Q: What do you know about the Bridgewater Triangle? I saw that the FX Network optioned a piece about it and planned a scripted series, which I’m not sure was developed. There are some stories here and there, but is anything active still happening? Is it worth doing a deep dig and trying to connect the dots?
—S. Curry
A: I got the above query from a television producer sniffing out fresh angles for a potential show, trying valiantly to avoid (yet another) pale knockoff of an already-premise-flimsy series such as Ghost Hunters or Finding Bigfoot. I had indeed heard of the Bridgewater Triangle but hadn’t done much research into it. The Triangle is touted as a hotbed of mysterious events, strange occurrences, and sinister deeds, though as we will see much of that is hype.
It’s a classic manufactured mystery, ironically—and not coincidentally—modeled after another manufactured mystery, the Bermuda Triangle (which was named and described by a high-profile mystery monger, Vincent Gaddis, and later Charles Berlitz). The Bridgewater Triangle is an area in eastern Massachusetts (see map). Researcher Loren Coleman popularized the term in his 1983 book Mysterious America, noting that “Because of its long history of evil, bedeviled and ominous occurrences, residents have recognized this area of the state for its strange and often sinister character and have, over the years, dubbed it the ‘The Bridgewater Triangle’” (Coleman 1983, 28).
What sort of bedeviled and ominous occurrences? You name it: “UFO sightings, mysterious disappearances, creature sightings and a high incidence of accidents, violence, and crime,” though “the most famous phantom creature to appear in the Bridgewater Triangle is the notorious Bigfoot.” A news article for Deadline.com describes it as “an actual area of well-documented supernatural activity that covers 17 small towns and 200 square miles of New England” (Petski 2019). It was the subject of a 2013 documentary film featuring Loren Coleman, Jeff Belanger, and Chris Balzano. The latter two are prominent writers of “true” ghost stories, and Balzano is author of the book Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle.
Where’s the Beef?
There’s plenty of breathless sizzle to this story, but as accidental skeptic and burger spokeswoman Clara Peller famously asked in the 1980s, “Where’s the beef?” (See my March/April 2015 “Skeptical Inquiree” column.) Where’s the evidence that this particular patch of land is home to unusually elevated rates of high weirdness?
The variegated nature of “unexplained” phenomena makes it inherently difficult to quantify, much less verify. Identifying seemingly sinister names in landmarks is fairly straightforward (just look for words such as devil), but beyond that it’s not clear how anyone would reliably measure such a broad range of phenomena. (Does any UFO or Bigfoot report, however scant or dubious, count toward a sinister sum?) Coleman does, however, provide us with some easily verifiable claims about the area, such as its “high incidence of accidents, violence, and crime.” The area covers some 200 miles and several towns, but there is a medium-sized city, Taunton, which is directly in the center of the supposed mysterious triangle; it should be a valid barometer.
Before trying to explain the reasons (supernatural or otherwise) that the area has a high incidence of accidents, violence, and crime, of course we should verify that it in fact does. For this we can turn to publicly available data. One source, www.city-data.com (2019), notes that “The 2019 crime rate in Taunton is 131 which is 2.1 times lower than the U.S. average.” Another data tracker, CrimeGrade.org (2019), gave Taunton an A- ranking for crime: “Taunton is in the 83rd percentile for safety, meaning 17% of cities are safer and 83% of cities are more dangerous.” The same source concluded that it’s safer than other cities of comparable size. This is of course the opposite of a “high incidence,” and it’s notable that Bridgewater—the town for which the triangle is named—has a crime rate index of 71, nearly one-fourth the national average.
Coleman is on firmer ground with the accident rate, however. The same website found that Taunton does have an average accident rate over twice that of the entire state (2019 data). Of course there may be many mundane reasons for this, including population, geography, drunk driving incidence, and so on. In fact, the data show that Taunton has over twice as many drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 population than the state average, which alone could explain the elevated accident rate. There’s no need to invoke mysterious malevolent forces as an influence; when you hear hoofbeats, think horses instead of unicorns.
