The Curse of the Bermuda Triangle (Full Episode) | Atlas of Cursed Places

when i was the kid i drew all over the wall with the marker i'm sure i had a good reason although it escapes me now but i did realize that i was gonna get in a ton of trouble and so i hit on the perfect alibi the easter bunny did it that was airtight you can't poke holes in that no one knows where the easter bunny is problem was my parents didn't believe in the easter bunny anymore i was busted i learned a hard lesson that day about the nature of magic now sadly i'm an adult and i envy my younger self the one who believed in magic did the wrinkles in gray hair grow an inverse relationship to wonder so what does the easter bunny have to do with the bermuda triangle we miss that wonder we long for a world with magic in it so here i am on the edge of a boat in the bermuda triangle and i'm hosting a tv show about curses so maybe all hope isn't lost there's a desire to believe in something beyond our understanding can a science minded skeptic like myself reignite the spark of magic is there an intersection point between science and myth wait what was that dude that was a shark man oh there he goes there goes the genius i used to be a professional sailor and at some point i've crossed most of the world's oceans on various sailboats and i've seen some pretty strange things cheers if you want to hear some stories just mix sailors and alcohol and you'll turn on a spigot you wish you could stop who's got like a good bermuda triangle story one time we went out with a sonar placed it at the bottom of the ocean and something sent a magnetic field back up but they said it was like almost 100 feet in the ground deep underneath it yeah probably godzilla they also have the vortex around you right yeah what's the vortex it's a spot where all the instruments go crazy and it's like a portal to another dimension or something if you guys see anything like that on here like weird i mean there's no way sometimes it'll be right there and then i mean you guys all know um steve knowles right like his story about they were doing like 40 knots or so we had three or four guys on the boat one green light came screaming up behind the boat and then it came around to the side of the boat they're still doing 40 knots lit up the whole side of the boat and then they say took off like a rocket in front of them yeah that's crazy yeah a story with everybody you know probably the flight 19. what do you guys think happened to flight 19 you know that's fortunate five playing that does this every day and then there's one day it just disappears you know yeah a search plane went out and also went missing right and that was a sea plane yeah why wouldn't a sea plane be able to line yeah russia right so all a mystery the story of the bermuda triangle really has three chapters plane crashes shipwrecks and the mysterious disappearances of entire cruise we call those ghost ships but are any of these chapters truly anomalous is the bermuda triangle more dangerous than the rest of the world's oceans we'll analyze the planet's most infamous curse with the skeptical forensic mind so here it is this is the this is it this is the bermuda triangle you know florida bermuda to puerto rico you know it's about 500 000 square miles the fact is there have been countless incidents millions on the world's oceans since the first seafaring people set out nearly 50 000 years ago most of these are easy to explain you know bad weather human error faulty equipment the ocean's a big bad place but i'm interested in the events here that have some mystery surrounding them where it's harder to put your finger on the cause so i've hand selected some of the most cryptic occurrences and created incident maps of the areas surrounding the bermuda triangle you can see there's hundreds and hundreds of shipwrecks and uh plane crashes this cluster here has got to be flight 19. the disappearance of flight 19 is the foundation of the bermuda triangle legend in early december in 1945 five navy planes took off from florida on a training mission with 14 men on board those planes the infamous flight 19 disappeared without a trace but then one of the rescue planes that goes looking for them also completely vanishes and now you have the seeds for a mystery 300 boats and planes searched the water for five days not one shred of wreckage was ever found this concrete shipwreck off the coast of bimini is the last witness to the missing planes while it can't tell its story in words i'd love to find some shrapnel of evidence of what happened to flight 19 something to ease my skeptic mind and keep the hope for a magical world alive [Music] this was the target for flight 19 this is where flight 19 is [Music] this [Applause] yes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] as lovely as this location is as lucid and clean the water i can't help but think of the 27 young men who flew over the stretch of unforgiving ocean and vanished forever in the darkness of the coming night all those families ripped apart children left behind without ever knowing what happened without closure without understanding did those young men fall victim to a mysterious geophysical curse what happened out there in the darkness [Music] this is actually the lead ship of flight 19. wow the exact same plane