Urban Legends are fascinating things – they can spread across the globe like wildfire, or they can occupy a small but important place in the culture of a local community.

At Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, there’s a story that is told to explain why the University cancelled its football program many years ago.

According to Dr Bill Garvin, a popular version goes something like this:

A persistent “campus legend” here at Drury is that Drury’s football program was canceled after a student was killed playing in a game.  One common variation of the story is that a rich alumnus was so horrified by the death of the student that she gave a million dollars to the college on the condition that Drury’s football program would be shut down.

There is something oddly charming to me in this tale. Yes, at it’s core, there’s the sad death of a young man, but there’s also the sense of an unofficial tradition of passing the story from one year to the next, until it has very probably outlived anyone who was alive at the time the tale is thought to have taken place.

Dr Bill Garvin again:

Like many urban legends, this campus legend does have a grain of truth to it. A Drury student was killed playing football in 1899. It would be decades, however, before Drury’s football team would be disbanded, and by that time the death of John C. Allen would be a faint memory.

Urban Legends often grow to fill a void, as though the collective conscious demands, even hungers for an explanation; any explanation. Of course, the truth is often much less stranger than fiction.

Dr Bill Garvin:

Campus legend to the contrary, the death of John Allen had no effect on the football program at Drury. The sport wasn’t dropped until 33 years later, after the 1932 season, when the hardships brought on by the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult for Drury College to field and fund a winning team.

I’m sure almost every institute of education has its own ecosystem of extraordinary explanations — if you happen on this post and you’d like to share a similar tale from your own days at university or college, please feel free to do so in the comments below!

Link to Dr Bill Garvin’s article: Reflections from the Past

It came as no surprise, then, that a quick Google search this morning for "Air France 447 Bermuda Triangle" turned up a number of hits, including some from reputable news sources.

Of course, many of these posts and articles are simply drawing a comparison between the mystery of Air France 447′s crash and other famous aircraft losses, including those that happened within the region of the Atlantic Ocean known to us today as the Bermuda Triangle [1].

But there are other sites drawing more than a casual connection between the tragedy of Air France 447 and the shadowy forces some believe to be behind the Triangle’s history of loss and disaster.

Which left me wondering — is there anything really to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?

Sunny Days, Calm Seas, Storms From Nowhere

I didn’t really give it any thought at the time, but I actually lived within the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle for a few months not too many years ago. I spent most of that time on various islands within the Bahamas, and my experience of the region was one of long sunny days, crystal blue waters, and sudden tropical storms that made me fear for my life.

During my time in the Bermuda Triangle I caught flights on large and small planes, and took trips on boats. I never felt at any risk, nor did I feel that the people who lived on these island paradises or who flocked to them for holidays were at all concerned about a mysterious and perhaps sinister threat to their safety.

Perhaps this was simply a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but the life I lived and observed within the Bermuda Triangle was much the same as any other part of the world in which I have lived or visited.

Let’s Call It The Bermuda Polygon. No, Wait…

Most people probably don’t realise that the concept of something out of the ordinary taking place in an area of the Atlantic Ocean — defined by connecting Miami, Florida with the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico — is only a little more than 50 years old.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1964 that the name of "The Bermuda Triangle" was first attached to this region, and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s — the decade in which an interest in the paranormal became truly fashionable — that it gained real popularity as a topic for authors focussing on the supernatural and the bizarre.

Since then, an amazing number of theories have been spawned to explain historical disappearances and tragedies in the region. Official accounts have been fictionalised, transcripts have been modified, and in many cases the fictional accounts have themselves come to be considered the authentic versions through repetition in many different sources.

The most popular ‘The Truth Is Out There’ explanation for tragedies within the Bermuda Triangle is, of course, that it is the site of hostile UFO activity. Others have suggested instead that the ‘lost’ civilisation of Atlantis [2] can be found beneath the waves of the Caribbean, or that remnants of their advanced technology, protecting a race that died thousands of years ago, is to blame.

Others of a more skeptical bent have attempted to explain Triangle phenomena through combinations of rare natural events or as a result of pure human error, or both.

