Larry Kusche

Lawrence David "Larry" Kusche (November 1, 1940 – July 22, 2024) was an American research librarian, commercial pilot and author. He is remembered for one book: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved (1975), which took apart the disappearance stories that had made the Triangle a popular mystery in the 1970s. Kusche was not a ufologist. He is included here because his work became a standard reference for skeptics examining UFO-adjacent folklore, and because his method, checking primary records instead of repeating secondary claims, is the same one many UFO investigators are criticized for skipping.

Background and career

Kusche was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and his family moved to the Phoenix area when he was six. He earned a commercial pilot's license at 19 and worked as a flight instructor, and he graduated from Arizona State University in 1964. After a brief period as a high school teacher and librarian, he earned a master's degree in library science and joined ASU's Hayden Library as a research librarian in June 1969. Wikipedia's biography of Kusche describes these years in detail.

His Bermuda Triangle work began from ordinary reference desk questions. Patrons kept asking about the Triangle, and the existing books on the subject repeated one another without much checking. Kusche and fellow librarian Debbie Blouin first compiled a bibliography of their findings, which they sold for $2. When Harper & Row asked for a book on the subject, Kusche took a leave of absence from ASU to write it. After the book's success he left librarianship to write full time, later working as a technical writer in the Phoenix area and becoming a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved

The 1970s Triangle boom was driven by bestsellers that promised time warps, UFOs, and vanished ships without a trace. Kusche's method was largely archival. He wrote hundreds of letters to official sources, including the Navy, the Coast Guard and insurers, and he checked the historical record for each disappearance he was asked about. According to Kirkus Reviews, which reviewed the book in March 1975, each chapter opened with a parody of the "Legend," and the body then examined the famous cases, including the Mary Celeste, the Ellen Austin, the Avenger bombers, and the Star Ariel. For most of them, Kirkus notes, Kusche found ordinary explanations: storms, fires, faulty instruments, unreported weather, poor communication, or darkness that hampered rescue searches.

His central argument was that the mystery had been manufactured. The Triangle's reputation rested on exaggeration, omitted facts, and rumor copied from one book to the next. Where an incident could not be confirmed as having happened at all, Kusche treated it as unproven, and he noted that many incidents attributed to the Triangle occurred well outside its boundaries. Kusche also criticized the popular writers directly, including Charles Berlitz, whose 1974 bestseller had made the Triangle a national phenomenon.

Flight 19 and later work

The most famous case, the loss of Navy Flight 19 in December 1945, received its own follow-up. Kusche first covered it as a chapter in the 1975 book, then expanded it into The Disappearance of Flight 19 (1980). According to his Wikipedia biography, he studied the Navy investigation report, interviewed Navy personnel who had been involved at the time, and flew the likely route of the missing aircraft himself. From that work he argued that the flight leader probably believed he was over the Florida Keys, which explained the reported compass failure and the lack of wreckage in the expected area.

His other books were less significant. Larry Kusche's Popcorn Cookery (1977) was a cookbook, and Shape Up Your Hips and Thighs (1979), written with Dennis Porr, was a fitness book. He remained a skeptic in print, contributing a 2015 Skeptical Inquirer retrospective, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Delusion: Looking Back after Forty Years." That piece, like the book, drew on the original records rather than on the legend.

Reception and legacy

The 1975 book was widely reviewed and widely cited. Kirkus called it "a superior weapon for all sensible squares to use for the bedevilment of Triangle believers." The Skeptical Inquirer's November/December 2015 editorial describes it as one of the classic debunking books of all time, while noting that Kusche himself preferred not to be called a debunker. The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on the Bermuda Triangle covers the same case material.

Kusche's significance for the UFO field is indirect but real. The Bermuda Triangle legend belonged to the same 1970s market for unexplained-mystery books that carried many UFO claims, and Kusche showed how repetition without sourcing and selective omission could turn ordinary losses at sea into a myth. He died in July 2024 at 83. His work remains a useful model for checking claims that rest on secondary sources.