as this is flight 19. yes the final words of the men on flight 19 have been studied and poured over every sentence and word analyzed in depth by the navy's after action report and then of course reanalyzed by armchair historians and hacky cursed tv shows walk me through what happened to flight 19 what's the deal it was a training flight for navigation training believe it or not so we just got back from the sapona which we we dove on that was their target so we know they dropped their bombs on the sapona right what was their path after that due east to east for another 60 70 miles okay then make a turn to the north northwest what happened it's a big mystery to this day right nobody knows exactly what happened to him nobody knows but there are theories colleen sterling is the lebron james of aviation probability analysis you maybe didn't know there wasn't lebron james of that after two years of searching for air france flight 447 colleen was brought in as part of a small team to re-analyze the data they found the wreckage in less than five days the first thing we did is looked at the 500-page navy report that came out the communications all the radar hits that they had and we wrote a chronology the key transmissions everything is map-based right so i'll put like where they launched from and the time and then i'll draw the line where they were supposed to go and then i can calculate with the wind and their heading how long it should have taken them to get to their first turn point i thought about that first turn point and then i said well where could they have gone from there they were trying to go back to the northwest but the wind was blowing them and they may have not made the turn sharp enough and might have gotten significantly blown to a different heading towers what is your compass reading powers i don't know where we are must have gotten lost after that last turn mt-28 this is ft-74 what is your trouble uh both my compasses are out and i'm trying to find fort lauderdale florida so this is the compass here that's the magnetic that's the magnetic compass so he would be looking at this what else would he look at that and then he down on his instrument panel you have what's called the gyrocompass here that you set this with this knob to agree with this to agree with this bounces around sure that one is very stable taylor who's the flight lead was talking about the compass didn't look right he started to get confused but they know they have to get back taylor thought that they needed to fly to the northeast because he thought they were over the florida keys how did you think it's very hard to imagine him getting that lost he doesn't seem to have his wits about him on this flight then you hear them arguing on the radio it's really sad right we've just passed over a small island and we have no other land in sight turn on your emergency isf gear or do you have it on iff gear was off i'm turning it on now what's the isf gear iffs an acronym for identification friend or folk okay right here for example see this says 1200 in an iff they would have given him a code to squawk to put in there and they would be picked up on their radar he didn't have it all he didn't have it on should he have had it on especially if i want help than finding out where i am right ft 28 to 9 one of the planes in the flight thinks if we went 270 degrees we could hit land 270 that's dude that's somebody with a decent compass or somebody else is like hey we just go 270 we're gonna hit last time to get to their bombing target they flew due east right well just flight due west and they take it back right we'll hit land at some point ft 28 all planes in flight change course to 0.90 for one minute so now they're going back east again east again damn if we just fly west you would get home hold it head who is the ranking guy on the flight he kept saying we need to go west right and then it gets corroborated without radar track that came from the solomon's aircraft carrier and where did that see them the radar tracks showed aircraft going south over land there's a good chance that it could be somewhere in this mid-peninsula east coast of florida region so that wouldn't surprise you at all no the model supports that wow we are now flying 270 degrees we will fly 270 degrees until we hit the beach or run out of gas [Music] and now they know they're in trouble because it's like time and they just don't have a clue where they are when the first plane drops below 10 gallons we all go down together does everyone understand that in december of 1945 five planes flown by navy pilots vanished into the night then one of the rescue planes that went after them suffered the same fate collectively the strange event is known as flight 19. we've just passed over a small island and we have no other land in sight it's the single biggest event that gave the cursed triangle its name but here's a question what if the planes didn't really go down inside the bermuda triangle does the curse dissolve into thin air when the first plane drops below 10 gallons we all go down together does everyone understand that [Music] there's a good chance that it could be somewhere in this mid-peninsula east coast of florida region they actually could have made it back and started heading south in the time that they had before they ran