Here There Be Dragons. Also, Occasionally Mermaids.

Despite it’s reputation, The Bermuda Triangle is by no means exclusive in being the site of maritime and aviation mysteries.

From the mysterious fate of Amelia Earhart in 1937, to the wildly fictionalised account of the abandoned Mary Celeste in 1872 [3], history brims with strange and unexplained incidents in the air and on the sea.

One chilling example, which matches anything reported out of the Bermuda Triangle, was the mysterious disappearance of Frederick Valentich while piloting a Cessna 182 on a routine flight across Australia’s Bass Straight on October 21, 1978.

According to transcripts from Valentich’s communications with air traffic control in Melbourne, he encountered a strange aircraft at approximately 7:06pm that evening. From his questions to traffic control, it’s obvious that Valentich initially thought he had experienced a close call with another, larger passenger aircraft. Melbourne Air Traffic Control, however, was unaware of any other aircraft in his immediate vicinity. A few minutes later, Valentich speculated about whether the craft was of military origin. And what followed was a conversation in which Valentich described the aircraft playing a cat-and-mouse game with him, buzzing his plane, hovering above, accelerating away at incredible speeds, until at approximately 7:12pm, 6 minutes after Valentich first reported his concern, all communication ceased.

Frederick Valentich was never seen again, and no wreckage from his plane was ever discovered.

The Truth Is In These Files?

One of the most interesting developments in recent years to those who follow UFO sightings and conspiracy theories was the decision by the UK Ministry Of Defence (MoD) to release its so-called ‘X-Files’ in a series of batches.

Last year, in 2008, the MoD released two batches of files, containing reports of, and investigations into, UFO sightings and experiences across the United Kingdom.

While these don’t appear to contain content relating to the Bermuda Triangle, they do represent an insider look at a government’s approach and response to the unexplained.

An accompanying article by Nick Pope on the X-Journals web site, explains what it was like to work on these files.

For 3 years Nick Pope headed up the MoD’s department charged with investigating UFOs, and he describes a day-to-day reality far removed from the glamorous dangers and intrigue of Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley.

In fact, it’s obvious in Pope’s article that the expense and manpower required to serve the general public’s interest in UFOs far outweighed the budget available to investigate the vast majority of sightings. You can sense his frustration that many reported sightings were dealt with by form letters, since the department simply couldn’t afford to open investigative cases on them. This is not to say that major events were overlooked, but in this case it does appear that fiction was far stranger than reality, rather than the other way around.

Having said which, I personally found it fascinating to realise that regardless of the explanation (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) of these phenomena, there were and perhaps still are people in positions of responsibility for investigating UFO sightings who consider them a potential face-value threat to public safety…

Everything Looks Strange, Even The Ocean

Of all the mysteries attributed to the Bermuda Triangle, the story of Flight 19 — and the lesser known story of PBM-5 BuNo 59225, which disappeared the same day while searching for the stricken pilots of Flight 19 — still makes my skin prickle with disquiet.

I’m a skeptic, and I have had a lifelong interest in the normal explanations of seemingly extraordinary things. My belief is that we may never know what truly happened with many unexplained events, but that often we believe things because we never truly choose to go looking for real explanations. It’s often easier, more interesting, and more self-validating to simply believe the strange and bizarre.

Despite this, I can’t help wondering what really happened to Flight 19 that day in December, 1945. Combined with the crew of 13 on PBM-5 BuNo 59225, which was part of the search for the Flight, 27 people disappeared without a trace that day.

27 people who left behind friends, colleagues, loved ones and a mystery that will probably never be solved.

Still, it’s worth remembering that while the known events of December 5, 1945, are strange enough, this hasn’t stopped authors from peppering official accounts of Flight 19’s disappearance with alarming details of their own, as with the claim that Flight Leader Taylor’s final communication was: "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white."

Back On Dry Land

Despite the mystery of Flight 19, and other disappearances within the area of The Bermuda Triangle, there’s a piece of ordinary, everyday information that tells a different story about that infamous stretch of ocean.

