Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [26]
All at Sea...
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot"
—Lewis Carroll
"The Walrus and the Carpenter"
It is careless of a man to fail to sufficiently research a subject on which he claims to be an authority. It is irresponsible for him to resist telling the facts when he discovers them. And it is irresponsible and callous for him to continue to misrepresent matters about which he has been informed to the contrary. J’accuse Charles Berlitz of these failings.
Berlitz is the author of The Bermuda Triangle, Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds, and Without a Trace, all of which contain such demonstrable errors and misstatements that the simplest investigation of the claims made easily shows that these books should have been classed as fiction rather than fact. I am told that Berlitz speaks some thirty languages, eleven of them fluently. Perhaps he is able to state his spurious claims in all thirty tongues, since he is heir to the creation of his grandfather, who founded the famous Berlitz language schools. Posterity would have been better served if he had stuck to that calling instead of becoming a very bad amateur scientist and espouser of pseudoscholarly theories.
Early in 1979 Berlitz took a group of fifteen archaeologists, explorers, and divers into the so-called Bermuda Triangle to study the "Lost Civilization of Atlantis." A brief chat with members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (notably Larry Kusche, author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved) would have saved these men the trip. But I suppose that if Berlitz was paying for his caprices, they might as well have had a holiday in the dreaded triangle. They were never safer.
The Bermuda Triangle is an expanse of ocean bounded at its three corners by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami. In 1945, when five Navy Avenger aircraft flew into the area and reportedly vanished mysteriously, the legend began to be manufactured. Within a few years the public was believing that some unknown force was snatching planes, boats, and people out of the Triangle and whisking them to some limbo or other. Berlitz was soaking up and writing down every reported incident, embellishing the tales and preparing them for publication. The result was the sale to credulous people of over 5 million copies of his first book, published in twenty languages, and more than $1 million in royalties.
When Larry Kusche set out to research the Bermuda Triangle, he had before him a formidable task. It is one thing for Berlitz to claim that something has occurred; it is another to try to prove that it did not. Meanwhile, the believers sit back smugly, hands folded, grinning widely. It is apparent that it is a matter of blind belief, rather than actual proof, where such issues are concerned. For as Kusche points out so very well, a large percentage of the so-called wonders of the Triangle were nothing but outright fabrications, with no evidence whatsoever to support them. We read about ships that are not listed in any registry, planes for which there are no records to show they ever flew, and shadowy crews and other people who in many instances were well accounted for and did not vanish into the Never-Never Land that authors like Berlitz would have us believe holds sway in the Caribbean. The Bermuda Triangle idea is nonsense, as we shall see.
I will not attempt to deal with the numerous other areas of the world that are claimed to harbor mysterious dangers. It seems that other nations, wanting to share in the silliness, have clamored to have their own Triangles recognized. Wherever anyone or anything vanishes, psychic whirlpools are invented. One author, Ivan Sanderson, even postulated twelve evenly spaced "Vile Vortexes" that