out of fuel wow [Music] for 70 years this disappearance gripped the imagination and people assumed it crashed at sea and what this model is showing me is there's this whole other search area that no one's even looked at there are still corners of florida that nobody's been in because it's inaccessible for one reason or another i don't usually follow up on leads when they involve like some dude who heard something from another guy who may or may not have seen something but colleen's identified a search zone near a turtle preserve in central florida and there just happens to be a guy with a story about a crashed airplane how do you know that this is the plan we're looking for of flight 19. well john meyer one of the leading researchers for flight 19 his theory was that the five airplanes separated at some point in time off the eastern coast of florida when they were trying to find land right when they got real low on fuel right and john thought that ft-81 actually made it back over land right and the diagram that he drew based on his theory put ft-81 in this particular area of florida at about the time it ran out of gas really so we've been out here looking for this particular wreck site for a while because we've been out here trompering around in basically everglades type of conditions as horrific and sad as it sounds planes crash all the time if we find out where any part of flight 19 actually went down well then the planes didn't disappear at all and definitely not in the bermuda triangle and they're just part of a tragic list with thousands and thousands of other entries when john passed away we're not really sure what happened to his notes and we had hurricane dorian this fall and it really flooded the area without john's notes we're looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack but we're not even sure which haystack to look in with colleen sterling confirming this area as the most likely location that flight 19 went down we decided to bring in some technology to speed up the search so this is a lidar drone what does that mean so it is a multi-rotor quadcopter and it has a lidar unit on it right basically the same principle as a policeman with a speed gun shoots out a laser hit something solid the return comes back and then it highly accurately marks those points millions of points of rotation thousands of rotations a second when it's all said and done mike he'll filter it out so we can actually get the vegetation away and look for the impressions yeah well let's get it done arming the props all right taking off since we have that high level of accuracy all of those like bottom points we're going to be really highly confident that those are actually ground that's what's going to you know allow us to give you guys an awesome representation of this landscape as if we had just you know burned all the vegetation down so basically what we're looking for is artificial features right down here is a nice little cross hmm see this impression here that creates this line it's pretty darn straight and then you have another one right here it's very unusual for a natural feature to have such pretty geometry right i think this is the best place to look for this wreck all right straight ahead here head a little bit left we should be getting pretty close there's a break in the weeds right there there's something here what you got something burned up oh yeah that's it there we go right that's got to be it that's that's got to be it look that would have been attached to the back of an engine there's the tire cool it came in pretty steep there's all kinds of debris in there that would have been the iff unit render fro unit okay yeah iff gear was off i'm turning it on now we'll do the next step for you the rest of the airplane is probably buried what we're looking for is the data plate on the front of the engine but to dig in the wildlife management area we have to have a separate permit to do that but it is something that we can come back and do while we need a serial number to say if this world war ii era wreck is one of the planes from flight 19 there is a chance at least one of them is not lost in the bermuda triangle at all you know this could be ft-81 which would mean some of them at least made it back to line right the truth is the psychological grip of the bermuda triangle's curse extends well beyond six missing planes so while nate works on digging out the engine block yeah i wouldn't want to be the one i was hoping you would be good my investigation moves to phase two ghost ships there comes a time in everyone's life where you find yourself sitting in the dark room at 3 a.m half-eaten turkey sandwich typing or muted triangle mysteries into the search engine what you tend to find are long lists of disappearances ships and planes vanishing and there's a list of theories that goes along with it magnetic fields mermaids gigantic undersea methane bubbles but it goes way out to alien wormholes and time vortices atlantis were they sucked under by the kraken now some of these theories are fairly bonkers but others you know they seem pretty plausible and then sometimes you find something that does seem real and fascinating and truly inexplicable something that on the surface defies any rational explanation here's maybe the most interesting incident map this is