January 12, 2012 • 44 mins
There's roughly 500,000 squares miles encompassed in a triangle with points in Miami, Bermuda and San Juan. There shouldn't be anything different about this area, but some people believe it's a hotbed of supernatural activity. Tune in to learn why.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
(00:21):
and that makes this stuff you should know the podcast
the rip off of stuff they don't want you to
know in this particular episode. It's right, but that's not
the case at all. I was just singing Barry Mantel
to Josh right before we recorded. Yeah, what song is it?
He had a song called the Bermuda Triangle, and I
(00:41):
think I remember the gist of it was that the
Bermuda Triangle not only makes ships and planes disappeared, but
people from your love life we'll disappear as well through
the Bermuda Triangle. I don't know, I don't remember, but
I was, as I told you, I was big into
very Man. I was a kid up for some reason.
(01:01):
When I was eight, I just thought he was the
bee's knees. He's very cool. Yeah, he asked me, you
me has every single one of his records at homes
lost to go home and route that song out. I
still have get to the bottom of stub mind in
the attic, do you? Oh yeah, it's sweet. Do you
have a nice record collection hitting up in the attic? Um,
I've got about two crates, not not a ton, but
i'll bet their choice. Yeah, they're pretty good. Okay, Well
(01:24):
there you have at the Bermuda Triangle. Thank you everybody.
The records range from Barry Manilow to like Molly Hatchett.
So that tells you what happened between ages nine and
fifteen for me, Um, chuck, Josh, you want to get
to this. Yeah, yeah, I mean you were a kid.
You just admitted to being a kid once. I was once. Um,
so of course the Remuda tryan al must have struck
(01:46):
your fancy at some point. Well, in the seventies it
was a big deal. Like I remember it being a
big deal in the seventies and I was kind of thinking,
you know, you never hear about it anymore. But I
think it was due to the book. Charles Berlitzs book
came out in nineteen What was it called the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, oh,
(02:08):
it's the Bermuda Triangle. Um, oh no, that's a different one.
No, No No, his was just a Bermuda Triangle. But his
sold twenty million copies. And like, I remember this being
a big deal at the time. It was like on
the Mike Douglas Show. And yeah, so I think that's
why it was so big in the seventies. People were
dumber back then. Plus Berry Manlow that was in the seventies.
It was I'll bet it he wrote that song after
the book. Um, well, if you wanted to talk about this,
(02:31):
my intro wasn't that good anyway, So you want to
just get into the Bermuda Triangle. The intro disappeared like
so many ships at sea. That was very good, Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, thank you. Um. So we think of the
Bermuda Triangle. Is this old, possibly ancient, possibly lost mystery.
(02:52):
Um that is that forms a triangle. It's a geographical,
made up, fictitious geographical area bounded were or with its
points between San Juan, Puerto Rico. Um, Bermuda greatly enough
and Miami. Um it's real, but it's just not like
it's not recognized by any official geographic bodies. Right. But
(03:14):
if you look at a map, you could also make
Bermuda quadrahedron with like eight other places too, So yeah,
it's as real as the Bermuda quadrahedron. Um. It's not
real if you are a member of the U S
Board of Geographic Names, because they don't recognize it formally.
Most people don't, um, not officially at least. Um. But
(03:36):
I was saying that, you know, it seems like it's
been around a long time. It wasn't until nineteen four
that it got its name. Did you know that? I
did because we actually researched this a long time ago
and didn't do it for some reason. So I knew
it from then, but only from then. Um. And there
there's I mean, if you are into this kind of thing,
you are well aware that there have been hundreds and
(03:57):
hundreds of ships that have gone miss seeing over say
the past century. Um, planes, ships, cars, somehow people just
gone depends on who you asked, right, well, it depends
on you know how, like I say, if you're into
it or not. And basically the key to the Bermuda
triangle is statistics. How you take statistics, how you either
(04:22):
manipulate them yourselves or or how you accept statistics at
face value, is probably a pretty good indicator about how
you feel about the Bermuda Triangle. Um, there's been all
sorts of explanations from uh, basically natural phenomenon, to the
idea that Atlantis is down there somewhere, which we'll get into,
(04:44):
to the idea that it's really no different than anywhere
else and it's just a bunch of uh sensationalism. Yes,
but no matter how you look at the Bermuda Triangle,
it encompasses about five square miles. It's huge and extremely
well traveled. It's not off the beaten path at all.
(05:08):
You a lot of people want to go to Bermuda.
The Bahamas is in there, I mean, come on. Yeah. Plus,
it's just it's just a heavily traveled route in area.
Right as far as shipping goes, I imagine two right. So, Um,
Supposedly there's been as many as a hundred ships and
a thousand lives lost in the Bermuda Triangle in the
last century. Right. Some say part of the problem is
(05:32):
the Coast Guards supposedly says that it doesn't that there's
not an unusual amount of incidents there that Okay, a
thousand people have died and a hundred ships have been
lost in last hundred years. Yeah, that's nothing. Um. Other
people say, no, that's not the case. Lloyd's of London, which,
by the way, Chuck, if you listen to the Coffee podcast,
(05:56):
the tie that binds coffee to Bermuda Triangle is to London.
It's right, uh. In nive the editor of Fate magazine,
Mary Margaret Fuller, Um, she contacted Lloyd's of London and said, hey, um,
can you give me a list of payoffs for the
Bermuda Triangle? And lloyd said sure we can. Of course,
(06:17):
we do this thing all the time. And um, four
hundred and twenty eight vessels were reported missing throughout the
world between nine and the Bermuda Triangle didn't have any
significantly higher incidents than any other area, supposedly, which is
why the insurance premiums the Bermuda Triangle are no different
(06:37):
than anywhere else as well. Yes, you should point out, uh,
if you ask a guy, I love this guy's name
name g n this' with a G, I, A N J.
Let's just come on and say it, Gan Quasar, Gene
and J Quasar. Is that is that supposed to be?
(06:57):
That's what I'm calling right, Have you been his page? No?
Actually that's not true. He um. He he's the administrator
of Bermuda hyphen Triangle dot org and I believe I
have been to that page before. And he's the author
of Into the Bermuda Triangle Cohen Pursuing the Truth behind
the World's Greatest Mystery. Yes, I went to his site
because I felt like I owed it to him to
(07:18):
check this out. And it is another one of those
sites that looks like my Space page from like two
thousand two. And it doesn't draw you in as far
as looking valid. I'm not saying it's not, but it
doesn't look super professional. There has there's like texts that's overlapping,
the images in some pages don't load like user A
(07:39):
good user experience adds tremendous veracity to one's fantastic claims.
It really does, Mr Quasar, We mean it. If you
update your user experience, people will listen more. I would
have honestly stayed on the site a lot longer. I've
been like, let me look at this, but as soon
as I saw it, I went come on. But despite
his lack of web design skill, yes, yeah, he has
(08:03):
like put a lot of time and effort and energy
into researching the Bermuda triangle, and he's one of the
ones that says, hey, Lloyd's of London, that's that's that's
why would you go to Lloyds of London. That's what
he says. Well, he says that Lloyds of London doesn't
even keep track of smaller craft, and a lot of
these smaller craft are missing, and they don't even insure yachts,
(08:24):
which is not true. I look that up. I thought
that was odd. I'm glad you looked. I don't know
if they're maybe he means yachts of a certain size,
but they definitely insure yachts. In fact, they were, ironically,
if I'm not mistaken, the originators of maritime insurance way
back when. I might be wrong, but I thought, I remember,
I don't think you're wrong. Um, so well Mr Quasar
(08:46):
went to the coast Guard instead. Uh. The coast Guard
has um definitive records on missing vessels, but they call
them um delayed overdue vessels. Like a three hour tour
that hasn't come back. Yes, so it's overdue. It's supposed
to be there after three hours, a hundred and eighty
(09:09):
thousand hours ago, so it's a very long overdue so
Mr Quasar found that um that he he was. He
says that he was given data on overdue vessels UM
after asking for twelve years, and found that in the
previous two years, the Coast Guard had records of three
hundred missing or overdue vessels. Now does that mean that
(09:30):
they were still overdue or they were overdue by a
couple of hours and they were just at one point
listed his overdue There is an excellent question. I didn't
get that. That is a very good question. Well, I
hope this guy listens to the podcast. Maybe you can
tell us. I bet we could contact him through his
website too. I bet it's not that hard. He also
went to the National Transportation Safety Board and looked at
(09:51):
their database and said, hey, okay, let's just take a
random place. Then if the Bermuda Triangle is no different
than any other area, how about off the coast of
New England. Uh, And we'll say for the last ten years,
there's only been a few disappearances of vessels in the
Bermuda Triangle over that same time period. I would ask
Mr Quasar, like, just give me more stats, like did
(10:15):
he compare the amount of travel? Was it all equalized?
