What Scientists Are Beginning to Find in the Bermuda Triangle

[00:00:00]Here's something that should bother you more than it probably does. There's a patch of ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico that doesn't appear on any official map. The US government doesn't recognize it as a real place.

[00:00:12]And yet, over the past 5 centuries, somewhere around 50 ships and 20 [music] planes have vanished inside it. Hundreds of people gone. No wreckage, no distress calls, nothing. We've put rovers on Mars. [music] We've mapped the ocean floor. We've decoded the human genome and somehow this triangle of water, this thing that technically doesn't even exist, still doesn't have a clear explanation. Or does [music] it? I'm Mike with List 25, and today we're doing something a little different. We're not counting down a list. We're going deep into the history, the legends, the science, and the actual data behind the most famous mystery on Earth. Because here's the thing. The Bermina triangle does have an answer. A really good one, actually. But to get there, we have to go back to [music] the beginning. Way back.

[00:01:06]Before we go any further, let's get the basics straight because [music] even the definition of the Bermuda Triangle is slippery. Draw a line from Miami to the island of Bermuda, then down to Puerto Rico, and back to Miami. That rough triangle is what we're talking about.

[00:01:23]Except here's the catch. Nobody agrees on the exact boundaries. Estimates of the total area range from 500,000 square miles to 1.5 million square miles.

[00:01:34]That's [music] a difference of a million square miles, which is to put it gently a massive margin of error. The US Navy doesn't recognize the Bermina Triangle.

[00:01:44]US Board of Geographic Names doesn't list it. The insurance giant Lloyds of London doesn't charge higher premiums for ships sailing through it. None of that stopped the rest of the world from becoming completely obsessed with it.

[00:01:56]And to understand why, you have to start with a man on a boat in 1942 who noticed something very strange about his compass.

[00:02:07]Columbus was sailing west from Spain, hoping to find a new route to Asia when he crossed into what we now call the Bermuda Triangle. His logs compiled shortly after his death and later translated described a series of strange events. First, his compass started behaving oddly. On September 13th, 1942, he wrote that the needles northwested, which meant they were no longer pointing where they should have. A few days later, he reported the sea rising to great heights without any apparent cause. And then most curiously, [music] he described a strange light on the horizon. Something small and flickering like a candle. It appeared and vanished.

[00:02:46]Now, you have to put yourself in 1492 to appreciate what these observations must have felt like. This was a man sailing into truly unknown water. No GPS, no satellite imagery, no weather forecasts, and his compass was lying to him.

[00:03:00][music] In that context, these weren't minor inconveniences. They were terrifying and they planted the first seed of legend [music] that would take centuries to fully bloom. The light, for what it's worth, was almost certainly bioluminescence, something we now understand completely. The compass anomaly had an explanation, too, [music] though it would take another few hundred years to nail down. But at the time, Columbus just sailed on and kept his mouth shut about most of it. Smart man.

[00:03:29]Fast forward a few centuries, and the stories start stacking up. [music] In 1881, a cargo ship called the Ellen Austin was making its way from Liverpool to New York through the Saraso Sea, the body of water that sits right in the middle of where the Bermuda Triangle would eventually be mapped. According to legend, the crew spotted a ship drifting silently with no one on board, just a fully loaded vessel, ghostly quiet, [music] moving with the current. The captain sent some of his men over to sail it back to New York. A storm blew up. The ship separated. When the weather cleared, the second ship was found again, except now it was empty. The men who' boarded it were gone. A second crew was sent over. The fog rolled back in.

[00:04:10]The ship vanished completely this time, and nobody ever saw [music] it again.

[00:04:13]It's a genuinely fantastic story. The only problem is that Lloyds of London ship registry from 1881 shows the Ellen Austin's voyage as completely uneventful. No detours, no ghost ships, no missing men. The story evolves significantly in the retelling. That tension between [music] a gripping tale and a boring reality is basically the entire story of the Bermuda Triangle.

[00:04:36][music] But to dismiss everything as myth would be a mistake because some of what happened out there was very real and very devastating.

