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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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,
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 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? 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
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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 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, 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,
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
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. 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 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. 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
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 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 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 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
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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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?
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. 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 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
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, 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 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 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.
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. 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 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 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
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 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 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 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
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 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, 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, 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 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 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
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, 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, 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 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. 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. 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
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 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 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
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? 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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. 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. 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, 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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
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