Whether did he take everything into consideration, right? And I
mean maybe the the coast of New England has a
disproportionately low amount of missing vessels, whereas the Gulf of
Mexico or the Pacific Ocean has higher than the Bermuda Triangle.
(10:36):
Depends on what you're comparing it to him. Or did
they have a lot of boats sink that they found
because the water wasn't as deep or was easily accessible,
because he's talking about disappearances like where you never find wreckage, right, Um,
So I guess gen Quasar G and J. Quasar Um
is a torch bearer of a very long line of
(10:59):
people who have really sunk their teeth and time and
energy into this solving this mystery, or or possibly even
promoting something that isn't a mystery as a mystery because
they genuinely believe it, Um. And probably what's what kicked
the whole thing off um, at least in the public's imagination,
(11:21):
was the missing Squadron, the lost flight Flight nineteen which
Chuck actually disappeared UM in sixty six years ago. Last week, Yeah,
they had a little ceremony down at um Fort Lauderdale
Hollywood International Airport UM to honor the fourteen servicemen who
were lost on that flight flight nineteen. But that was
(11:44):
that made huge headlines. Yeah, I mean you want to
go and tell the story. Yeah, let's talk about flight
nineteen UM. And you know, I want to point out
that this is one of the leading stories. And in fact,
when you go back and look at all the research,
a lot of this is based on a handful of
stories that have been retold over and over and over
by all these different people. So it seems like there's
(12:05):
more than there are. No, it's just the whole, the whole.
A mystery of the Bermuda triangle is based on a
handful of disappearances that are noted, no, noteworth and not like. Okay,
so h u S Navy Avengers Flight nineteen uh five,
(12:27):
missing Navy pilot h Avengers. I guess is that the
kind of plane? Yeah? There, Navy grum and TBF Avengers.
They were propeller planes, fighter fighter jets or fighter prop
planes from the end of the war. Okay, So they
set out on a routine patrol sunny day five highly
experienced student pilots, which is a little bit of a
(12:50):
contradiction in terms. Yeah, but I mean, these were Navy pilots,
So I mean, I'm sure if you put them side
by side to any other student pilots, they would do
they would dog fight them into into humiliation, into oblivion. Uh.
Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor led the mission, and the mission
included a few course changes departed at one fifteen scheduled
(13:10):
course changes. Yeah. Basically Taylor knew what he was doing
and this was a routine flight. That's what some say.
There's also speculation that's Taylor wasn't super experienced. Well, actually
the other pilots weren't super experienced, and that he had
a consistent record of navigation troubles, including ditching airplanes twice
(13:32):
into the Pacific Ocean. Well that's just routine Navy hazing
back then. Uh, but we'll get into that. So Taylor
led the missions. Uh, they took off. We're flying over
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they heard a signal um that
they thought was from a boat or a plane in distress. No,
that was Cox that heard that signal. But he was
(13:54):
part of the crew, right, was he. It was he
at the base. He was another guy who was flying
over a different to Florida. Okay, yeah, he was. He
kind of tried to help them. He got the distress
signal and he tried to figure out where they were
and was giving them, Um, okay, that makes more sense.
So Cox uh told Taylor fly with the sun at
(14:17):
your left wing and up the coast until you see Miami,
and you'll know my Miami when you see it. Taylor said, no, no, no,
we're over a small island and there's no other land anywhere.
If it was a Florida Keys, which he thought it was,
he would have seen a bunch of islands obviously, and
Florida sticking down there. And they only had a couple
of hours left of fuel. And then Taylor described a
(14:39):
large island that they assumed was Andros Island, which is
the largest island in the Bahamas. And so they sent
him back further instructions to get him to Fort Lauderdale.
Is that right? Yeah, But there's a big part that
you left out here, and this is important. Taylor reported
that everything looked wrong quote yeah, and that his compasses
(15:01):
were um going haywire. Well yea, and those are two
those are big, yeah, those are big. When he started
on this heading, his voice started coming through. Uh, clearer
and louder, which they took to mean all right, that
you're headed in the right direction, right, because the bass
he was talking to was in Fort lauder Down. Yeah,
so like you're getting closer, you're on the right path.
But Taylor said, no, no no, no, I don't think you're right.
(15:22):
I don't think we went far enough east, so we're
gonna turn around and go east again. Um. At that
point the voice got less clear and further away, indicating
that he was probably going in the wrong direction. And
then that was it. They never heard from him again
or anybody else. They never found any records as far
as I understand, they were just lost, all five Navy avengers. Um.
(15:47):
And there were two seaplanes that were sent out and
one of them exploded right after takeoff and the other
one never found any trace of flight nineteen Yeah, so um,
that's so. In nineteen fifty two, and author George sand
wrote an article for Fate magazine called c Mystery at
our back Door and first described a quote watery triangle
(16:10):
bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, And then
in nine uh ragosig sorry Argosy magazine finally gave the
Triangle its name in an article by Vincent Gaddis called
the Deadly Bermuda Triangle, which is a pulp magazine that
(16:30):
writes fiction. But somehow people missed that and took it
to be a real thing. Right. It even says the
magazine's tagline is a magazine of master fiction. And when
you look at it, like I looked it up, it's
it doesn't look like a valid are not valid, But
it doesn't look like a newsweek you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
I know it's UM. Part of the other uh, I
(16:52):
think thing that captured the public's imagination and that was
kind of lost on people was originally the Navy UM said.
They said that flight nine he was lost due to
pilot error, and uh, Lieutenant Taylor's family was like, no,
he was way too experience for that. There's no way
he would do this. There's something else. So the Navy
was pressured to change it, because this is back when
(17:13):
the Navy was like, all right, all right, we don't
want your feelings to be hurt. Uh, And they changed
it to um something caused unknown, yes, which sounds very mysterious.
Exactly so, and if the Navy is saying we lost
five fighter planes to cause is unknown in this area
that people are calling the Remuna Triangle. That's what really
(17:35):
gave the Remuna Triangle its initial boost into the capturing
the public imagination. Yeah, and like I said, I've looked
up more on Taylor, and apparently the truth is the
only other four or the other four pilots didn't have
significant experience. Taylor had a history of getting lost, and
by the time of his final transmission, they were low
(17:57):
on fuel, they weren't near land, bad weather came in,
and they probably crashed and landed on the bottom of
the ocean. Right. Not very mysterious, no, um. But the
fact that they were never heard from again, I mean
that does again capture the public's imagination. That does. That's
what happened. They're just gone. Things aren't supposed to go,
(18:19):
especially not airplanes. You're not supposed to not find a
trace of something. Um. There have been plenty of other
things that have gone missing, Like you said, a lot
of them are very famous. UM. One, the Mary Celeste,
is commonly listed on as a disappearance of the Bermuda Triangle.
Not so the Mary Celeste, which was a brig from
(18:39):
the late nineteenth century. I think the eighteen seventies um
set sail from New York to Spain and shouldn't have
come anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle when it was found
around the Strait of Gibraltar, floating adrift, with nary a
soul board being still on the grill, a pipe still smoking.
I think when they found it, no explanation whatsoever, just gone.
(19:02):
But it had nothing to do with the Bermuda trying.
I wonder how it got mixed up. People just claim
it that's the problem. It's like, Okay, if there is
something going on here, you're not You're not helping your
case in getting it across to incredulous skeptics right by saying,
plus the mary celasts and that's something exactly UM. But
(19:26):
there was there was one that is legitimately chalked up
to the Bermuda Triangle, the MILWAUKEE'SO Airlift wing plane six eight.
Let's hear about this. So in nineteen on a clear night,
UM a ship, I'm sorry, a UM flying box car,
the fair Child C one nineteen, huge, huge old plane.
(19:48):
It's like the Spruce goose. Huge. UM. It began it
lifted off from Milwaukee on its way to Grand Turk
in the Bahamas, which is that's that's like it. That's
a nice duty, I'm sure. Um. And it landed at
Homestead Air Force Base at five or four pm, hung
around for almost three hours, and then lifted off at
(20:10):
seven pm on its way to the Bahamas. And I
was never heard from again after about um halfway there.
I think I never heard from again. No one ever
found a trace of it. One of the things that
really um captures the imagination about this one is it
had a full crew of really experienced flight mechanics and
(20:34):
flight engineers who knew what they were doing. So if
there is anything that was wrong with this plane, there
are plenty of people on board to fix it. Right.
But nothing the planes has gone forever, no trace, no
one ever heard of it. Said they found a few
scraps of debris, yes, but they think that that could
have been scuttled. It didn't appear to have undergone any
(20:54):
damage or anything like that. Just like they were right,
there's the Sulfur queen Um, which is a ship that
had like a hundred and fifty thousand tons of molten
sulfur aboard, and they found scraps of or and stuff
like that that would indicate an explosion. Sure, there's nothing
that indicated that with the um with plane six eighty.
