The Bermuda Triangle

The claim is there are mysterious accidents in the so-called Bermuda Triangle, an area roughly between Bermuda Island, Puerto Rico and Southeast US. If this theory is true more accidents should be visible in the said area.

Looked at a ship accidents data to confirm. The data comes from US Coast Guard, its "Marine Casualty & Pollution Data for Researchers", btw 1982-2001 [1,2]. Plotted accidents in the BT in one color, others (a bigger region) in a different color. As concluded in [2] there doesn't appear to be any glaring patterns. Accidents, as stated by [2] decrease in frequency as one gets further from the shore, whether or not one is inside the Bermuda Triangle.

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A statistical test idea could be taking a bigger area, look at the distribution of incident counts based on smaller regions there, then get counts in the same area without ones in the triangle. Are both counts the same Poisson distribution?

References

[1] Marine Casualty & Pollution Data for Researchers

[2] Research