ghost ships so ghost ships were ships that are just floating drifting in the ocean with nobody on them and this is from the u.s hydrographic survey they documented sixteen hundred ghost ships yeah there's something very sort of eerie and terrifying in this idea of 600 ships out here and you know you don't know what happened to the crew i mean where did everybody go or where are the bodies how this is happening during a seven-year survey starting in 1887 the u.s hydrographic office found the existence of sixteen hundred ships floating a sea without a single soul on board sixteen hundred floating ships and zero sailors that mass seems off now i'm not saying that it's not aliens because it could be but let's see how a scientist who studies the world's oceans explains it they call this area the um doldrums of the doldrums the atmospheric circulation starts with a lot of warm moist air rising from the pacific in the tropical area and once it reaches high altitudes it starts heading toward the poles and at a certain latitude which is in this area the air starts sinking yeah and associated with them is very little wind so pre-19th century all the ships were sails right so these sailboats required wind to move right so it just sort of sits there and it just sits there but other things like large mats of sargassum weed which are less buoyant than water they float you had these massive sargassum weed that you just literally got stuck in big mats 100 yards wide and almost a mile long wow you're stuck yeah you imagine six weeks of it or seven weeks of it running out of water and you're hoping for some winds you're hoping to find some current yeah and hoping for something to blow right wow i can't imagine anything creepier than running into a ship in the middle of nowhere with nobody on it what's your theory why would all these boats end up empty there are some people out there that believe aliens are involved sure but you know i'm a scientist i'm waiting to see the first true documented case of the alien abduction right but they do have these uh ocean vortices if you got coordinators you go oh great i'm i'm finally going but they spin around in the order of nine ten days they basically bring you back to the same location which would be tough if you're running out of water [Music] and as you know if you drink salt water over time makes you a little uh crazy you get dehydrated hallucinate things like that and that you know helps to add all the great legends right about mermaids and monsters and maelstroms and the triangle and the bermuda triangle [Music] you can sort of imagine the mariners out here during the age of sale being stuck but i think that's why sailors get so superstitious because they show a little control over the weather and so many things so you never sail on a friday you gotta be careful whistling on a boat because you can whistle up a breeze you know there's a trillion sailor superstitions and it probably comes from a sense of powerlessness and being being trapped we were in hamilton harbor in bermuda and i was anchored there in an 85 foot steel catch the tail end of a hurricane came through and we heard on the radio six vessels uh you know calling for help abandoning ship these were inexperienced sailors and to them it felt like the world was ending and water's coming in and you know it's intense you could hear on the radio fear just warping their perception [Music] and putting them in a bad spot uh where you know if they'd been through it one time if they'd lived through it one time they would have known they're gonna survive it and that their other options are worse many times you know these vessels turn up floating and the crew died and they could have stayed and they would have been wet and miserable but they would have lived listen inexperienced sailors make mistakes but for that to be replicated sixteen hundred times come on that's a mystery humans are a complex animal and there's a lot of variation within our species if you walk down the street and go into a bar or a grocery store everybody acts different some people are loud some are quiet some walk fast some walk slow but if something scary happens then boom in the face of fear instincts kick in and we all move in unison but is that enough to explain how 1600 crews of stranded sailors all repeated the exact same behavior time after time after time dr george everly wrote the book on the human stress response and you know what's super stressful abandoning ship what would cause a seasoned professional a professional sailor right to lose rationality and abandon ship now we do know extreme stress does allow a part of the brain to hijack your more rational centers there's a part of the brain called the amygdala yes and the amygdala is the home of what we sometimes call the fight-or-flight response right every once in a while the amygdala can hijack executive functions it overrides it if you will okay so we begin to do irrational things and it begins mildly irrational if i can drink some salt water maybe it'll buy me enough time for maybe a miracle the brain is concerned about survival it could lead one to do anything in a moment of desperation i'm dry that's wet i'll try it out so going overboard seems like a really good idea right until you go overboard and find out it's not your kidneys can only