It just sank first, or maybe it was lifted to
(21:17):
a distant planet. Well, that is that is one explanation
that people use. So let's talk about we're gonna divvy
up the explanations into far fetched theories, yes, which is
what the article I think very fairly calls them. Sure,
and at least using Ackerman's razor. Uh. And then two
(21:38):
more scientific explanations. So let's start with the intensely more
fun and entertaining farfetched theories. Yes, I mentioned UFOs and
alien abduction, and that is a pretty hotbed of UFO
sightings down there. And some people have theorized that that's
what's going on there there poor in these ships and
(22:01):
planes abducting them to their universe, their planet, or it
may actually be a portal to other planets. Yes, they
think that possibly if there are portals that a blue hole,
which there are several in the Bermuda Triangle, are wormholes
through dimensions or time and space, and uh that this
(22:23):
is a highly trafficked portal in the Bermuda Triangle and
ships and planes get sucked into it accidentally. Uh. Some Josh,
think again, these are the far fetched theories that we're
going over now. Some think, Josh, that it is home
to the lost city of Atlantis, who which may or
may not have been populated by a race of aliens. Correct,
(22:45):
they had advanced technologies, some say including a death ray weapon.
So some say that destroyed Atlantis Eventually. Agred Casey said,
have you heard of him? I have the Sleeping Psychic
or a sleeping profit of Virginia Beach. Yeah. He he
was really hot for Atlantis. He was, and he predicted actually,
um that in the sixties. He didn't predict it in
(23:05):
the sixties. He predicted that in the sixties people would
find evidence of Atlantis off the coast of Bimony. And
surely enough in nineteen was it. Yeah, they found what's
known as the Biminy Road. Now, this is pretty interesting,
I think it is. It depends on your viewpoint, like
Bermuda Triangle as a whole. But yes, there's a long, um,
(23:26):
what looks to be a road of shaped blocks of
rock in about fifteen ft of water off the coast
of Bimony. Yeah, and it's cool looking and uh, a
lot of people say, no, this is just something that
happened naturally, like a coral reef mite. And others have
studied it and said, you know what, these stones are
(23:46):
shaped and they're placed there very purposefully as a wall.
So it's also called the Biminy Wall or road, and uh,
this could have been tied to Atlantis somehow, could have
been a lot of people say also, look, there's tool
marks on there, and then critics say, yes, underwater tourists
(24:06):
like you have used tools to take chips off of
it as souvenirs and studying it. Yeah. Interesting, But if
you look at the Beminy Wall, it is very suggestive
of being shaped by man and being put in place.
But these are like enormous rocks, so it would have
taken a marvel of engineering to get those there. You
(24:26):
know what. Jerry just interrupted the podcast, which she rarely does,
and says, I dove the Bemini Road, so she's seen firsthand.
I thought she said I drove it. At first, I
was like, Jerry is an alien underwater doom buggie. We
should have just had her say it. But do you
want to say it? And she want to say it
because that would mean she exists. Did she beat first?
(24:48):
She did? Wow? Jerry, So let's get back to Atlantis. Uh.
They supposedly relied on the power of special energy crystals,
one of which has been recovered by a man named
Dr Ray Brown. Allegedly, Dr Ray Brown was a diver
and in nineteen seventy he said that he was diving
down there and discovered an underwater pyramid made of mirrored stone.
(25:10):
Mirrored stone, and just weird to see underwater? And is
it seeing a mirror pyramid? Doesn't seem like the seventies? Uh?
He said. He entered the pyramid and saw a brassy
metallic rod with a multifaceted red gym hanging from the
apex of the room. And directly below this rod was
(25:31):
a stand of bronze I'm sorry, with bronze hands holding
a crystal sphere four inches in diameter. He said, you
know what, I'm just gonna take that. It sounds like
something he found it like Kirkland's. You know that sounds
like a candle holder from kirkland Sid. Yeah, So he
thought it was a good idea to take this. He
(25:52):
removed it. He said, I'm not only gonna take it,
but I'm not gonna tell anyone five years until the
Great Psychic Seminar of Phoenix, Arizona in h he revealed
the crystal, and uh, what did they see when they
gazed upon it? Not one, not twice, but thrice pyramids
inside of smaller sizes, the smaller in front of the other,
(26:15):
and some people have been said to have seen a
fourth one in a deep meditative state. So basically Dr
Brown says, hey, man, um, these these pyramids are evidence
that there's some sort of electrical properties going on in
this crystal, and there's probably more of these crystals down there,
and that's probably what's causing all of these problems in
(26:38):
the Bermuda triangle. But scoff, as you might, there's apparently
evidence of an underwater urban complex off the coast of
Cuba that was recently discovered in the last ten years
or so. Yeah, I think it was like racquetball courts
and uh other stuff. Now, that was definitely I looked
(27:00):
this up, but I didn't get a whole lot out
of it. What did you see? I thought that they're
still looking, They're still looking. God, I've become dated in
my old age. Was that making my scoff face? When
you said, when you said that, scoff as you may, Okay,
magnetic abnormalities. Uh, this one I think is sort of interesting.
(27:21):
There's a guy, a pilot named Bruce Gernon, and he
co wrote a book called The Fog Colon and never
before published theory of the Bermuda triangle phenomenon. He says
that in December of nineteen seventy, he was flying uh
to Beminy Clear Skies when he saw this weird cloud
almost perfectly round and hovering over the Miami shoreline right.
(27:45):
So he goes to go around it, goes to go
around it, cloud moves, couldn't go around it. So he said,
you know what this thing is like a tunnel. Now
I'm just gonna fly into this tunnel, big whoop, fly
out the other side and get to my Destination's not
much of a Freudian, no he uh. He he got
inside the tunnel, he said he saw lines on the walls.
It spun counterclockwise, and my my, I'm this guy. All
(28:09):
of a sudden and his channeling, Bruce gurg Garnan, his
uh navigational instruments were going nuts. His compass with spinning counterclockwise.
He said, you know, there should be blue sky at
the end of the tunnel, but there's really nothing. There's
no sky, there's no ocean, there's no horizon, there's no
nothing but gray Hayes as he's flying. Yes, which why
(28:34):
that's why, I said Lieutenant Taylor, saying everything looks weird.
My compasses are haywire. Yeah, that's why it counts. Okay um.
He contacted Miami Air Traffic Control to get some identification.
They said, uh, we don't see any planes over on
our radar over, And then a few minutes later they
(28:54):
went scratch that we see a plane now over you. No,
they didn't. They said that somebody spotted a plane over
Miami over. Oh they didn't. They didn't spot on the radar. No, No,
he popped up on the radar while it was in
the electronic fog. Somebody reported a plane flying over Miami
over or so. Uh. He said to himself, that's not
(29:16):
possible because it takes a good hour fifteen minutes to
get to Miami. I've only been up here for forty
seven minutes. At that moment, the clouds tunnel peals away
and the instruments go back to normal, and he looks
down and he sees Miami Beach Dwyane Wade on the
beach of Miami at South Beach playing basketball. So Gernan
(29:39):
said that, um, this happened to him, No just once,
but another time with his wife, and um, he wrote
a book on it, the Fog and never before published
Theory of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon. He basically says that
there is some sort of um, the force of gravity
is weaker there and so like throw, magnetism is allowed
(30:01):
to escape more easily from the Earth's core. And what
it does, You've got an electromagnetic storm that this pays
very quickly but leaves this electronic fog that can just
screw you up, send you off course, uh, make you
lose time, and then the next thing you know, you're
a hundred miles off course with your compasses showing that
(30:22):
you're dead. Well, he claims it's a time travel tunnel.
So that's what he says, And he had another dude
that said, Hey, the same thing happened to me ten
years ago. I went through this time storm and my
watch confirmed it. Yeah, so there you have it, and
(30:43):
I'm sorry. He's saying that the magnetism is weaker in
that area. That is that what he's saying. Yeah, um,
so that's the Electric Electronic Fog. I think he had
a band called Bruce Gernan and the Electronic Fog. Yeah,
they played at that same psychic seminar, that ray round
Debut pyramid. Um so, chuck, there's also uh. Basically, they're saying, okay,
(31:08):
al right, okay, okay, okay, okay, So no aliens, no atlantis.
Let's get scientific here. Um, how about that the Bermuda
Triangle is the only place where the compass the magnetic north,
true North and geographic north line up one of two places, right, yes,
(31:29):
the other one, get this is named the Devil c
It's off the coast of Japan. But it doesn't necessarily
hold water either. But um, so they're saying, okay, so
how about this, And that makes compasses go crazy, makes
a malfunction, and therefore even a season pilot could be
(31:51):
led off course to die. So here's the mystery of
the Bermuda Triangle laid bare scientifically. So what's magnetic declination?
Go ahead and explain that. So agnetic declination is the distance.