You might not expect to turn to an insurance company to debunk a persistent story of frequent alien abductions or ancient underwater technology, but in the case of The Bermuda Triangle, this is perhaps the best place to look for a rational point of view.

Quoted in an Independent article from 21 December, 1997, Norman Hooke — a spokesperson for Lloyd’s Maritime Insurance company — explained that Lloyd’s charges no more for maritime vessels charting through The Bermuda Triangle than through other stretches of ocean.

Statistically speaking, vessels passing through the Bermuda Triangle are at no greater risk of mishap than when sailing elsewhere.

Does this close the case on The Bermuda Triangle as a place of undying mystery?

For me, despite the strange tale of Flight 19, I think it does. At least, I believe it puts the stories of the strange and unexpected from that region into a broader perspective: mysteries happen everywhere, and sometimes explanations will never be known. The Bermuda Triangle has been a lucrative industry for authors who write about tales of mystery and imagination, but real-world evidence suggests that it’s just a stretch of ocean, much like any other; albeit one that has definitely had it’s fair share of unexplained tragedies.

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We may never know what happened to Air France 447 to cause it to crash. Perhaps it will join the ranks of mysteries that will haunt and challenge professional and amateur investigators and theorists for years to come. While some people are suggesting bizarre and paranormal explanations for its loss, air crash investigators being reported in the press are almost universally talking in terms of the plane and / or crew experiencing a series of contributing events, currently unknown but not theoretically unexplainable, that led to this tragic disaster.

If anything, the loss of Air France 447 should serve as a reminder that for all the technology we have available, there are still large holes in what we can know and learn when disaster strikes.

Footnotes:

1.	Or, even more chillingly, as the Devil’s Triangle!
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2.	I say ‘lost’, because of course no-one has established to date that Atlantis in any form ever truly existed.
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3.	Here’s a piece of trivia for you — the legend of the Mary Celeste and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of its crew owes a huge debt to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his many stories featuring the private detective, Sherlock Holmes. In 1884, Conan Doyle published a story called "J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement", in which he drew heavily from the known accounts of the Mary Celeste, but in which he also added many of the details — including the warm, uneaten meals, the freshly brewed coffee, the unruffled cat etc — that most people now accept as being part of the true, known facts of the state in which the vessel was discovered when found floating abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean.
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The question that seems to be on everyone’s lips — well, let’s be honest, the question I’ve been asked at least a couple of times by email, anyway — is what do I, Murray By Moonlight, amateur urban legend investigator, think of the MythBusters show?

Do I like the show? Do I respect the things Adam, Jamie and the rest of the crew are attempting to achieve with it? Do I secretly envy them for all the things they get to blow up? For that matter, do I secretly envy Jamie (that’s him on the right in the picture) for his silly moustache and his even more silly hat?

The answer to at least some of these questions is yes…

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When I first began writing about urban legends, MythBusters was probably little more than an idea bouncing around in the head of television producer, Peter Rees. We were partying like it was 1999 back then [1], and urban legends were fresh and new and interesting; and a guy with an unhealthy interest in contemporary folklore and something of an analytical mind could put up a reasonably popular website devoted to helping people learn more about urban legends.

We didn’t have blogs back then. We didn’t have citizen journalism. We didn’t all have Twitter accounts and MySpace accounts and Facebook accounts and a zillion logins and passwords for a zillion pages we never looked at again. We just had a few key websites with a lot of people working behind the scenes to shed some much-needed light on the whackier things people claim to believe.

Then MythBusters arrived on the scene, bringing with it a change in the way people thought about Urban Legends.

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In the hands of Adam and Jamie and their very clever crew, Urban Legends [2] have become focused around things you can test. Things you can put your hands on, things you can put in a wind tunnel, things you can blow up or drown or shoot or, did I mention, blow up.

As much as anyone else, I’m always fascinated to see the way the MythBuster team goes about testing the latest crop of claims; and, like many other people, I can’t help enjoying it when clever people blow things up in interesting ways. Put the two ideas together, and that’s a half hour of television I’m definitely going to enjoy!

And yet, I do have a couple of reservations about the show.

