The , also known as the Dragon's Triangle, the Formosa

Formosa

Formosa or Ilha Formosa is a Portuguese historical name for Taiwan , literally meaning, "Beautiful Island". The term may also refer to:-Places:* Formosa Strait, another name for the Taiwan Strait...

 (Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

) Triangle and the "Pacific Bermuda Triangle", is a region of the Pacific

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

 around Miyake Island, about 100 km south of Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

. The size and area varies with the report (the only reports stem from the 1950s), with various reports placing it 70 miles (112.7 km) from an unspecified part of Japan's east coast, 300 miles (482.8 km) from the coast, and even near Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima, officially , is an island of the Japanese Volcano Islands chain, which lie south of the Ogasawara Islands and together with them form the Ogasawara Archipelago. The island is located south of mainland Tokyo and administered as part of Ogasawara, one of eight villages of Tokyo...

, 750 miles (1,207 km) from the coast.(Kusche:259-260)

The area is said to be a danger zone on Japanese maps, according to Charles Berlitz

Charles Berlitz

Charles Frambach Berlitz was an American linguist and language teacher known for his books on anomalous phenomena, as well as his language-learning courses. He is listed in The People's Almanac as one of the fifteen most eminent linguists in the world.-Life:Berlitz was born in New York City...

's books The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle (book)

The Bermuda Triangle is a best-selling 1974 book by Charles Berlitz which popularized the belief of the Bermuda Triangle as an area of ocean prone to disappearing ships and airplanes...

(1974) and The Dragon's Triangle (1989). He states that in the peacetime years between 1952-54 Japan lost 5 military vessels with crews lost totalling over 700 people and that Japanese government sent a research vessel boarded by over 100 scientists to study the Devil's Sea, and that this ship too vanished; and finally that the area was officially declared a danger zone.

According to Larry Kusche

Larry Kusche

Lawrence David Kusche is an American author and pilot. He had been a commercial pilot, flight instructor, instrument-rated pilot, instrument instructor and librarian by the time he wrote The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved and The Disappearance of Flight 19 .Larry Kusche was born in Racine,...

's investigation, these "military vessels" were fishing vessels, and some of them were lost outside the Devil's Sea, even as far as near Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima, officially , is an island of the Japanese Volcano Islands chain, which lie south of the Ogasawara Islands and together with them form the Ogasawara Archipelago. The island is located south of mainland Tokyo and administered as part of Ogasawara, one of eight villages of Tokyo...

, 1000 km to the south. He also points out that, at that time, hundreds of fishing boats were lost around Japan every year.

The Japanese research vessel that Berlitz named, Kaiyo Maru No 5, had a crew of 31 aboard. While investigating activity of an undersea volcano, Myōjin-shō

Myojin-sho

is a submarine volcano located about 450 kilometers south of Tokyo on the Izu-Ogasawara Ridge in the Izu Islands. Volcanic activity has been detected there since 1869...

, about 300 km south of the Devil's Sea, it was destroyed by an eruption on 24 September 1952. Some wreckage was recovered. At least one ship sent an SOS. The other seven boats were small fishing boats lost between April 1949 and October 1953 somewhere between Miyake Island and Iwo Jima, a distance of 750 miles.(Kusche: 258)