People have been trying to solve the “mystery” of the Bermuda Triangle for years. Here’s what we know about the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean (roughly) bounded by the southeastern coast of the U.S., Bermuda, and the islands of the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico).

Reports of unexplained occurrences in the region date to the mid-19th century. Some ships were discovered completely abandoned for no apparent reason; others transmitted no distress signals and were never seen or heard from again. Aircraft have been reported and then vanished, and rescue missions are said to have vanished when flying in the area. However, wreckage has not been found, and some of the theories advanced to explain the repeated mysteries have been fanciful.

Despite its reputation, the Bermuda Triangle does not have a high incidence of disappearances. Disappearances do not occur with greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other comparable region of the Atlantic Ocean.

At least two incidents in the region involved U.S. military craft. In March 1918 the collier USS Cyclops, en route to Baltimore, Maryland, from Brazil, disappeared inside the Bermuda Triangle. No explanation was given for its disappearance, and no wreckage was found. Some 27 years later, a squadron of bombers (collectively known as Flight 19) under American Lieut. Charles Carroll Taylor disappeared in the airspace above the Bermuda Triangle. As in the Cyclops incident, no explanation was given and no wreckage was found.

The exact number of ships and airplanes that have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle is not known. The most common estimate is about 50 ships and 20 airplanes.

The agonic line sometimes passes through the Bermuda Triangle, including a period in the early 20th century. The agonic line is a place on Earth’s surface where true north and magnetic north align, and there is no need to account for magnetic declination on a compass.

An Australian scientist has dared to declare that the Bermuda Triangle enigma has been'solved' - by asserting that there was never a mystery in the first place, defying 70 years of fevered conjecture.

The disappearance of so many ships and planes in the area between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico, according to Karl Kruszelnicki, a fellow at Sydney University, has nothing to do with aliens or fire-crystals from the lost city of Atlantis.

Instead, the large number of disappearances is explained by nothing more supernatural than plain old human error, bad weather, and the fact that many planes and ships approach that part of the Atlantic Ocean in the first place.