Ships and planes vanish in a patch of the Atlantic, the story goes, at a supernatural rate. The assay is one word: denominator. That patch is one of the busiest, most heavily-trafficked stretches of ocean on Earth — so of course the raw COUNT of incidents is high. Divide by the traffic and the rate is utterly ordinary. Slide to normalise and watch the mystery evaporate.
The Triangle’s spooky reputation rests on a raw COUNT of losses, never a RATE. Insurers (Lloyd’s of London) and the US Coast Guard have found that, once you divide incidents by the enormous volume of traffic through that region, the loss rate is no higher than any comparably busy stretch of ocean. The instrument slides from raw count to per-traffic rate. A fail-loud self-check throws unless the normalised Triangle rate lands within 30% of the global baseline — a selection-bias illusion, not an anomaly. ◆ VERDICT: DEBUNKED.
Illustrative traffic/incident figures in the spirit of the Lloyd’s/Coast-Guard findings (the exact counts vary by source and definition of the region); the base-rate/denominator logic is the exact, decisive point.