So you have your geographic north pole, which is constant
constantly located in the same place right about twelve miles
north of the magnetic north pole. Okay, Magnetic declination is
(32:15):
the difference in compass degrees between um the two north poles. Yes, North,
and you have to compensate for it when you're charting
a course. It moves as you travel. Well, yes, and Um,
it's not it's not constant like it's not always um
separated by the same number of degrees depending on where
(32:38):
you are. Um, there's a line. Supposedly, it's an imaginary
line where true north magnetic north are imperfect linement. Okay,
I'm sorry. The agonic line is real, but it's an
imaginary line, right. Um, So, Sir Edmund Haley, the guy
who discovered Haley's comment said, you know what the Sagan line. Yeah,
(33:01):
this organic line is um. It moves. It's moving westward
at about point two degrees per year. At one point, yes,
the organic line was in the Bermuda triangle, but it
hasn't been that way for a while. It's now about
in the Gulf of Mexico. You know when it was.
I don't, But if it's moving point two degrees per year,
(33:22):
it probably wouldn't account for all of the stuff that's
gone on in Bermuda Triangle. If a lot of stuff
has gone on in Bermuna Triangle and the other uh uh,
I don't want to say debunk. But the other thing
to consider is that they're they're assuming that these pilots
aren't accounting for the magnetic declination, which if you're an
(33:43):
experienced pilot, then your your accounting for that to get
your proper course exactly like, these aren't spring chickens who
were sailing through the Bermuda Triangle, not all of them.
At least we talked about blue holes already a k a. Wormholes,
two other dimensions in parts of the universe. Now, Chuck,
let's go on to um the scientific or plausible theories there.
(34:08):
Weather patterns. It is a very turbulent area. You can
have violent, unexpected storms that pop up seemingly out of
nowhere and that dissipate really really quick as quick as
they came. That are undetected by satellites, so they can't
point and say, well, there was a big storm there.
You know, they'll just pop up leave. You can have
a water spout, which is a tornado over the ocean.
(34:29):
They're really cool looking but it can whip water up
to about a thousand feet into the air. Sure, and
if you're a small plane or even a large time
you could get taken out by one of those. Or
if you're a boat or a ship parked over a
water spout or traveling over a water spout, you're gone.
You're gone. So that's that's one plausible explanation, which is
(34:50):
just bad weather. Yeah, underwater earthquakes. Apparently there is um
a lot of seismic activity in the Bermuda triangle UM,
and that can cause what you're called freak waves, which
that's just sad for those waves. But they can get
up to a hundred feet high. And if you are
a little boat, even if you're a big boat, a
(35:10):
hundred foot wave is you're gone. Um. And one of
the reasons you're gone, Chuck, is because of the underwater
topography UM in the Bermuda Triangle. There's a gentle slope
away from the North American continent and then it drops
off and some of the deepest trenches on planet Earth
(35:31):
are in that area. So if you're a planer boat
and a water spout sinks you takes you out of
the air, or a freak wave get you um, and
you sink off of that shelf, the continental shelf, into
the trench. You're never ever ever going to be found,
except for maybe a civilization a couple of thousand years
(35:52):
into the future, maybe five. It sounds way more exciting
on a TV show to say something like and it
was never spotted again, especially if Robert Stack is saying it.
But it's not as exciting to say it was never
spotted again because it sank so deep we cannot get
down there to see it. And isn't that weird in itself?
(36:14):
Is not weird, it's weird. That's pretty creepy. That creeps
me out more than the idea of like a wormhole.
Oh like, how what's down there in the deep? Yeah?
Or like just the thought of a plane that's not
that's supposed to be up in the air is down there? Uh.
That part of the ocean is home to three water currents,
the jet stream, the Easterly's, and the Gulf Stream. And
(36:38):
the Gulf stream moves really fast, which is why Dexter
dumps his bodies in it, because it's gonna get washed
out to see at about five miles an hour, which
doesn't sound like much. Trust us. That is fast for current,
that's fast when you're moving in the water. And if
you are an inexperienced sailor, and apparently this area has
a lot more inexperienced pilots and sailors because it's I
(36:58):
guess y um, it's gonna throw you off course hundreds
of miles if you're not compensating for it correctly. And
if they're not looking in the right place, you're a
hundred miles over there. You might as well be on
another planet, especially if you don't know where you are,
because if you're a hundred miles off course, you don't
(37:20):
realize you're a hundred miles off course, You're gone. What
about this methane gas, it's sort of like the exploding lake.
I think this is my this is my favorite explanation.
So there is there are significant deposits of things called
methane hydrates, which is basically super dense methane gas in
(37:41):
the form of ice crystals on the sea floor um
and when these crystals, which keep the gas in place, rupture,
huge gas bubble can make its way to the surface
without any warning whatsoever in just a few seconds. And
in the area of this gas bubble up. The gas
mixes with the water, making the water significantly less dense,
(38:04):
making a ship that happens to be in this area
sunk like immediately. It also kicks up a bunch of sediments.
So conceivably ship that is pulled down suck down to
the bottom of the ocean um and then it's covered
with sediment, is by all intensive purposes missing forever. Right, Yeah,
it makes sense. I like the methane gas one. Also,
(38:27):
if you're a plane, conceivably this gas explosion, this rupture
would be flammable, and if you have electrical equipment, you
could conceivably catch fire. Who knows. I like it more
for a ship because it makes sense, like just the
water basically bottoming out beneath the ship. Maybe, But that's
basically the same concept as the um death ray crystal,
(38:51):
except like we've seen these things and they're there. That's uh.
I read it this this one guy's article this morning,
and he talked about a guy named Larry Kush or
Kush and this guy he was at the He wasn't
was he, I don't think so. If he was there,
(39:12):
he was throwing tomatoes at him because he's one of
these guys. It's like, you know what, I'm gonna really
investigate everyone who's investigating. And he researched dozens and dozens
of articles and books and TV shows and he said,
you know what, not many of these people did any
real investigation. They're all telling the same stories over and
over and over to sell papers or advertising on TV.
(39:34):
And he says, you know what, they're just passing on
speculation as its truth. And what we've got here is
communal reinforcement over the years of people that really got
into this whole thing. And that's really all it is.
It's it's boats sinc planes crash. Sometimes they don't get found.
(39:55):
End of story. That's what he said. And uh here
and if your childhood pirates do they say modern day
pirates are or could be used, especially before the d
A shut down the Caribbean for smuggling and basically through
Mexico into a pit of living hell. So some plausible,
(40:18):
some far fetched. There's the Bermuda triangle. I think this
is a good lesson. And um, it's like what we
do when we're doing research. If you've come across the
same story and it's told in almost the exact same way,
using the same wording across site after sit after site,
just like you said, communally reinforced. And it's not necessarily true.
(40:41):
But if you while away your hours and spend your
time researching the Bermuda triangle and getting into it and
it tickles your fancy, more power to you. Yeah, I'm
not gonna poop put it's fun. She just spent like
forty minutes poo pooing it. No, I just I believe
if it's just both sinking and planes crashing. Well, and
(41:04):
also you know, raises the question is there even a
significant amount loss compared to other places? It doesn't seem
like it. Well, anyway, that's Bermuna triangle. If you want
to learn more about it, you can read the article
on the site called Bermuda Triangle. Just type that into
the search bar at house to works dot com and
we'll bring it up. And I said search bar. So
(41:25):
it's time for a listener mail. That's right, Josh, I'm
gonna call this uh nast Thomas nasty email from himself. No, no,
he's not alive anymore. Uh This from Evan B. And
Evans says, I was just listening to the podcast on
political animals. It was the one on the Republican Elephant
Democratic Donkey. I have an interesting story involving Thomas Nast.
(41:48):
I have an elderly neighbor. About a year ago, my
mom started working for him as an aide. He was
going through his I'm sorry he's going through financial troubles
mentioned selling a painting he had bought years ago when
he lived in Pittsburgh. It was a painting of the
head of Christ, and it turns out it was Thomas
nast original. Uh. This is very interesting to learn because
Nast is known for its political works and not necessarily
(42:09):
religious ones. My mom took the painting to be a
praise and it was valued at about two hundred thousand dollars.
Holy Cow turned out to be somewhat of a generous estimate,
but the painting was still very valuable. Nonetheless, the painting
was placed in Skinner's auction house set to auction in
the fall, but did not sell unfortunately. However, it is
going to be back up for auction again at the
(42:31):
next Skinner's auction. And I'm happy that I finally have
a relevant story to email you guys about when people
say that like I've always wanted to email in, but
I've never had anything to say until now. But but
usually when they say that it's something significant, you can
email in to say hi, that's fine. Yeah, but you're
not gonna get red on the air unless it's significant.
Oh is that what it's all about? That's what I said.
(42:52):
There's nothing to do with telling it's high. So that's
Evan B and his mom. It's a great story. Yeah.
I love ones like that, Like have you ever heard
the one about the lady who found like a hundred
and fifty grand in cash and like a fire extinguisher
That never happened to me. Yeah, I love this. Um. Well,
that is it for unsolved mysteries. We appreciate you joining us,
(43:14):
and uh, if you want to get in touch with us,
if you want to tell us high, you can just
tell us high. It's fine. Um. You can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook at facebook dot com slash stuff you
Should Know, or you can send us a plain old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(43:38):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
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you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready.
