It may have been the same book I read.
The author simply investigated reports of lost planes and ships.
It became clear that the vast majority (over 95%) of ‘disappearances’ were simply untrue.
Some vessels had docked safely; some had been retired + sold for scrap and some ships were still in use!
The very few that had not made it to land had been out in atrocious weather…
I still have it in my collection. An excellent book. I’d like to think it had something to do with the CT going away, but I’m usually not that optimistic.
IIRC, Flight 19 was actually nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle when it disappeared, for example.
I looked at the ‘evidence’ for the Loch Ness Monster.
Basically there were occasional reports of ‘something large’ in the water, with a few ‘sightings’ on land.
Given that the popular conspiracy theory is that it’s a dinosaur, how many animals would you need to have a thriving colony?
And why don’t we have any physical evidence - even a measly hair?!
Back in the 20th century, conspiracy theories were fun. No longer. In this century, they’re all bummers.
That’s easily answered: dinosaurs didn’t have hair, they had feathers.. D’oh.
The post-WWII era of woo - a larger term that includes alien astronauts, ancient civilizations, ESP, the New Age and suchlike - was driven almost entirely by people making money off books and, later, documentaries. Immanuel Velikowsky, Gordon Hancock, Donald Keyhoe, Jeane Dixon, and the others pumped out almost annual volumes of nonsense and any newsstand would feature a bunch of magazines pandering to the crowd.
Like Weird Al Yankovic or Jeff Dunham, you can be a superstar in a field without virtually no other stars. My theory is that when the superstars died off others couldn’t step in and match their sales. Or when a good selling debunker like Kusche appeared, or when James Randi demolished Yuri Geller on Carson, interest, i.e. money, in that particular woo also waned.
Nothing ever truly disappears on the Internet and true nutcase believers *cough* Flatearthers *cough* have a permanent platform. But note that no money is to be made from a flat earth and so the idiocy is constrained to a tiny core that even other CTers laught at.
The answer to everything, unfortunately, involves money.
A plesiosaur, which is a type of Sauropterygian, not a dinosaur. Sauropterygians are just outside the Archosaur lineage (dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plus crocs).
Originally I wrote that they’re slightly closer than turtles but apparently new research places plesiosaurs in the turtle lineage (as stem testudines) so they’d be equidistant.
You forgot Erich von Däniken, who probably was the king of paranormal explanations for natural phenomena in the seventies, and continues to spew his bullshit til today.
I still think that the third Star Trek movie should have been called In Search of Spock.
If I tried to give a complete list, I’d have used up all the characters allowed to a post.
Except now the “evidence” comes from Big Foot Hunters and UFO investigators i.e. faked.
Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved
by Larry Kusche (Author)- this put most of the nails into the BT weird concept.
Now, BigFoot does not exist. Period. Mind you they found the Saola , a rather large bovine type mammal just in 1992. But it is rare, secretive, and lives in a smallish restricted area where there are few roads or civilization. If you watch TV shows, BigFoot lives all over North America, including within a short walk for highways and towns. If there were that many, we’d have found bodies by now- some hunter would have shot one as a bear by now.
And there are no plesiosaur type sea monsters. Impossible. Mind you, we will find most large unknown sea creatures.
Except that the so-called “Triangle” doesnt have any unusual numbers of unexplained disappearances Kusche proved that most of the famous ones were either explained or not inside the triangle at all. So, there is not need to explain the “mysterious phenomena” since there is none.
Great book.
Or- in the few really mysterious ones- the mystery part wasnt IN the triangle.
The Carroll A. Deering? Last seen off North Carolina.
The HMS Juno? Sank off the Azores somewhere. etc etc.
Impossible. Maybe a sturgeon or a large eel is responsible for some of the few NON-hoax reports.
I suspect that’s part of why the Bermuda Triangle fell out of favor. When it was new and obscure and getting the actual data of the alleged incidents was difficult, the believers could claim all sorts of “mysterious vanishings” happened in the triangle even when they were neither mysterious nor happened in the Triangle in the first place.
But these days anyone who wants to bother to do the research can just look up an incident online and verify that it wasn’t anywhere near where the Triangle supposedly is. That took a lot of the momentum out of the legend-building, I expect.
And politics. I notice that most of the really popular conspiracy theories days have a strong political tinge to them. And get pushed from the top, not just by fringe grifters. The more apolitical conspiracy theories appear to have been largely edged out.
(It’s still largely about milking cash from the gullible though, of course)
Good points.
As a kid, I was fascinated by the Frank Edwards books such as “Stranger Than Science” and “Strange Worlds”, which told of weird stories, strange phenomenon (including the BT), aliens, demons, mysterious disappearances. I was like, “well, these seem strange, but they couldn’t publish if they weren’t true. You can fact check them!”
Well, as it turns out, in 1975 you really couldn’t fact check this stuff. The locations were obscure, or foreign, or old. So the veracity of the story of the purple glob that fell from the sky and confounded authorities had to remain a unknown.
Until now!
I still have those books, and I read some when I only have a few minutes. But now I do an internet search, and the results are, shall we say, underwhelming,
Edwards was a genius at taking odd stories and presenting them in a way that made you believe. He could take a little truth and spin it into a scary yet fascinating story (his book was taken from his radio show.)
But what does the internet tell us, now? That his stories can be broken into three groups:
Stories that are true, and are mysterious, such as the L-8 blimp mystery (rare)
Stories that he presents as mysterious, but are not at all. The facts are (mostly) correct, but there is nothing mysterious, but he leaves out stuff that would show it is just a mundane story, or more often, distorts truth and fabricates additional “facts” that make it mysterious and creepy (probably half)
Complete fabrications with not a single truth (the rest)
I remember the In Search Of series! My brother and I loved it - the spooky music, Leonard Nimoy narrating, creepy “evidence” of some grainy photos and video and half-remembered stories from “eyewitnesses”…it made our young minds wander - anything was possible!
I will have to look thru the catalog of episodes to see some of the topics covered, and see where the current thinking is on some of those subjects.