The Alaska Triangle

by Brian Dunning
November 18, 2025

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You may have caught some of the 2020-21 Travel Channel series The Alaska Triangle, about a region which the series description says "has been home to so much unusual activity that it has struck fear across Alaska and the world." Interesting, if true. Its main feature seems to be that people, planes, and boats disappear within this triangle at an alarming rate, leaving no trace, no evidence. Ever since the series aired, the Internet has exploded with YouTube videos and podcast episodes uncritically parroting the claims, and trying to make you think that Alaska has some supernatural element that puts travelers in special danger.

The classic case that all of these sources talk about is the 1972 disappearance of Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, Sr. They were on a campaign trip from Anchorage to Juneau in a Cessna 310, a small twin engine plane, along with a pilot and one other passenger. Somewhere along that flight path, most of which follows the coastline, they disappeared. Despite one of the most exhaustive searches in the state's history, no trace was ever found, either of the plane or of the people in it.

(Incidentally, a Cessna 310 is usually what I flew around in Alaska with my grandfather, an old-school bush pilot, through my teens and twenties. In the 1930s he once made an emergency landing on a frozen river with a few passengers, and it was something like a week before they were spotted. His boss Hans Mirow, who was one of the original Alaska bush pilots, actually crashed and was killed searching for him. Alaska is a place where not even the most experienced experts are safe.)

The triangle — according to whoever first drew it — is a long, tall skinny region extending from Alaska's northernmost town all the way down, through part of Canada, to Juneau in the southeast panhandle. It's too narrow to include much Alaskan territory; and to my eye, it looks more like it was drawn to connect three places in Alaska that most people would have heard of, as opposed to some particularly treacherous region.

Pretty much all of the articles, YouTube videos, TV shows, and books that propagate the Alaska Triangle story assert that 20,000 people have disappeared in the region since 1972. That sounds incredible! And so it is meant to. It's also completely false; it's not even close to true. It's exaggerated by a factor of about 15.

Here's the actual number. As of this writing in 2025, Alaska has 1,334 unsolved missing persons cases going back as far as 1948. That sounds low to me, but if it sounds high to you, Florida has 2,424. Texas has 2,749. California has 3,619 — almost three times as many as in Alaska. But of course these are apples-to-oranges comparisons because Alaska's population is so small. It's when we look at it by rate — number missing per 100,000 residents — that Alaska's numbers actually do become alarming. Alaska has a rate of 177 per hundred thousand, ten times the rate of the state with the second highest, which is Hawaii at only 18.

And yes, those thirteen hundred or so are the ones that remain unsolved and open — which is the fundamental claim made by the Alaska Triangle believers. It doesn't include people who we later found out what happened: murdered, eaten by a bear, death from exposure or accident, or the most common alternative: they were found alive. All these represent the vast majority of missing persons cases in Alaska as in other states.

Visitation to remote parts of Alaska is highly seasonal, with most people going out there when the weather is best in summer. Consequently, third quarter data is the highest, with about 450 missing persons reports in the state; about double what each of the other quarters gets. In all, roughly 1,250 missing persons reports are filed per year, on average, with around 96% of those being eventually solved, one way or another.

But the fact remains that Alaska has only 1,334 unsolved missing persons cases, going back more than half a century. So if any source is giving you some number up in the tens of thousands, it means they did no original research, nor did they verify the information in their sources, so you should probably dismiss the entirety of their presentation. But let me also give you two more nice little tests to apply to any article, TV show, podcast, or whatever about this to see if they know what they're talking about.

The first of these is to see what they say is the area of the Alaska Triangle. Most say that it's 200-300,000 mi² (up to 775,000 km²). Whoever said that must not know how to draw a triangle on an online map and read the area. At best, it's 185,000 mi² (475,000 km²); that's by drawing a triangle between Anchorage, Juneau, and a small town with a difficult-to-pronounce Iñupiaq name formerly known as Barrow. Why give the number so grossly wrong? This makes no sense to me. So if you see 200-300,000 mi² given, again, dismiss your source.