(43:58):
Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
(00:21):
and that makes this stuff you should know the podcast
the rip off of stuff they don't want you to
know in this particular episode. It's right, but that's not
the case at all. I was just singing Barry Mantel
to Josh right before we recorded. Yeah, what song is it?
He had a song called the Bermuda Triangle, and I
(00:41):
think I remember the gist of it was that the
Bermuda Triangle not only makes ships and planes disappeared, but
people from your love life we'll disappear as well through
the Bermuda Triangle. I don't know, I don't remember, but
I was, as I told you, I was big into
very Man. I was a kid up for some reason.
(01:01):
When I was eight, I just thought he was the
bee's knees. He's very cool. Yeah, he asked me, you
me has every single one of his records at homes
lost to go home and route that song out. I
still have get to the bottom of stub mind in
the attic, do you? Oh yeah, it's sweet. Do you
have a nice record collection hitting up in the attic? Um,
I've got about two crates, not not a ton, but
i'll bet their choice. Yeah, they're pretty good. Okay, Well
(01:24):
there you have at the Bermuda Triangle. Thank you everybody.
The records range from Barry Manilow to like Molly Hatchett.
So that tells you what happened between ages nine and
fifteen for me, Um, chuck, Josh, you want to get
to this. Yeah, yeah, I mean you were a kid.
You just admitted to being a kid once. I was once. Um,
so of course the Remuda tryan al must have struck
(01:46):
your fancy at some point. Well, in the seventies it
was a big deal. Like I remember it being a
big deal in the seventies and I was kind of thinking,
you know, you never hear about it anymore. But I
think it was due to the book. Charles Berlitzs book
came out in nineteen What was it called the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, oh,
(02:08):
it's the Bermuda Triangle. Um, oh no, that's a different one.
No, No No, his was just a Bermuda Triangle. But his
sold twenty million copies. And like, I remember this being
a big deal at the time. It was like on
the Mike Douglas Show. And yeah, so I think that's
why it was so big in the seventies. People were
dumber back then. Plus Berry Manlow that was in the seventies.
It was I'll bet it he wrote that song after
the book. Um, well, if you wanted to talk about this,
(02:31):
my intro wasn't that good anyway, So you want to
just get into the Bermuda Triangle. The intro disappeared like
so many ships at sea. That was very good, Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, thank you. Um. So we think of the
Bermuda Triangle. Is this old, possibly ancient, possibly lost mystery.
(02:52):
Um that is that forms a triangle. It's a geographical,
made up, fictitious geographical area bounded were or with its
points between San Juan, Puerto Rico. Um, Bermuda greatly enough
and Miami. Um it's real, but it's just not like
it's not recognized by any official geographic bodies. Right. But
(03:14):
if you look at a map, you could also make
Bermuda quadrahedron with like eight other places too, So yeah,
it's as real as the Bermuda quadrahedron. Um. It's not
real if you are a member of the U S
Board of Geographic Names, because they don't recognize it formally.
Most people don't, um, not officially at least. Um. But
(03:36):
I was saying that, you know, it seems like it's
been around a long time. It wasn't until nineteen four
that it got its name. Did you know that? I
did because we actually researched this a long time ago
and didn't do it for some reason. So I knew
it from then, but only from then. Um. And there
there's I mean, if you are into this kind of thing,
you are well aware that there have been hundreds and
(03:57):
hundreds of ships that have gone miss seeing over say
the past century. Um, planes, ships, cars, somehow people just
gone depends on who you asked, right, well, it depends
on you know how, like I say, if you're into
it or not. And basically the key to the Bermuda
triangle is statistics. How you take statistics, how you either
(04:22):
manipulate them yourselves or or how you accept statistics at
face value, is probably a pretty good indicator about how
you feel about the Bermuda Triangle. Um, there's been all
sorts of explanations from uh, basically natural phenomenon, to the
idea that Atlantis is down there somewhere, which we'll get into,
(04:44):
to the idea that it's really no different than anywhere
else and it's just a bunch of uh sensationalism. Yes,
but no matter how you look at the Bermuda Triangle,
it encompasses about five square miles. It's huge and extremely
well traveled. It's not off the beaten path at all.
(05:08):
You a lot of people want to go to Bermuda.
The Bahamas is in there, I mean, come on. Yeah. Plus,
it's just it's just a heavily traveled route in area.
Right as far as shipping goes, I imagine two right. So, Um,
Supposedly there's been as many as a hundred ships and
a thousand lives lost in the Bermuda Triangle in the
last century. Right. Some say part of the problem is
(05:32):
the Coast Guards supposedly says that it doesn't that there's
not an unusual amount of incidents there that Okay, a
thousand people have died and a hundred ships have been
lost in last hundred years. Yeah, that's nothing. Um. Other
people say, no, that's not the case. Lloyd's of London, which,
by the way, Chuck, if you listen to the Coffee podcast,
(05:56):
the tie that binds coffee to Bermuda Triangle is to London.
It's right, uh. In nive the editor of Fate magazine,
Mary Margaret Fuller, Um, she contacted Lloyd's of London and said, hey, um,
can you give me a list of payoffs for the
Bermuda Triangle? And lloyd said sure we can. Of course,
(06:17):
we do this thing all the time. And um, four
hundred and twenty eight vessels were reported missing throughout the
world between nine and the Bermuda Triangle didn't have any
significantly higher incidents than any other area, supposedly, which is
why the insurance premiums the Bermuda Triangle are no different
(06:37):
than anywhere else as well. Yes, you should point out, uh,
if you ask a guy, I love this guy's name
name g n this' with a G, I, A N J.
Let's just come on and say it, Gan Quasar, Gene
and J Quasar. Is that is that supposed to be?
(06:57):
That's what I'm calling right, Have you been his page? No?
Actually that's not true. He um. He he's the administrator
of Bermuda hyphen Triangle dot org and I believe I
have been to that page before. And he's the author
of Into the Bermuda Triangle Cohen Pursuing the Truth behind
the World's Greatest Mystery. Yes, I went to his site
because I felt like I owed it to him to
(07:18):
check this out. And it is another one of those
sites that looks like my Space page from like two
thousand two. And it doesn't draw you in as far
as looking valid. I'm not saying it's not, but it
doesn't look super professional. There has there's like texts that's overlapping,
the images in some pages don't load like user A
(07:39):
good user experience adds tremendous veracity to one's fantastic claims.
It really does, Mr Quasar, We mean it. If you
update your user experience, people will listen more. I would
have honestly stayed on the site a lot longer. I've
been like, let me look at this, but as soon
as I saw it, I went come on. But despite
his lack of web design skill, yes, yeah, he has
(08:03):
like put a lot of time and effort and energy
into researching the Bermuda triangle, and he's one of the
ones that says, hey, Lloyd's of London, that's that's that's
why would you go to Lloyds of London. That's what
he says. Well, he says that Lloyds of London doesn't
even keep track of smaller craft, and a lot of
these smaller craft are missing, and they don't even insure yachts,
(08:24):
which is not true. I look that up. I thought
that was odd. I'm glad you looked. I don't know
if they're maybe he means yachts of a certain size,
but they definitely insure yachts. In fact, they were, ironically,
if I'm not mistaken, the originators of maritime insurance way
back when. I might be wrong, but I thought, I remember,
I don't think you're wrong. Um, so well Mr Quasar
(08:46):
went to the coast Guard instead. Uh. The coast Guard
has um definitive records on missing vessels, but they call
them um delayed overdue vessels. Like a three hour tour
that hasn't come back. Yes, so it's overdue. It's supposed
to be there after three hours, a hundred and eighty
(09:09):
thousand hours ago, so it's a very long overdue so
Mr Quasar found that um that he he was. He
says that he was given data on overdue vessels UM
after asking for twelve years, and found that in the
previous two years, the Coast Guard had records of three
hundred missing or overdue vessels. Now does that mean that
(09:30):
they were still overdue or they were overdue by a
couple of hours and they were just at one point
listed his overdue There is an excellent question. I didn't
get that. That is a very good question. Well, I
hope this guy listens to the podcast. Maybe you can
tell us. I bet we could contact him through his
website too. I bet it's not that hard. He also
went to the National Transportation Safety Board and looked at
(09:51):
their database and said, hey, okay, let's just take a
random place. Then if the Bermuda Triangle is no different
than any other area, how about off the coast of
New England. Uh, And we'll say for the last ten years,
there's only been a few disappearances of vessels in the
Bermuda Triangle over that same time period. I would ask
Mr Quasar, like, just give me more stats, like did
(10:15):
he compare the amount of travel? Was it all equalized?
Whether did he take everything into consideration, right? And I
mean maybe the the coast of New England has a
disproportionately low amount of missing vessels, whereas the Gulf of
Mexico or the Pacific Ocean has higher than the Bermuda Triangle.
