The Mystery of the Devil's Triangle

In the last 200 years, 20 planes, 50 ships, and hundreds of people have just vanished in a small area in the Atlantic Ocean. This is a part of the ocean called the Bermuda Triangle, or the Devil's Triangle. It's an aquatic graveyard where over the years researchers have uncovered hundreds of wrecks. Scientific hypotheses have been crafted to try to explain what is happening here. The idea, the fear, has spread, sparking countless books and documentaries attempting to prove that there's something strange happening in this triangle of ocean. There's some kind of anomaly going on down there that we can't explain. It's generally regarded as this area of water in the North Atlantic, drawn from Miami to San Juan to Bermuda. The mystery here kind of started back in 1492 when Christopher Columbus was out there trying to reach Asia, and he passes through this triangle of water. And this is where things get weird. Columbus kept a very detailed journal, which I have a first edition English translation of that I'm not freaking out about because I love old books. On September 13, 1492, Columbus says that as he's going along this route, something weird starts happening with his compass. On this day, at the commencement of the night, the needles turned a half point northwest, and in the morning they turned somewhat more northwest. Oh, creepy, Chris. But it doesn't stop there. He also reported the sea rising and a strange light out in the distance. He described it like a wax candle moving up and down. What is going on here? The mystery continued throughout the centuries. In 1606, while traveling through the triangle, a large English ship carrying 150 travelers became wrecked at Bermuda after encountering a huge hurricane. Even though this wasn't mysterious because it was just weather, it left an impression on how people saw this body of water. In fact, it is supposed that this shipwreck inspired Shakespeare's play The Tempest, which often referred to Bermuda or Bermudes as being vexed or cursed. Okay, but listen to this one. Next up is 1881. This ship is sailing from Liverpool to New York City when it passes through the triangle. The people on board say that they came across a ghost ship with no one on board. There are varying reports on exactly what happened, but the people on board generally reported that some of the crew decided to get on the ghost ship, but then the ships were separated by a massive storm. When they were reunited with the ghost ship the next day, there was no trace of the crew. This stuff is kind of spooky, if true. But wait, we're just getting started because when you get to the 20th century, that's when the Bermuda Triangle as a mysterious body of water started to gain a lot of attention. In February 1918, one of the U.S. Navy's largest ships, the USS Cyclops, was carrying 300 men from Salvador, Brazil to Baltimore, Maryland. The route goes right through the Bermuda Triangle, but the ship never arrived to Baltimore. Despite being able to, the Cyclops never sent out an SOS distress call. No wreck was ever found. As one article published a few years after the disappearance said, usually a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver identified as belonging to a lost ship is picked up after a wreck, but not so with the Cyclops. She just disappeared as though some gigantic monster of the sea had grabbed her, men and all, and sent her into the depths of the ocean. In an official statement, the U.S. Navy said that, quote, the disappearance of the ship has been one of the most baffling mysteries in the annals of the Navy. That's an official quote. Again, kind of spooky. Oh, and the Navy boats kept disappearing. In 1941, the USS Proteus, carrying 58 passengers and a bunch of metal, suddenly vanished within the Bermuda Triangle. And then one month later, another Navy ship disappears, 61 people on board, totally gone. But it wasn't until 1945 when people started to get really suspicious. This is when a bunch of World War II-era planes were doing a three-hour exercise over Grand Bahama Island, flying out and then pivoting back to their airbase back in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But these planes never returned, and the disappearances just kept happening. A long-haul flight with 25 people and six crew disappeared in the Triangle without a trace in 1948, and a year later it happened again to another plane of the exact same model. All in all, there have been over 70 mysterious disappearances here in this little patch of ocean, where all those years ago Columbus noticed something strange happening with his compass. With time, more and more people started noticing. One writer in the 50s said, quote, there have been other disappearances in this backyard sea of ours, and always the record, when the account is finally closed, has an ominous notation, no trace found. People wanted answers. 