Read “The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved” by Larry Kursche.
He is/was a Librarian and actually went back and looked at newspaper articles, and, other eye witness reports, from the time of the more famous incidents. Almost all were shown to have disappeared during bad weather, at least one, during a Hurricane.
NOVA did an episode on the Triangle and got at least one of the authors, Richard Winer, to admit he lied to make the stories better. Kursche was was involved with the episode.
Spot on. A darned good book.
The title, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved", intrigued me as I thought it a rather pretentious title. Boy, was I wrong! Chapter and verse, he takes apart all the "mysterious" disappearances.
There was a classic media hype article at the end. They reported that a pleasure cruiser was found adrift in the Triangle, with no one aboard and nothing disturbed. Headline: "Bermuda Triangle Strikes Again". It turned out that a couple of guys took their boat out, beached it on one of the Bahama Cays, partied until they passed out. Tide came in and boat went out. Coast Guard finds them a day later. Next headline says "Bermuda Triangle RELEASES (my emphasis) crew of boat".
Kusche has another good debunking book titled The Disappearance of Flight 19 wherein he dismantles the "mystery" of that flight's disappearance. (The flight leader got lost and discipline killed them ("All we have to do is head East" by the pilots was ignored)).
The Berlitz book on this is a total fraud. He says that Taylor said "Don't come after me, they look like they are from Mars." when he actually said something like "Don't come after me, I know where I am".
What got me on that "mystery" was the fact that five planes went down all at once, and the search plane sent up after them disappeared as well.
According to the transcripts, Taylor said that when the first plane ran out of gas, they'd all go down together. The "lone" search plane was one of 13. It was a Martin Mariner, known as the "Flying Gas Tank" to due the fumes leaking throughout the plane. A merchant vessel in the area reported "a large ball of fire" when that plane went missing, but after investigating the area, could find no wreckage.