(10:36):
Depends on what you're comparing it to him. Or did
they have a lot of boats sink that they found
because the water wasn't as deep or was easily accessible,
because he's talking about disappearances like where you never find wreckage, right, Um,
So I guess gen Quasar G and J. Quasar Um
is a torch bearer of a very long line of
(10:59):
people who have really sunk their teeth and time and
energy into this solving this mystery, or or possibly even
promoting something that isn't a mystery as a mystery because
they genuinely believe it, Um. And probably what's what kicked
the whole thing off um, at least in the public's imagination,
(11:21):
was the missing Squadron, the lost flight Flight nineteen which
Chuck actually disappeared UM in sixty six years ago. Last week, Yeah,
they had a little ceremony down at um Fort Lauderdale
Hollywood International Airport UM to honor the fourteen servicemen who
were lost on that flight flight nineteen. But that was
(11:44):
that made huge headlines. Yeah, I mean you want to
go and tell the story. Yeah, let's talk about flight
nineteen UM. And you know, I want to point out
that this is one of the leading stories. And in fact,
when you go back and look at all the research,
a lot of this is based on a handful of
stories that have been retold over and over and over
by all these different people. So it seems like there's
(12:05):
more than there are. No, it's just the whole, the whole.
A mystery of the Bermuda triangle is based on a
handful of disappearances that are noted, no, noteworth and not like. Okay,
so h u S Navy Avengers Flight nineteen uh five,
(12:27):
missing Navy pilot h Avengers. I guess is that the
kind of plane? Yeah? There, Navy grum and TBF Avengers.
They were propeller planes, fighter fighter jets or fighter prop
planes from the end of the war. Okay, So they
set out on a routine patrol sunny day five highly
experienced student pilots, which is a little bit of a
(12:50):
contradiction in terms. Yeah, but I mean, these were Navy pilots,
So I mean, I'm sure if you put them side
by side to any other student pilots, they would do
they would dog fight them into into humiliation, into oblivion. Uh.
Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor led the mission, and the mission
included a few course changes departed at one fifteen scheduled
(13:10):
course changes. Yeah. Basically Taylor knew what he was doing
and this was a routine flight. That's what some say.
There's also speculation that's Taylor wasn't super experienced. Well, actually
the other pilots weren't super experienced, and that he had
a consistent record of navigation troubles, including ditching airplanes twice
(13:32):
into the Pacific Ocean. Well that's just routine Navy hazing
back then. Uh, but we'll get into that. So Taylor
led the missions. Uh, they took off. We're flying over
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they heard a signal um that
they thought was from a boat or a plane in distress. No,
that was Cox that heard that signal. But he was
(13:54):
part of the crew, right, was he. It was he
at the base. He was another guy who was flying
over a different to Florida. Okay, yeah, he was. He
kind of tried to help them. He got the distress
signal and he tried to figure out where they were
and was giving them, Um, okay, that makes more sense.
So Cox uh told Taylor fly with the sun at
(14:17):
your left wing and up the coast until you see Miami,
and you'll know my Miami when you see it. Taylor said, no, no, no,
we're over a small island and there's no other land anywhere.
If it was a Florida Keys, which he thought it was,
he would have seen a bunch of islands obviously, and
Florida sticking down there. And they only had a couple
of hours left of fuel. And then Taylor described a
(14:39):
large island that they assumed was Andros Island, which is
the largest island in the Bahamas. And so they sent
him back further instructions to get him to Fort Lauderdale.
Is that right? Yeah, But there's a big part that
you left out here, and this is important. Taylor reported
that everything looked wrong quote yeah, and that his compasses
(15:01):
were um going haywire. Well yea, and those are two
those are big, yeah, those are big. When he started
on this heading, his voice started coming through. Uh, clearer
and louder, which they took to mean all right, that
you're headed in the right direction, right, because the bass
he was talking to was in Fort lauder Down. Yeah,
so like you're getting closer, you're on the right path.
But Taylor said, no, no no, no, I don't think you're right.
(15:22):
I don't think we went far enough east, so we're
gonna turn around and go east again. Um. At that
point the voice got less clear and further away, indicating
that he was probably going in the wrong direction. And
then that was it. They never heard from him again
or anybody else. They never found any records as far
as I understand, they were just lost, all five Navy avengers. Um.
(15:47):
And there were two seaplanes that were sent out and
one of them exploded right after takeoff and the other
one never found any trace of flight nineteen Yeah, so um,
that's so. In nineteen fifty two, and author George sand
wrote an article for Fate magazine called c Mystery at
our back Door and first described a quote watery triangle
(16:10):
bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, And then
in nine uh ragosig sorry Argosy magazine finally gave the
Triangle its name in an article by Vincent Gaddis called
the Deadly Bermuda Triangle, which is a pulp magazine that
(16:30):
writes fiction. But somehow people missed that and took it
to be a real thing. Right. It even says the
magazine's tagline is a magazine of master fiction. And when
you look at it, like I looked it up, it's
it doesn't look like a valid are not valid, But
it doesn't look like a newsweek you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
I know it's UM. Part of the other uh, I
(16:52):
think thing that captured the public's imagination and that was
kind of lost on people was originally the Navy UM said.
They said that flight nine he was lost due to
pilot error, and uh, Lieutenant Taylor's family was like, no,
he was way too experience for that. There's no way
he would do this. There's something else. So the Navy
was pressured to change it, because this is back when
(17:13):
the Navy was like, all right, all right, we don't
want your feelings to be hurt. Uh, And they changed
it to um something caused unknown, yes, which sounds very mysterious.
Exactly so, and if the Navy is saying we lost
five fighter planes to cause is unknown in this area
that people are calling the Remuna Triangle. That's what really
(17:35):
gave the Remuna Triangle its initial boost into the capturing
the public imagination. Yeah, and like I said, I've looked
up more on Taylor, and apparently the truth is the
only other four or the other four pilots didn't have
significant experience. Taylor had a history of getting lost, and
by the time of his final transmission, they were low
(17:57):
on fuel, they weren't near land, bad weather came in,
and they probably crashed and landed on the bottom of
the ocean. Right. Not very mysterious, no, um. But the
fact that they were never heard from again, I mean
that does again capture the public's imagination. That does. That's
what happened. They're just gone. Things aren't supposed to go,
(18:19):
especially not airplanes. You're not supposed to not find a
trace of something. Um. There have been plenty of other
things that have gone missing, Like you said, a lot
of them are very famous. UM. One, the Mary Celeste,
is commonly listed on as a disappearance of the Bermuda Triangle.
Not so the Mary Celeste, which was a brig from
(18:39):
the late nineteenth century. I think the eighteen seventies um
set sail from New York to Spain and shouldn't have
come anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle when it was found
around the Strait of Gibraltar, floating adrift, with nary a
soul board being still on the grill, a pipe still smoking.
I think when they found it, no explanation whatsoever, just gone.
(19:02):
But it had nothing to do with the Bermuda trying.
I wonder how it got mixed up. People just claim
it that's the problem. It's like, Okay, if there is
something going on here, you're not You're not helping your
case in getting it across to incredulous skeptics right by saying,
plus the mary celasts and that's something exactly UM. But
(19:26):
there was there was one that is legitimately chalked up
to the Bermuda Triangle, the MILWAUKEE'SO Airlift wing plane six eight.
Let's hear about this. So in nineteen on a clear night,
UM a ship, I'm sorry, a UM flying box car,
the fair Child C one nineteen, huge, huge old plane.
(19:48):
It's like the Spruce goose. Huge. UM. It began it
lifted off from Milwaukee on its way to Grand Turk
in the Bahamas, which is that's that's like it. That's
a nice duty, I'm sure. Um. And it landed at
Homestead Air Force Base at five or four pm, hung
around for almost three hours, and then lifted off at
(20:10):
seven pm on its way to the Bahamas. And I
was never heard from again after about um halfway there.
I think I never heard from again. No one ever
found a trace of it. One of the things that
really um captures the imagination about this one is it
had a full crew of really experienced flight mechanics and
(20:34):
flight engineers who knew what they were doing. So if
there is anything that was wrong with this plane, there
are plenty of people on board to fix it. Right.
But nothing the planes has gone forever, no trace, no
one ever heard of it. Said they found a few
scraps of debris, yes, but they think that that could
have been scuttled. It didn't appear to have undergone any
(20:54):
damage or anything like that. Just like they were right,
there's the Sulfur queen Um, which is a ship that
had like a hundred and fifty thousand tons of molten
sulfur aboard, and they found scraps of or and stuff
like that that would indicate an explosion. Sure, there's nothing
that indicated that with the um with plane six eighty.