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Like some others, I’m occasionally dismayed at the conclusions the MythBusters team is willing to draw from once-off testing. Of course, I understand that they don’t have an unlimited budget and that within a half-hour entertainment show they use clever and often ingenious methods for testing a particular Legend. Having said that, the purist in me wishes that the testing could be as rigourous as possible, and / or that the show was upfront in each episode that in many cases their testing can only really be considered indicative rather than conclusive.

In defence of the MythBusters team, you often see them talking about this in a casual way during their segment wrapups, but the show still carries this idea that ‘We know this claim is absolutely true or untrue because MythBusters tested it.’

Interestingly enough, the producers of the show are obviously aware of this concern out there in viewership land [3], so they occasionally have episodes in which they go back to retest their conclusions.

Personally, I’m glad they do this, but I still have a niggling feeling about the results they sometimes achieve that go unchallenged, or which haven’t caused enough concern in the viewership to warrant testing again.

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But my bigger concern is also probably a much less specific one.

While MythBusters has proven to be a great format for presenting entertaining tests and results of different beliefs and Legends, I can’t help feeling that no effort whatsoever is going into another important aspect of how Urban Legends work – why do people believe these things?

Back in the earlier episodes of the show, MythBusters featured a woman who would talk about these things [4], and I respected the show more at that point for treating Urban Legends as holistic entities, not just as the physical manifestations of their details.

I guess this didn’t prove as popular with the general viewership, and let’s face it – it’s a show that has to be concerned with appealing to the greatest number of people who might watch it.

But, like the episodes in which they go back to placate their disgruntled viewers, I’d love to see occasional episodes that feature experts in the way the belief side of Urban Legends works, and the communal and viral ways in which they spread.

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So yes, I enjoy MythBusters, and watch it with much happiness whenever I’m near a television and it’s on. I don’t think of it as required viewing, and it rankles me under the skin occasionally, but in the big scheme of things, I’d rather the show existed in a slightly flawed format (well, to me), than not at all.

In a way, I sometimes wonder whether or not the show has been ultimately good for the ‘Urban Legends Industry’ [5], or if it has had the effect of pushing these people and resources into the shadows, but I guess in the end, to the vast majority of people, it doesn’t really matter. The show must go on, and Adam and Jamie are there to tell us that you can’t kill someone by dropping a penny off the Empire State Building.

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All that’s left is to answer the questions from the opening paragraphs.

Do I like the show?

Yes, though I wish it was a little different.

Do I respect the things Adam, Jamie and the rest of the crew are attempting to achieve with it?

Absolutely, though see above for my few reservations about the way they go about testing their Legends.

Do I secretly envy them for all the things they get to blow up?

I’d probably just kill myself if I tried to blow something up, so not really. But it’s fun to watch someone else do it!

For that matter, do I secretly envy Jamie (that’s him on the right in the picture) for his silly moustache and his even more silly hat?

I have my own moustache, thank you very much, and I look silly in hats.

But then, aha ahahahaha, so does Jamie.

Footnotes:

1.	Largely because it was 1999 back then.
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2.	I’m not going to be obsessive-compulsive about it, but I wish they’d named the show ‘LegendBusters’, since there is a very real difference between Legends and Myths. Maybe ‘LegendBusters’ wouldn’t have been as catchy as a title, but it would have been more accurate in the pursuit of understanding contemporary folklore. Okay, it appears I am going to be obsessive-compulsive about it…
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3.	Particularly because a lot of viewers are only too happy to write in to call the team out on a particular conclusion.
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4.	Was she a psychologist? A folklorist? Sadly, it’s been so long since I’ve seen these episodes that I can’t remember.
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5.	By which I mean the sites and people who have worked hard on analysing and investigating Urban Legends.
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Imagine, for a moment, what it would have been like for the first sentient humans to look up at the night sky and to see the moon charting its way across the heavens. It must have been one of the great mysteries of existence, worthy of secrets and rituals, and later to become an object of worship and suspicion.

