September 17, 1950: The Article That Seeded the Bermuda Triangle Legend

Today in 1950 · Sunday, September 17, 1950

TBM-3 Avenger torpedo bombers in formation, 1945 — the same type flown by the lost Flight 19

TBM-3 Avenger torpedo bombers in formation, 1945 — the same type flown by the lost Flight 19 · U.S. Navy photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this Sunday in 1950, readers of the Miami Herald's page 6F found a moody Associated Press feature by E. V. W. Jones, a Miami AP writer, under the headline 'Same Big World: Sea's Puzzles Still Baffle Men In Pushbutton Age.' It was, as far as researchers have ever traced, the first press treatment of the cluster of disappearances that would one day be called the Bermuda Triangle.

Jones tallied roughly 135 people lost without explanation off Florida and the Bahamas: the freighter Sandra, gone with her crew; a 32-passenger airliner lost near Miami in 1948; the British airliners Star Tiger and Ariel, vanished in 1948 and 1949; and Flight 19 — the five Navy torpedo bombers that disappeared in 1945, along with the rescue plane sent after them. 'It's a small world?' Jones wrote. 'No, it's still the same vast globe the ancients knew, with the same misty limbo of the lost.'

Jones named no region and drew no triangle — the phrase 'Bermuda Triangle' would wait until Vincent Gaddis coined it in 1964. But every book, documentary and campfire theory since traces its paper trail back to this one atmospheric Sunday feature. Legends, it turns out, have bylines.

Also on this day

  • US Marines advancing from Inchon captured Kimpo airfield on the road to Seoul.
  • India extended diplomatic recognition to Israel.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — Billboard's top record of 1950, topping the sales, jukebox and disc-jockey charts alike. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: Betty Grable and Dan Dailey opened in “My Blue Heaven” — radio stars jumping to the brand-new medium of television, 1950's biggest showbiz anxiety set to music — and it shot straight to No. 1.
⚾ In sports: The Yankees took two of three at Detroit, 21-year-old rookie Whitey Ford running his record to 7-0 — while Phillies rookie Bubba Church was carried off after a line drive struck his face, deepening Philadelphia's pitching crisis.

Sources: SMU archive: full text of the 1950 article · History Collection: how media built the myth · Wikipedia: Bermuda Triangle · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

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