It just sank first, or maybe it was lifted to
(21:17):
a distant planet. Well, that is that is one explanation
that people use. So let's talk about we're gonna divvy
up the explanations into far fetched theories, yes, which is
what the article I think very fairly calls them. Sure,
and at least using Ackerman's razor. Uh. And then two
(21:38):
more scientific explanations. So let's start with the intensely more
fun and entertaining farfetched theories. Yes, I mentioned UFOs and
alien abduction, and that is a pretty hotbed of UFO
sightings down there. And some people have theorized that that's
what's going on there there poor in these ships and
(22:01):
planes abducting them to their universe, their planet, or it
may actually be a portal to other planets. Yes, they
think that possibly if there are portals that a blue hole,
which there are several in the Bermuda Triangle, are wormholes
through dimensions or time and space, and uh that this
(22:23):
is a highly trafficked portal in the Bermuda Triangle and
ships and planes get sucked into it accidentally. Uh. Some Josh,
think again, these are the far fetched theories that we're
going over now. Some think, Josh, that it is home
to the lost city of Atlantis, who which may or
may not have been populated by a race of aliens. Correct,
(22:45):
they had advanced technologies, some say including a death ray weapon.
So some say that destroyed Atlantis Eventually. Agred Casey said,
have you heard of him? I have the Sleeping Psychic
or a sleeping profit of Virginia Beach. Yeah. He he
was really hot for Atlantis. He was, and he predicted actually,
um that in the sixties. He didn't predict it in
(23:05):
the sixties. He predicted that in the sixties people would
find evidence of Atlantis off the coast of Bimony. And
surely enough in nineteen was it. Yeah, they found what's
known as the Biminy Road. Now, this is pretty interesting,
I think it is. It depends on your viewpoint, like
Bermuda Triangle as a whole. But yes, there's a long, um,
(23:26):
what looks to be a road of shaped blocks of
rock in about fifteen ft of water off the coast
of Bimony. Yeah, and it's cool looking and uh, a
lot of people say, no, this is just something that
happened naturally, like a coral reef mite. And others have
studied it and said, you know what, these stones are
(23:46):
shaped and they're placed there very purposefully as a wall.
So it's also called the Biminy Wall or road, and uh,
this could have been tied to Atlantis somehow, could have
been a lot of people say also, look, there's tool
marks on there, and then critics say, yes, underwater tourists
(24:06):
like you have used tools to take chips off of
it as souvenirs and studying it. Yeah. Interesting, But if
you look at the Beminy Wall, it is very suggestive
of being shaped by man and being put in place.
But these are like enormous rocks, so it would have
taken a marvel of engineering to get those there. You
(24:26):
know what. Jerry just interrupted the podcast, which she rarely does,
and says, I dove the Bemini Road, so she's seen firsthand.
I thought she said I drove it. At first, I
was like, Jerry is an alien underwater doom buggie. We
should have just had her say it. But do you
want to say it? And she want to say it
because that would mean she exists. Did she beat first?
(24:48):
She did? Wow? Jerry, So let's get back to Atlantis. Uh.
They supposedly relied on the power of special energy crystals,
one of which has been recovered by a man named
Dr Ray Brown. Allegedly, Dr Ray Brown was a diver
and in nineteen seventy he said that he was diving
down there and discovered an underwater pyramid made of mirrored stone.
(25:10):
Mirrored stone, and just weird to see underwater? And is
it seeing a mirror pyramid? Doesn't seem like the seventies? Uh?
He said. He entered the pyramid and saw a brassy
metallic rod with a multifaceted red gym hanging from the
apex of the room. And directly below this rod was
(25:31):
a stand of bronze I'm sorry, with bronze hands holding
a crystal sphere four inches in diameter. He said, you
know what, I'm just gonna take that. It sounds like
something he found it like Kirkland's. You know that sounds
like a candle holder from kirkland Sid. Yeah, So he
thought it was a good idea to take this. He
(25:52):
removed it. He said, I'm not only gonna take it,
but I'm not gonna tell anyone five years until the
Great Psychic Seminar of Phoenix, Arizona in h he revealed
the crystal, and uh, what did they see when they
gazed upon it? Not one, not twice, but thrice pyramids
inside of smaller sizes, the smaller in front of the other,
(26:15):
and some people have been said to have seen a
fourth one in a deep meditative state. So basically Dr
Brown says, hey, man, um, these these pyramids are evidence
that there's some sort of electrical properties going on in
this crystal, and there's probably more of these crystals down there,
and that's probably what's causing all of these problems in
(26:38):
the Bermuda triangle. But scoff, as you might, there's apparently
evidence of an underwater urban complex off the coast of
Cuba that was recently discovered in the last ten years
or so. Yeah, I think it was like racquetball courts
and uh other stuff. Now, that was definitely I looked
(27:00):
this up, but I didn't get a whole lot out
of it. What did you see? I thought that they're
still looking, They're still looking. God, I've become dated in
my old age. Was that making my scoff face? When
you said, when you said that, scoff as you may, Okay,
magnetic abnormalities. Uh, this one I think is sort of interesting.
(27:21):
There's a guy, a pilot named Bruce Gernon, and he
co wrote a book called The Fog Colon and never
before published theory of the Bermuda triangle phenomenon. He says
that in December of nineteen seventy, he was flying uh
to Beminy Clear Skies when he saw this weird cloud
almost perfectly round and hovering over the Miami shoreline right.
(27:45):
So he goes to go around it, goes to go
around it, cloud moves, couldn't go around it. So he said,
you know what this thing is like a tunnel. Now
I'm just gonna fly into this tunnel, big whoop, fly
out the other side and get to my Destination's not
much of a Freudian, no he uh. He he got
inside the tunnel, he said he saw lines on the walls.
It spun counterclockwise, and my my, I'm this guy. All
(28:09):
of a sudden and his channeling, Bruce gurg Garnan, his
uh navigational instruments were going nuts. His compass with spinning counterclockwise.
He said, you know, there should be blue sky at
the end of the tunnel, but there's really nothing. There's
no sky, there's no ocean, there's no horizon, there's no
nothing but gray Hayes as he's flying. Yes, which why
(28:34):
that's why, I said Lieutenant Taylor, saying everything looks weird.
My compasses are haywire. Yeah, that's why it counts. Okay um.
He contacted Miami Air Traffic Control to get some identification.
They said, uh, we don't see any planes over on
our radar over, And then a few minutes later they
(28:54):
went scratch that we see a plane now over you. No,
they didn't. They said that somebody spotted a plane over
Miami over. Oh they didn't. They didn't spot on the radar. No, No,
he popped up on the radar while it was in
the electronic fog. Somebody reported a plane flying over Miami
over or so. Uh. He said to himself, that's not
(29:16):
possible because it takes a good hour fifteen minutes to
get to Miami. I've only been up here for forty
seven minutes. At that moment, the clouds tunnel peals away
and the instruments go back to normal, and he looks
down and he sees Miami Beach Dwyane Wade on the
beach of Miami at South Beach playing basketball. So Gernan
(29:39):
said that, um, this happened to him, No just once,
but another time with his wife, and um, he wrote
a book on it, the Fog and never before published
Theory of the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon. He basically says that
there is some sort of um, the force of gravity
is weaker there and so like throw, magnetism is allowed
(30:01):
to escape more easily from the Earth's core. And what
it does, You've got an electromagnetic storm that this pays
very quickly but leaves this electronic fog that can just
screw you up, send you off course, uh, make you
lose time, and then the next thing you know, you're
a hundred miles off course with your compasses showing that
(30:22):
you're dead. Well, he claims it's a time travel tunnel.
So that's what he says, And he had another dude
that said, Hey, the same thing happened to me ten
years ago. I went through this time storm and my
watch confirmed it. Yeah, so there you have it, and
(30:43):
I'm sorry. He's saying that the magnetism is weaker in
that area. That is that what he's saying. Yeah, um,
so that's the Electric Electronic Fog. I think he had
a band called Bruce Gernan and the Electronic Fog. Yeah,
they played at that same psychic seminar, that ray round
Debut pyramid. Um so, chuck, there's also uh. Basically, they're saying, okay,
(31:08):
al right, okay, okay, okay, okay, So no aliens, no atlantis.
Let's get scientific here. Um, how about that the Bermuda
Triangle is the only place where the compass the magnetic north,
true North and geographic north line up one of two places, right, yes,
(31:29):
the other one, get this is named the Devil c
It's off the coast of Japan. But it doesn't necessarily
hold water either. But um, so they're saying, okay, so
how about this, And that makes compasses go crazy, makes
a malfunction, and therefore even a season pilot could be
(31:51):
led off course to die. So here's the mystery of
the Bermuda Triangle laid bare scientifically. So what's magnetic declination?
Go ahead and explain that. So agnetic declination is the distance.