Across the centuries that separate then from now, we have believed many things about the moon. The Egyptians saw the moon as the god Thoth, who was responsible for giving humans the gift of writing. The Greeks worshiped the moon as the personification of Selene, and she was the sister of Helios, the sun god; and then later as Artemis, who was the virgin goddess of the hunt, as well as of healing and childbirth. To the Romans she was Diana, and she was as virginal and wild as Artemis, her Greek forebear. And to the Babylonians, the moon was Sin [1], and he was the god of wisdom, and eventually the creator of all things.

In those centuries and millenia, the moon has been a creator, protector, benefactor and guardian. But the moon also has a dark side [2], both literal and figurative, and the presence of a full moon hasn’t always been thought of as a blessing.

“Is it a full moon tonight?” someone asks, hanging up a phone.

“I don’t think so,” you reply. “Why?”

“Because that’s the third customer who’s yelled at me today for no good reason. It has to be a full moon!”

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Exactly at what point in human history it became common to believe that a full moon could affect our emotions and sanity remains a mystery that may well endure for the rest of time.

We know that we owe the English word ‘lunatic’ [3] to such a belief, and we can trace the word back through French and ultimately to Latin, where it was derived from the worship of the Roman goddess Luna, whose embodiment as the moon was thought to have an influence on mental stability.

We also know that in the folklore of recent centuries the full moon became invested with the power to force shapeshifters – people cursed to become creatures such as werewolves – to transform themselves into hideous monsters hungry for human blood, the ultimate embodiment of the loss of reason and sanity.

And we know that for hundreds of years a growing number of mystics, natural philosophers, scientists, and psychiatric professionals alike have searched for proof of a correlation between the full moon and the extremes of human behavior it has been thought to influence.

In Dark And Bright Of Moonlit Night

Of all the many and varied things we have believed about the moon, the conviction that it wields a sinister effect when it shines at its brightest has lingered longer than any other, and has in fact thrived to this very day.

And yet the question remains: is there any real justification to the belief that during the full moon suicide rates increase, assaults rise, hospital and psychiatric admissions soar, accidents abound, and people generally become more aggressive and unpredictable? Or is this simply a modern belief that hearkens back to a more superstitious time?

In an attempt to answer that very question, a number of studies have been conducted by researchers on either side of the ‘lunar effect’ debate, and reading any one of them, and the wealth of supporting statistics they include, you would be forgiven for believing largely whatever the author intended.

It’s only been in the last 10 or so years, however, that an effort has been made to go back to many of these studies to look at the methods they used and whether or not the results they produced can be considered reliable.

And the outcome? It seems that the most convincing arguments tell us that the full moon doesn’t have a noticeable effect on how we behave.

When The Full Moon Fades

Debate will almost certainly continue, and the future will hold more research studies, and even more contentious results.

But until some link between the full moon and our behavior can be demonstrated, we can explain the common belief in the ‘lunar effect’ in terms of how people tend to notice certain types of patterns.

In simple terms, it’s not a matter of the full moon making people behave in strange ways, but rather the fact that we notice these things more when the moon is full. Or, to put it another way, when we have a full moon we have an explanation for the unexpected or antisocial actions of others, and because we can match the one against the other, the fact that it’s a full moon feels significant. During other phases of the moon, we’d simply say, “Wow, that customer was a complete pain in the ass more annoying than Paris Hilton a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that I love being yelled at!”, and we’d pretty much leave it at that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, we only have a couple of weeks until the next full moon, and I need to make sure my health insurance is up to date and that I’ve replenished my supplies of shaving cream for the inevitable bout of hairiness…

Further reading

• Moonstruck! Does The Full Moon Influence Behavior?
• Full moon and lunar effects

Footnotes:

1.	Not the same connotation as the word ‘sin’ implies in English today.
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2.	Intriguingly and tragically enough, the first two women to be tried and executed for witchcraft [4] by the Inquisition were members of a Milanese cult devoted to the worship of Madonna Oriente, a moon goddess.
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3.	Which first appeared in Old English as the word ‘lunatyke’ at some point during the 14th century, and literally meant ‘moon-driven’ or ‘moonstruck’.
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4.	Although, the Inquisition had sentenced many to death for other forms of heresy before it turned its attention to witchcraft.
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