Legendary Bermuda Triangle Ship Discovered In Florida

The Bermuda Triangle, the reputedly creepy stretch of sea located between Florida, Puerto Rico and (obviously) Bermuda, is home to innumerable legends, most of which are pretty awful. Disappearing ships and planes and mysterious last transmissions abound within its borders, and there are probably as many theories about their nature as there are actual incidents. Some believe it's the secret location of the lost continent of Atlantis, or a portal to another time. Others go with aliens or invisible tornadoes. Others still have offered more realistic explanations, such as large waves and undersea methane gas bursts. Of course, there's also the boring people who go with that lame thing called "reality," which in this case is simply that the Bermuda Triangle's disappearances are completely proportional to any other similarly sized patch of sea with such heavy traffic.  

As Live Science tells us, researchers have recently uncovered some very significant evidence that seems to support the "accidents happen, and it almost certainly isn't because of aliens" school of thinking. This is because they just found the SS Cotopaxi, one of the most legendary ships that supposedly disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle without a trace. If that name rings a bell, it's because you may have seen the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of The Third Kind. As Syfy reminds us, the Cotopaxi''s real life disappearance in 1925 was immortalized in the film, where the old steamer's Bermuda Triangle fate was solved when it was found in the middle of the Gobi Desert. 

SS Cotopaxi's fate may have been caused by aliens in the movie, but in reality, it was something even weirder: Florida. In February 2020, marine biologist Michael Barnette identified the "Bear Wreck," a popular diving destination off the coast of St. Augustine (and therefore well outside the so-called Bermuda Triangle), as the Cotopaxi. He had already been suspecting as much for years, and set out to prove this to the world after the Cuban coast guard found a ghost ship in 2015 and a conspiracy theory about it being the Cotopaxi immediately surfaced. 

Collaborating with Science Channel, Barnette and a historian called Guy Walters reviewed historical documents and the Cotopaxi's distress signals, and further evidence to support their theory of the Bear Wreck's true identity was found within the wreck itself. Sorry, conspiracy theorists (and Mr. Spielberg)! It looks like everyone's favorite mysterious steamer is just one of the many, many "Bermuda Triangle disappearances" that actually took place well outside the supposedly mysterious location.