handle so much salt in your diet and salt water from the ocean has four times that amount so drinking salt water basically starts a doomsday clock in your body the minute you take your first sip you start dying the marine corps came up with conditioned black catastrophic failure of your cognitive abilities because of stress you know the classic line from the rhyme of the ancient mariner is water water everywhere and not a drop to drink it was a real thing i think dehydration plays a bigger role as dehydration gets into people they start drinking salt water and eventually they start getting off the boat to me the ghost ships aren't some sort of symptom of a cursed bermuda triangle it's a weather pattern that causes ships to get stuck and then human instinct causes people to make bad decisions it's the perfect storm repeating over and over maybe the real mystery isn't some dark external force but something inside of our own minds maybe we're a species of mammal that was never meant to be on the ocean at all weird stuff has been happening in the bermuda triangle for a long time some people think it goes all the way back to christopher columbus who saw strange lights in the sky and he later lost his flagship to santa maria in the five century since countless other ships have vanished in this 500 000 square mile stretch of ocean but is there really something supernatural happening here or is the open ocean just a dangerous place to be i'd really like to get into some of these shipwrecks i'm curious as to whether we can find you know some kind of root cause for this pattern of shipwrecks you know it could be currents it could be shallow water in here this is all the bahamas and there's a ton of huge sections of one foot two foot sand banks and all kinds of reefs that aren't even marked today and some of that might be the explanation but i think we need to dig a little deeper an estimated three million shipwrecks litter the ocean bottom and less than one percent have ever been explored there are logical explanations for the wrecks around bermuda the knife edge reefs the high traffic even hurricanes but most armchair bermuda triangle experts will point to the more mysterious events like the disappearance of the uss cyclops the cyclops is the shipwrecks what flight 19 is to plane crashes in march of 1918 the last transmission the ship sent on its way through the triangle gave the impression of bright sunny skies fair weather and then she disappeared without a trace no distress call no sign of wreckage 309 men vanished what do the conditions down there look like they're good i mean you can definitely see it's definitely snapped in half there's the half of a wreck sitting right on the bottom it's the steering portion of it it was a shipping boat that went down in the early 90s it's not the cyclops but neil found a much more recent wreck that may offer a clue a ship that appears to be snapped in half you said it was the tail end of hurricane andrew it was shortly after the hurricane they were bringing supplies there's nothing to hit out here knows what happened yeah who knows it took a little while for us to find it but we fixed a mooring on it and just a temporary chain and line that will follow down [Music] so if i don't make it back tell my mom i love her okay you guys thanks i have your partners yes no no come on no no none of you get my barneys [Music] [Music] [Applause] like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] unexpectedly [Music] nobody knows quite what happened because something broke the hips backward i can understand how bad weather can make a ship size or a torpedo or boiler room explosion could knock a hole in the side but to crack so cleanly in half how would that happen and could this be a clue as to how the cyclops and so many other ships have been lost [Music] tim jansen is a physical oceanographer and he has a scientific theory that might explain all these sudden disappearances it's something i heard rumors about when i was sailing around the world in my 20s the terrifying rogue wave what's your definition of a rogue wave the general definition everybody understands it's a very very big wave and then there's a sort of like scientific version of that which doesn't like big or large because it's not very precise okay so you measure for a while you pick the highest one-third of the waves you average that number and that's the significant wave height a wave that is twice as big as that that's formerly called a rogue wave right so drop no wave is the first time that we actually measured a wave that was qualifying as a little roadway like you know two times a significant wave height in an already very large wave field where was it what was it this was in uh off the coast of norway the north sea when was that this was 1995. so pretty recently like they've only had a real scientific proof of any of this totally 95. for centuries the scientific community wrote off the concept of rogue waves as just tall tales told by drunken sailors exaggerations that are unreliable then in the mid 90s the dropner oil platform was being battered by some run-of-the-mill 40-foot waves when a monster came out of nowhere nearly 90 feet tall a rogue wave smashed into the dropner oil platform recently a nasa study determined that at any given time there are as many