So you have your geographic north pole, which is constant
constantly located in the same place right about twelve miles
north of the magnetic north pole. Okay, Magnetic declination is
(32:15):
the difference in compass degrees between um the two north poles. Yes, North,
and you have to compensate for it when you're charting
a course. It moves as you travel. Well, yes, and Um,
it's not it's not constant like it's not always um
separated by the same number of degrees depending on where
(32:38):
you are. Um, there's a line. Supposedly, it's an imaginary
line where true north magnetic north are imperfect linement. Okay,
I'm sorry. The agonic line is real, but it's an
imaginary line, right. Um, So, Sir Edmund Haley, the guy
who discovered Haley's comment said, you know what the Sagan line. Yeah,
(33:01):
this organic line is um. It moves. It's moving westward
at about point two degrees per year. At one point, yes,
the organic line was in the Bermuda triangle, but it
hasn't been that way for a while. It's now about
in the Gulf of Mexico. You know when it was.
I don't, But if it's moving point two degrees per year,
(33:22):
it probably wouldn't account for all of the stuff that's
gone on in Bermuda Triangle. If a lot of stuff
has gone on in Bermuna Triangle and the other uh uh,
I don't want to say debunk. But the other thing
to consider is that they're they're assuming that these pilots
aren't accounting for the magnetic declination, which if you're an
(33:43):
experienced pilot, then your your accounting for that to get
your proper course exactly like, these aren't spring chickens who
were sailing through the Bermuda Triangle, not all of them.
At least we talked about blue holes already a k a. Wormholes,
two other dimensions in parts of the universe. Now, Chuck,
let's go on to um the scientific or plausible theories there.
(34:08):
Weather patterns. It is a very turbulent area. You can
have violent, unexpected storms that pop up seemingly out of
nowhere and that dissipate really really quick as quick as
they came. That are undetected by satellites, so they can't
point and say, well, there was a big storm there.
You know, they'll just pop up leave. You can have
a water spout, which is a tornado over the ocean.
(34:29):
They're really cool looking but it can whip water up
to about a thousand feet into the air. Sure, and
if you're a small plane or even a large time
you could get taken out by one of those. Or
if you're a boat or a ship parked over a
water spout or traveling over a water spout, you're gone.
You're gone. So that's that's one plausible explanation, which is
(34:50):
just bad weather. Yeah, underwater earthquakes. Apparently there is um
a lot of seismic activity in the Bermuda triangle UM,
and that can cause what you're called freak waves, which
that's just sad for those waves. But they can get
up to a hundred feet high. And if you are
a little boat, even if you're a big boat, a
(35:10):
hundred foot wave is you're gone. Um. And one of
the reasons you're gone, Chuck, is because of the underwater
topography UM in the Bermuda Triangle. There's a gentle slope
away from the North American continent and then it drops
off and some of the deepest trenches on planet Earth
(35:31):
are in that area. So if you're a planer boat
and a water spout sinks you takes you out of
the air, or a freak wave get you um, and
you sink off of that shelf, the continental shelf, into
the trench. You're never ever ever going to be found,
except for maybe a civilization a couple of thousand years
(35:52):
into the future, maybe five. It sounds way more exciting
on a TV show to say something like and it
was never spotted again, especially if Robert Stack is saying it.
But it's not as exciting to say it was never
spotted again because it sank so deep we cannot get
down there to see it. And isn't that weird in itself?
(36:14):
Is not weird, it's weird. That's pretty creepy. That creeps
me out more than the idea of like a wormhole.
Oh like, how what's down there in the deep? Yeah?
Or like just the thought of a plane that's not
that's supposed to be up in the air is down there? Uh.
That part of the ocean is home to three water currents,
the jet stream, the Easterly's, and the Gulf Stream. And
(36:38):
the Gulf stream moves really fast, which is why Dexter
dumps his bodies in it, because it's gonna get washed
out to see at about five miles an hour, which
doesn't sound like much. Trust us. That is fast for current,
that's fast when you're moving in the water. And if
you are an inexperienced sailor, and apparently this area has
a lot more inexperienced pilots and sailors because it's I
(36:58):
guess y um, it's gonna throw you off course hundreds
of miles if you're not compensating for it correctly. And
if they're not looking in the right place, you're a
hundred miles over there. You might as well be on
another planet, especially if you don't know where you are,
because if you're a hundred miles off course, you don't
(37:20):
realize you're a hundred miles off course, You're gone. What
about this methane gas, it's sort of like the exploding lake.
I think this is my this is my favorite explanation.
So there is there are significant deposits of things called
methane hydrates, which is basically super dense methane gas in
(37:41):
the form of ice crystals on the sea floor um
and when these crystals, which keep the gas in place, rupture,
huge gas bubble can make its way to the surface
without any warning whatsoever in just a few seconds. And
in the area of this gas bubble up. The gas
mixes with the water, making the water significantly less dense,
(38:04):
making a ship that happens to be in this area
sunk like immediately. It also kicks up a bunch of sediments.
So conceivably ship that is pulled down suck down to
the bottom of the ocean um and then it's covered
with sediment, is by all intensive purposes missing forever. Right, Yeah,
it makes sense. I like the methane gas one. Also,
(38:27):
if you're a plane, conceivably this gas explosion, this rupture
would be flammable, and if you have electrical equipment, you
could conceivably catch fire. Who knows. I like it more
for a ship because it makes sense, like just the
water basically bottoming out beneath the ship. Maybe, But that's
basically the same concept as the um death ray crystal,
(38:51):
except like we've seen these things and they're there. That's uh.
I read it this this one guy's article this morning,
and he talked about a guy named Larry Kush or
Kush and this guy he was at the He wasn't
was he, I don't think so. If he was there,
(39:12):
he was throwing tomatoes at him because he's one of
these guys. It's like, you know what, I'm gonna really
investigate everyone who's investigating. And he researched dozens and dozens
of articles and books and TV shows and he said,
you know what, not many of these people did any
real investigation. They're all telling the same stories over and
over and over to sell papers or advertising on TV.
(39:34):
And he says, you know what, they're just passing on
speculation as its truth. And what we've got here is
communal reinforcement over the years of people that really got
into this whole thing. And that's really all it is.
It's it's boats sinc planes crash. Sometimes they don't get found.
(39:55):
End of story. That's what he said. And uh here
and if your childhood pirates do they say modern day
pirates are or could be used, especially before the d
A shut down the Caribbean for smuggling and basically through
Mexico into a pit of living hell. So some plausible,
(40:18):
some far fetched. There's the Bermuda triangle. I think this
is a good lesson. And um, it's like what we
do when we're doing research. If you've come across the
same story and it's told in almost the exact same way,
using the same wording across site after sit after site,
just like you said, communally reinforced. And it's not necessarily true.
(40:41):
But if you while away your hours and spend your
time researching the Bermuda triangle and getting into it and
it tickles your fancy, more power to you. Yeah, I'm
not gonna poop put it's fun. She just spent like
forty minutes poo pooing it. No, I just I believe
if it's just both sinking and planes crashing. Well, and
(41:04):
also you know, raises the question is there even a
significant amount loss compared to other places? It doesn't seem
like it. Well, anyway, that's Bermuna triangle. If you want
to learn more about it, you can read the article
on the site called Bermuda Triangle. Just type that into
the search bar at house to works dot com and
we'll bring it up. And I said search bar. So
(41:25):
it's time for a listener mail. That's right, Josh, I'm
gonna call this uh nast Thomas nasty email from himself. No, no,
he's not alive anymore. Uh This from Evan B. And
Evans says, I was just listening to the podcast on
political animals. It was the one on the Republican Elephant
Democratic Donkey. I have an interesting story involving Thomas Nast.
(41:48):
I have an elderly neighbor. About a year ago, my
mom started working for him as an aide. He was
going through his I'm sorry he's going through financial troubles
mentioned selling a painting he had bought years ago when
he lived in Pittsburgh. It was a painting of the
head of Christ, and it turns out it was Thomas
nast original. Uh. This is very interesting to learn because
Nast is known for its political works and not necessarily
(42:09):
religious ones. My mom took the painting to be a
praise and it was valued at about two hundred thousand dollars.
Holy Cow turned out to be somewhat of a generous estimate,
but the painting was still very valuable. Nonetheless, the painting
was placed in Skinner's auction house set to auction in
the fall, but did not sell unfortunately. However, it is
going to be back up for auction again at the
(42:31):
next Skinner's auction. And I'm happy that I finally have
a relevant story to email you guys about when people
say that like I've always wanted to email in, but
I've never had anything to say until now. But but
usually when they say that it's something significant, you can
email in to say hi, that's fine. Yeah, but you're
not gonna get red on the air unless it's significant.
Oh is that what it's all about? That's what I said.
(42:52):
There's nothing to do with telling it's high. So that's
Evan B and his mom. It's a great story. Yeah.
I love ones like that, Like have you ever heard
the one about the lady who found like a hundred
and fifty grand in cash and like a fire extinguisher
That never happened to me. Yeah, I love this. Um. Well,
that is it for unsolved mysteries. We appreciate you joining us,
(43:14):
and uh, if you want to get in touch with us,
if you want to tell us high, you can just
tell us high. It's fine. Um. You can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook at facebook dot com slash stuff you
Should Know, or you can send us a plain old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(43:38):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone
app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to
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(43:58):
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