The second is if they say that the Alaska Triangle first got its name in 1972 when Congressmen Boggs and Begich were lost, then again, you know they used invalid sources. I don't think I found a single article that didn't parrot the claim that 1972 was when the term originated. And it's false. The phrase "Alaska Triangle" did not appear anywhere in print during 1972 — not even anytime in the 20th century (at least not in this context). The very first time the name was used— so far as I could find — was in 2001, in an episode of History's Mysteries titled "Alaska's Bermuda Triangle", and in the episode description and the episode itself, they shortened it to the Alaska Triangle. The episode focuses mainly on the Boggs and Begich disappearance.

So this led me to track down the origin of the term "Alaska's Bermuda Triangle", because I wanted to know if this was some actual mystery that had been around a while, or if it was just some recent thing that the History Channel made up and they wanted to hype. Tracking this down gave me one heck of a hard time; but I think I finally nailed it. It was in 1978, and it was in the publisher's description of a selection in the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped's "Cassette Books" — the 1978 version of audiobooks. This selection included some poems written by Sheila Nickerson, who was, for a time in the 1970s, the Poet Laureate of Alaska. One of the poems talked about disappearances in Alaska, including a small plane that disappeared along with a colleague of hers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game — the wreckage and bodies having never been found. Nickerson gave some context to her use of the phrase years later in 1996 when she published a book in prose: Disappearance: A Map — A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes. And in this book she used the term again, when describing what must have happened to her associate's plane:

We can only conclude that ice forced it down into the vastness of ice, into itself. The area includes the Malaspina Glacier and the Bering Glacier, the two largest glaciers in North America — a torturous wilderness of snow and crevasse that has claimed many lives and left numerous mysteries. This immense area is sometimes referred to as Alaska's Bermuda Triangle.

It's also worthwhile to give the opening sentences of her book, as they fairly encompass this Alaska veteran's assessment of her vast state:

I live in a place where people disappear. Alaska. Too large to comprehend.

People go out in planes, boats, on foot, and are never heard from again.

Nickerson was not one given to fancies about Bigfoot or Wendigos or unexplainable disappearances. She understood, all too well, the dangers of a place like Alaska where the environments are not only extreme, but also far from the reach of help. She wrote:

Usually the plane is never found. The area is too large, the crevasses and the snow too deep, the waters too quick and too cold. Often the search is over quickly, the names of the disappeared forgotten or never known.

At sea, boats go down, and those who fish are swept overboard. Seldom are the bodies found. Crabbing in the Bering Sea is the nation's most dangerous occupation, but the waters of Alaska are unkind on every coast and in every fishery.

And in the Bering Sea and northern waters, crab pots break away from their moorings and ghost-fish on the bottom of the sea. And the bottom of the sea holds many mysteries.

So there are no paranormal boogeymen needed to explain unsolved missing persons in Alaska, and no need to invent a childish "Alaska Triangle."

A word about Alaska Native women. It is true, as it is in other US states with large native populations, that they have a large number of missing and murdered women and girls. Alaska has the 4th highest number of any state, and among these women, murder is the third leading cause of death — though it doesn't even crack the top 10 nationwide. But most of these crimes are solved. While Alaska Native women are 3.5 times as likely to be victims of violence than other Alaskans, they make up only 15% of Alaska Natives who are missing. Among missing Alaska Natives, 75-80% are lost in remote wilderness areas, a much higher rate than non-native Alaskans. They're more likely to be out there hunting and fishing in more hazardous conditions, and men tend to do that work more often than women.

Going back to missing airplanes for a moment, even those might not be nearly so common as these TV shows want to convince you. Including the Boggs and Begich crash, how many planes do you suppose have gone missing in Alaska, never to be seen again, ever? Five. The number is five, with cases in 1947, 1951, 1972 (the Congressmen), 1992 (Nickerson's colleague), and 2013. It's six if we count a Navy PBY well off the coast during World War II. So it's pretty hard to cling to any narrative that says some staggering number of planes vanish in Alaska, never to be seen again. Furthermore, when you see the routes these planes were on, it appears that few of them were inside the alleged triangle.

So it turns out that while the Bermuda Triangle is non-existent in every way, there being no unexpectedly high number of losses there; the so-called Alaska Triangle does indeed have far more than its share of unsolved missing persons. As Sheila Nickerson so ably observed, Alaska is a place where people disappear; the state is simply too large to comprehend. The distances are too great, the roads are too few, the winter conditions too brutal, the rivers too fast and too cold. That alone should be enough to command our respect on its own merits.

By Brian Dunning
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