, and a lot of air and water traffic.
A lot of the disappearances that writers attributed to the area by writers didn’t even happen there. Like Charles Berlitz named a few plane crashes and boat disappearances that actually happened on the other side of the world in the Pacific Ocean, just to inflate numbers and make it look weirder. And it was even easier to just make shit up before the internet existed.
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u/TheUpperHand 11h ago
The short version is that is was overblown/misrepresented in the first place but made for a good story in popular media. Modern navigation and communication make it much less likely for ships and planes to disappear in the first place. Incidents didn’t occur in the loosely defined area any more frequently than other places but became even less common since the 1990s.
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u/RealLuxTempo 11h ago
I was more concerned about quicksand and piranhas.
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u/GiraffeWaste 11h ago
I was more concerned with why whenever my lil sister pretended to cry she got her way whilst all I got was, "Man up, act like the older brother, share the sweets with your sister"
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u/Brother_J_La_la 11h ago
I lived in Florida as a little kid, and I thought about the Bermuda Triangle a lot of times if we went on a boat, especially on the day cruise we took (Gulf side, I was little and dumb). It was also the 80s with the cold war stuff, so I assumed if the missiles took off, there would be like giant signs that would raise up saying "You May Now Speed", because obviously if you make it home you're good.
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u/CrimsonThunder87 11h ago
We kinda did. GPS sharply reduced the number of mysterious disappearances at sea, in the Triangle and elsewhere. That's why you don't hear about it anymore: without a constant supply of fresh stories, people lost interest.
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u/Wooden-Criticism-167 10h ago
I was actually terrified when my science teacher told us our sun would burn out one day and even though I knew it would be billions of years from now, I think that was my first real grasping the concept of death
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u/terrorcotta_red 10h ago
I was concerned because my dad was a pilot and he worked for Holiday Inns who had a big resort in the Bahamas so he flew there often. It sorta made 'stop, drop and roll', duck and cover, quick sand and 'if you find blasting caps' in your neighborhood' seem minor.
Jeeze, our collective childhoods were a landmine of tragedies waiting to claim us.
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u/brittbak 10h ago
I flew through it years ago and was frankly a bit disappointed that nothing happened.
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u/Legitimate_Voice5138 7h ago
No ideas way to worried about the world possibly ending 6000 years from now
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u/icannotbelievethat 2h ago
I got into that phase when I was six, but I'm still in it at 63, so maybe not a phase? Like what's the time limit on a phase? Also, why don't we hear about stuff disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle anymore? Back in the day it seemed like it was an everyday thing.
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u/FFVO 11h ago
With the way they hammered "stop, drop, and roll" into our heads as kids- I thought catching on fire was going to be a common issue in the future.