as 10 rogue waves happening in the world's oceans most people were sort of like discarding that as sort of like you know mermaid type stories right a rogue wave is rare but it's not impossible like you know three and ten thousand right you know 100 foot wave we see them all the time really when i got out of college i was at a loss i didn't have a plan but then an old family friend offered me a job fixing up a yacht and then sailing around the world i mean he was gonna pay me well i knew that opportunity could never come again so i kept my mouth shut and he never realized how clueless i was and i took the job three and a half years in the ocean will teach you a lot but luckily during all that time we never hit one of these a rogue wave is rare but it's not impossible like you know three and ten thousand right you know a hundred foot wave we see them all the time really now i've never myself as an adult but if i was sailing along and i looked up into the shadow of an eight-story high wave that might be the time if you have a significant wave height of say 17 18 meters that means that in that wave field there's going to be waves it's going to be way bigger than that they have to be there has to be a wave twice that absolutely otherwise you wouldn't get an average of 17 meters yeah yeah wow that's a lot of water man it is okay here's where we get to the good part you're on your freighter and you're in a storm and a hundred foot wave is coming at you from some unknown direction what kind of things might happen a single large wave could put stresses on a vessel that you normally wouldn't have you would have like just one very big wave say in the middle of the vessel lifting it up and you have two sides that aren't supported putting a lot of stress in the middle and that's how a 550 foot long steel ship snaps in half just like a baseball bat over bo jackson's knee how cool was bo jackson by the way whether or not boats disappear because of roadways undoubtedly yes right um how often we don't know sure and whether or not all these vessels are due to roadways i think that question is open yeah no i mean it's like the mystery of the sea right there's a lot of unknowns out there still a curse can be a powerful weapon for those who lack power a supernatural vow to take revenge beyond the plane we exist in but the bermuda triangle isn't a singular event brought on by magic or an angry voodoo priest is something in the collective consciousness an agreement made by millions of strangers as a way to explain the inexplicable there are plausible scientific explanations for all these events that have given the bermuda triangle its mythical cursed status and i know i'm not smarter than those who believe i mean ask my sixth grade teacher mr dowsky and she'll tell you so why do so many people believe that it's cursed when science says there's nothing special about this area so michael i've been doing some investigation and i know you've written about this so the bermuda triangle what do you think our brains are not well wired to understand randomness our brains are wired to find patterns and meaning hidden forces at work conspiracy somebody is behind the scenes pulling the strings and reproductive success is the key to evolution so we are the descendants of those who are most likely to find meaningful patterns right and infuse those patterns with agency yeah let's look at some of these examples here when you set out to make a documentary you're filled with hope that all this cool stuff is gonna happen you're gonna find out that magic is real and then you're forced to confront reality the world k is your b bro and you run into that one guy at the bar and he ruins everything we're looking at uh you know regional shipwreck data since 2007 and of course you would expect it you know in the pacific ocean and you know the indian ocean and so on but but here's our triangle right does it seem to be going on there right in other words the number of accidents here in the bermuda triangle doesn't even reach this level of the bay of bengal right and you know who knows the statistics insurance companies right people who have to pay out if there's a crash or some kind of financial loss and they don't charge anymore to travel through the bermuda triangle right if there was something happening the insurance companies would 100 billion trillion percent make you pay more they're not going to lose money like that's not happening there's no way that's right yeah so the reality is crossing the atlantic anywhere would be just as dangerous as going through the bermuda triangle and yet the name the bermuda triangle has terrified generations of non-sailors but why so where does the term bermuda triangle come from the origin myth begins in the early 1960s with an article by a guy named vincent gattis in the magazine argosy argosy was one of the largest pulp fiction magazines ever published fiction okay that's it fiction right that's your first first clue right and he was basing it on a fake magazine article yeah that referenced this area around bermuda it might be triangular so he called the bermuda triangle and that meme really stuck and that's where the fantasy and imagination jumps in especially fantasy writers charles burlitz for example he was very popular writer he wrote books on roswell he jumped