10 years later, this book came out. The author goes deep and he makes the argument that something is really happening in the Bermuda Triangle, not just bad weather. This mysterious patch of water is actually a gateway to something much bigger. And he's not afraid to explore some alternative theories about ancient civilizations and energy that was left over from those civilizations affecting this area. It's magnets, it's crystals, it's wormholes, it's the ripping of space-time. These forces connect us to the physical potential of our universe, all shown to us because of the mysterious disappearances of the Bermuda Triangle. No, no, no. Come on, guys. I hope no one was actually following me down that rabbit hole because you can't read a book like this, talk about a bunch of mysterious things, and call that evidence. That is not what this is. I was really into this for a moment, actually, when I was going through all of the disappearances until it started to become about freaking crystals and alien life coming to save humans from nuclear fission. We can't do this. We can't present a handful of data points, even if they are factually accurate, separated by hundreds of years and call that proof that this patch of ocean is cursed. What blows my mind is that this book, the one that really put the Bermuda Triangle on the map, sold over 14 million copies worldwide. People love this stuff, mysterious stories and finding connections in observations that we can see and understand. I know that, at least for me, no matter how data-minded and objective I am, I kind of get intoxicated by a good, mysterious story. Our brains are built for this stuff, especially when the storyteller throws in little embellishments like, despite being able to, the Cyclops never sent out an SOS distress call. This tendency is really concerning to me, and honestly, more and more as I realize how powerful the tool of storytelling is, especially visual storytelling, where I can layer in the music and the visuals to make your brain think that it is real. Okay, wait a minute, is this a video about the Bermuda Triangle, or is this Johnny Harris' current soul-searching about factual accuracy and storytelling on the internet? It's both. But let's keep going on this Bermuda Triangle story, because there actually is a very satisfying, evidence-based answer to what is really going on with all these disappearances. Here we go. There have been some serious scientific hypotheses developed on what's going on here. They range from things like the Bermuda Triangle having a disturbance in geomagnetism, which throws off compasses and other navigational tools. Remember Columbus? Creepy Chris? Or methane blowouts, which is a real thing. We have these huge deposits of methane under the ocean floor, and if these blow up, you get this massive explosion, and then a huge crater that just sucks down anything that is floating on top of it. That could easily explain it, right? Okay, but then there's the plane disappearances. Here's another more simple explanation. Hurricanes. The Bermuda Triangle is in the Caribbean, which does seem to have an abnormal number of high-intensity storms. That kind of makes sense. And one popular theory is that these storms can cause what are called rogue waves, which are massive waves that reach a hundred feet or more. Maybe it's those that lead to the disappearances. See, this is making more sense. You've got methane gas, geomagnetism, tons of storms in the Caribbean. It makes sense that this is a perilous place for planes and boats. These are scientific explanations that validate the Bermuda Triangle. We don't need Atlantis and crystals and aliens. We have geomagnetism and weather systems. Rational explanations for the Bermuda Triangle. No, no, no, no. Shine the light, folks. Do not fall for this again. No, another trap. Me saying science-y things like geomagnetism and methane blowouts can sound like I'm presenting strong evidence to you, but I'm not. I'm saying words. I'm speculating. Okay, so will we ever get to the bottom of this? Well, yes, we can. But not by listening to me tell you stories about ghost ships and mysterious Navy disappearances or even a hundred foot waves. Instead, we need to approach this differently. Humans have developed an amazing tool for seeing reality. Instead of relying on our own observations, which usually need to be couched as stories and that are limited by how much we can hold in our brain at once, instead of this, we can collect hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of observations about the world. And they don't have to fit in our brains all at once because we can record them over time and then process and aggregate them with math or maps. And if you did that, you would see that of the tens of thousands of recorded accidents or casualties at sea, recorded over the course of 20 years, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary here. It doesn't even make the top 10 most dangerous ocean regions in the world, at least according to another analysis, another data set. We wanted to make damn sure on this, so we reached out to Lloyd's List, which is a shipping publication who graciously spent months aggregating data, tons of data about marine casualties out to sea. We found that 1.8% of all vessels everywhere in the world have some casualty, including mysterious disappearances, 1.8%. And that of the 8,634 boats that passed through the Bermuda Triangle, there were only two casualties. 0.02% of the boats that passed through here had an accident, 90 times lower than the global average. That was for 2021. So yeah, that's the evidence we should actually be looking at and talking about. It's not as tantalizing as the stories told in this book that sold 20 million copies. But it's true. It's what actually happened.