Explaining the ‘Triangle’
So is there anything to the Bridgewater Triangle? Sure there is. Give me a map and an hour, and I can likely draw you a dozen other equally mysterious “triangles” around the United States. It’s easy to do with such broad categories of “unexplained” or “strange” events, including sinister deeds, serial killers, Bigfoot sightings, ghost stories, UFO reports, alleged curses, giant snakes, animal mutilations, giant birds, claims of Satanic cult activity, notable rocks, historical locations, and so on.
There’s nothing unique or special about it, but if people want to arbitrarily pick three cities or points and dig deep enough at things that happened inside or nearby, they’ll find enough to fill a book or documentary. Lumping disparate “weird things” together and trying to see some hidden underlying common cause or thread is easy to do but not useful. The mystery-mongering mentality underlying the triangle is basically “Oh, look! There was a UFO report in March 1986 here, which is only twenty miles from the spooky-named ‘Devil’s Rock,’—and look at this! The following year there was a Bigfoot sighting in a nearby town! Could there be some connection?” It’s a form of anomaly hunting, which as I’ve described before in this column is not a good investigation technique. Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and we find patterns in everything, from baseball statistics to clouds. Sometimes those patterns are real, but often they’re what we psychologically impose on the world. They’re created in our perceptions, not in real life (as in pareidolia).
The search for some underlying grand cause, some real (or, more likely, imagined) connection between these wildly disparate data points is the stuff of fevered Stephen King novels. You also have to think of not only whether there might be some genuine underlying reason for the events but why they would be a factor. For example, someone might say, “Could there be something in the water or environment that could cause weird things to happen or normal people to experience hallucinations or something?” It’s hard to think of any specific etiological basis for strange activity in general, but it would depend on what exactly the “strange activity” is. If objects are prone to falling off shelves or walls, it might be in a seismic area with possibly unnoticed tremors (though they’d be recorded by scientists), whereas of course that wouldn’t happen away from fault lines. The same thing would apply to strange lights in the sky; they’d be more common around military bases and airports than other places.
I often see exactly this kind of lumping together of unrelated phenomena in my investigations. For example, a couple who believes their house is haunted will attribute anything odd or strange to the ghost or spirit presumed to plague them. Flashlights with batteries that go dead, misplaced household objects, or phone calls with no one on the other end of the line can all be seen as having a common cause, yet they may in fact have completely different causes (old batteries, carelessness, and robocalls, for example). It is of course possible that there is an elevated incidence of Bigfoot sightings in the region, but to demonstrate that you’d need to examine other comparable regions. Utah and Arizona, for example, will naturally have fewer Bigfoot sightings merely due to their arid geography and smaller populations—regardless of whether or not Bigfoot exist.
As always, the burden of proof is on the claimants; it’s not up to skeptics to prove there isn’t a so-called Bridgewater Triangle. In the case of the Bermuda Triangle, researcher Larry Kusche chose to take on that burden of proof and found that much of that mystery was the result of mistakes, ignoring obvious explanations, and mystery mongering.
References
Coleman, Loren. 1983. Mysterious America. Winchester, Massachusetts: Faber & Faber.
City-Data.com. 2019. Crime rate in Taunton, Massachusetts: Murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts, arson, law enforcement employees, police officers, crime map. Available online at https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Taunton-Massachusetts.html.
CrimeGrade.org. 2019. Taunton, MA Violent Crime Rates and Maps. Available online at https://crimegrade.org/violent-crime-taunton-ma/.
Petski, Denise. 2019. FX developing horror thriller ‘The Bridgewater Triangle’ produced by Noah Hawley. Deadline.com (August 22). Available at https://deadline.com/2019/08/fx-developing-horror-thriller-the-bridgewater-triangle-produced-noah-hawley-1202701098/.