In the 1950s, an urban legend about the Atlantic Ocean surfaced. According to the lore, a mysterious area formed a triangle from Bermuda to South Florida down to Puerto Rico. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the region was supposedly where ships, planes, and people mysteriously disappeared.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service (NOAA) says there are scientific explanations for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, and the area doesn’t have any more disappearances than other well-traveled routes.
The myth persists and has even sparked a belief that other waterways are cursed. Since the 1990s, the Great Lakes have also been rumored to have their own mysterious triangle.
Read More: What Is the Scientific Mystery Behind the Bermuda Triangle?
What Is the Great Lakes Triangle?
The idea of a Great Lakes Triangle began as Americans’ interest in the Bermuda Triangle was proving to be profitable.
“It was first mentioned in 1975 in a newspaper article that jokingly said that some people refer to a Michigan Triangle,” says Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archeological Association.
The year before, The Bermuda Triangle had been an instant bestselling book. It was written by a retired linguist and paranormal hobbyist who skeptics felt played with the truth. One called it “almost all hooey.” Others said it relied on unsubstantiated reports and faulty science. Nevertheless, it sold 14 million copies and was translated into 32 languages.
In 1976, another paranormal hobbyist published a book, The Great Lakes Triangle, and claimed there were planes and vessels that disappeared in a mysterious triangle within the Great Lakes. The triangle was said to have stretched from Benton Harbor, Michigan, up and across the lake to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and back across to Ludington, Michigan.
The book didn’t see the success The Bermuda Triangle enjoyed, and the chatter of a paranormal passage in Lake Michigan simmered down until the 1990s. Then, Baillod says Chicago River tour guides began speaking of it during boat tours.
Robert Crowe was a tour guide whose company specialized in Chicago-area supernatural tours. Crowe mostly did bus tours, but he expanded to include boat tours. Part of his talk included a description of the Great Lakes Triangle, which he continued until he died in 2012. Baillod says it was a “fun ghost story.”
The idea continued in memes and online ghost stories, and Baillod says it resurfaced in the early 2020s with a new book claiming Lake Michigan had a mysterious triangle that swallowed ships.
“When you write a book on it, it goes from harmless folk tale to misinformation,” Baillod says.
Read More: No One Has Ever Found the Le Griffon Shipwreck, Despite the Many Claims
The Lake Michigan Triangle
Although authors and tour guides have claimed there is a Great Lakes Triangle or Michigan Triangle, Baillod says that is simply not true.
“It’s complete hokum,” he says.
One of the reasons Baillod and other researchers say the Great Lakes Triangle doesn’t exist is because they actually know the location of the ships that supposedly disappeared without a trace.
“We can plot where all these missing ships are in the Great Lakes,” Baillod says. “When you do that, it blows holes in this hokum story.”
Since 1812, there has been a record made of every commercial vessel on the Great Lakes. “We know its career,” Baillod says. “When it launched, how big it was when it went off the books.”
In the 1990s, Baillod was one of 10 researchers who began collecting shipwreck information for the Great Lakes. Of the thousands of losses they have on their records, 225 are still missing. “They were sunk by collision or went down in a storm in deep water. The vast majority of those are not in the triangle,” he says.
An Enduring Myth
Claims that ships disappeared and were never accounted for conflict with the actuality that researchers have known where the shipwrecks were located and why they went down. Most wrecks, Baillod says, tend to cluster around well-used ports and navigational choke points.
Lake Michigan has the most wrecks, and Lake Superior has the least, simply because it has less traffic. Lake Erie has the highest density of wrecks.
Given that scientists can account for why these wrecks happened and where they occurred, why has a myth about a supernatural triangle persisted for almost half a century?
“If you try to tell someone facts about the spatial distribution of shipwrecks, their eyes glaze over. People don’t want to have facts; they want to emote,” Baillod says.
Although ghost stories on tour buses might be fun, Baillod says there is harm in ignoring history in order to prioritize an unproven theory.
“I have a problem with it because these are real historical disasters where real people died,” he says. “When you mythologize these events, you do a real disservice to those who died by not telling the real story. When you replace natural with supernatural causes, you bifurcate the truth.”
Read More: As an Underwater Graveyard, the Great Lakes Have Claimed Close to 10,000 Ships
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Los Angeles Times. Charles Berlitz, 90; Linguist and Author on the Paranormal
Great Lakes Museum. Would you enter the triangle?
Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country's largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