right in with the bermuda triangle and that's what kind of put it on the map right some riders go all goes back to columbus columbus saw all kinds of crazy you know those guys crossing the ocean they saw lots totally of course and what do they know exactly ask any bermuda triangle enthusiast and they'll tell you that christopher columbus was the first person to write about mysterious forces in the triangle apparently he saw a series of lights dancing in the sky this could be the genesis of the triangle's larger than life reputation every curse every myth every mystery has a moment where it began a singular point in the space-time continuum from which everything else follows was the bermuda triangles moment in a place just like this 528 years ago columbus he was coming in to the caribbean and possibly san salvador and he recounted seeing lights hovering in the sky you know in some ways the bermuda triangle goes back to that story that's the first mysterious incident armchair bermuda triangle theorists often point to this sighting as evidence of something supernatural but is there something else going on here san salvador's got indigenous people latino people that might have had fires on a hillside and it's possible that columbus mistook fires on a hillside or something else so i think i'm gonna go up there and build a fire and we'll pull out and see what it looks like it's not exactly hard science but my time machine only goes back to 1493 and this is the best we can do so people when they see something they don't understand they make up a myth mythology superstition curses are ways of dealing with uncertainty the bermuda triangle weird stuff happens here but it could be that columbus just saw something as simple as this you know a fire on a hillside so we'll take a boat out and look back at this and say would you have been fooled so we're not exactly sure where columbus was when he saw lights in the sky and anyone who says they know for sure is full of it and a sample of 10 articles about columbus sighting will give you 10 different interpretations of what happened but that's irrelevant because even though that event is pointed to as the origin of the bermuda triangle's supernatural power the point isn't to perfectly recreate a well-documented historical event it's to see if columbus's mysterious light could have been caused by something extremely unmysterious that's a word by the way that's the fire i said earlier on the hill columbus has done the unthinkable he's crossed the ocean he's been at sea for months he was all the way in the caribbean even though you know he thought he was in indonesia and he sees lights floating in the sky one man's sighting of lights in the sky is another man's proof of the supernatural but this happened 500 years ago so it's probably worth asking the question what did columbus actually see well his journal says it looked like candlelight rising up and down look familiar when we run out of rational understanding when we can't explain something to ourselves we look for causation quite possibly columbus was just so fried and it had been so long that he couldn't see what was there he might have seen what is behind me right now for a lot of people that's where the bermuda triangle myth starts all the way back to columbus he was lost and something as simple as some indigenous people starting a fire on a hill could be the origin of the bermuda triangle columbus jotted it in a journal and then people played the telephone game for five centuries the lights in the sky the promise of land in the distance turned into indisputable evidence of the supernatural for those who wanted to believe [Music] occam's razor says that the simplest explanation is usually correct and yet when it comes to catastrophe or death the terrifying unknown we rarely accept the low-hanging fruit if ships disappear well maybe it's aliens when planes disappear obviously there's a vortex to another dimension hey samus nate we were able to id that plane we found but it's not from flight 19. turns out it's a different world war two airplane it's a farmer but the search continues all right so we didn't solve a 75 year old mystery in the two weeks we had to film this show but still when it comes to the bermuda triangle there is no curse if there was some statistical measurable impact then we would see it in insurance rates and maritime practice and in government orders believing in the supernatural stretch of ocean is a little like believing in the easter bunny and we want magic in the world we need it if some older kid tells your toddler the truth about a certain magical holiday you get enraged because the world is a better place with magic in it the curse of the bermuda triangle is a sociological construct not a marine confluence and in some ways it speaks to man's need for myth for gods for devils and for the unknown to remain unknowable [Music] you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 1,435,046

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, bermuda triangle, atlas of cursed places, cursed places, bermuda triangle facts, weird places, lost in the bermuda triangle, what happens in the bermuda triangle, disappearances in the bermuda triangle, Riddle of the bermuda triangle

Id: plalHGHwSj8

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022