[00:04:48]March 1918, World War I is still grinding on. A US Navy cargo ship called the USS Cyclops, 542 [music] feet long, carrying 309 men and 10,000 tons of manganese ore, [music] left Rio de Janeiro bound for Baltimore. It made an unscheduled stop in Barbados. Then it headed north, and then it was simply gone. To this day, the disappearance of the USS Cyclops remains the single largest loss of life in US naval history that didn't involve combat. President Woodrow Wilson said at the time, "Only God and the Sea know what happened to the great ship." It didn't stop there.

[00:05:24][music] In 1941, two of the Cyclops's sister ships, the Proteus and the Narius, vanished along nearly the same route, also without explanation. Three ships, hundreds of men, [music] the same stretch of water. Still no wreckage. The conspiracy theories practically wrote themselves, but the military historians who've studied these disappearances point to something more grounded. The Cyclops was overloaded.

[00:05:48]Its engines were in poor shape, and it was sailing through a region notorious for unpredictable weather. A sudden storm, structural failure, and a rapid [music] sinking would explain why there was no distress call. Ships that go down fast don't always get the chance to radio for help. It's not as dramatic as a sea monster, but it's probably what happened.

[00:06:11]If the USS Cyclops planted the seed, flight 19 is what made the Bermuda Triangle a household name. December 5th, 1945. Five Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers take off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida for a routine training run. 14 men on board.

[00:06:30]The lead pilot is Lieutenant Charles Taylor. Experienced, decorated, no reason to expect anything to go wrong.

[00:06:38]About 90 minutes into the flight, Taylor's compass starts behaving strangely. He begins to believe he's somewhere above the Florida Keys. He radios the control tower. We cannot be sure where we are. Over the next 2 hours, the situation deteriorates.

[00:06:53]Taylor, still convinced he's above the [music] Keys, turns the planes east, deeper into the Atlantic, when he should have turned west toward Florida. Radio contact becomes increasingly garbled.

[00:07:04]The weather [music] worsens. At some point, Taylor transfers command to another pilot for reasons that were never fully [music] explained. The last transmission. It looks like we're entering white water. We are completely lost. All five planes went down somewhere in the Atlantic out of fuel.

[00:07:22]That same night, a rescue plane with a 13-man crew also disappeared while searching for them. The official Navy investigation described the planes as having quote vanished as completely as if they had flown to Mars. No wreckage was ever found from Flight 19. In terms of raw mystery, it doesn't get more compelling than that. Here's what later analysis showed, [music] though. Taylor had a documented history of getting lost. On the day of flight 19, he was almost certainly east of the Bahamas, not [music] above the Keys. His directional error sent the planes further east, away from land instead of toward it. a tragic human mistake made worse by worsening weather and deteriorating [music] radio communication. It wasn't supernatural. It was a series of cascading errors in terrible conditions.

[00:08:10]But pilot got lost in bad weather is never going to be as memorable as five planes vanished without a trace. And so the legend got bigger every time it was retold.

[00:08:24]The Bermuda Triangle didn't officially get its name until 1964 when an American writer named Vincent Gatis published an article in Argusy magazine. He drew his three lines, Florida to Bermuda, Bermuda to Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico back to Florida, and declared that within this area, quote, most of the total vanishments had occurred. The timing was perfect. The Cold War was at its height.

[00:08:46]Human missile crisis just happened.

[00:08:48][music] People were primed for conspiracies, for the idea that forces beyond human understanding were at work in the world. Gatis' article spread everywhere. [music] The concept caught fire in a way nobody fully anticipated.

[00:09:00]Then came the books. In 1974, Charles Burletz published the Bermuda Triangle, which became one of the bestselling non-fiction books in history, 20 million copies in more than 30 languages.

[00:09:14]Berlitz left no theory behind. aliens, [music] Atlantis, time portals, supernatural dimensions. The book was enthusiastically, joyfully unconstrained by evidence, and people loved it. Steven Spielberg loved it so much that he depicted Flight 19 as an alien abduction in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[00:09:33]The Bermuda Triangle had graduated from maritime mystery to full-on cultural mythology. It had escaped the bounds of what anyone could actually prove or disprove, which is exactly the environment where legends thrive.

[00:09:48]To its credit, the Bermuda Triangle has attracted some genuine scientific attention, and not all the explanations people have offered are crazy. The compass anomaly Columbus noticed is real, and it has an explanation.

[00:10:03]Magnetic north and geographic north are not the same [music] point. The variation between them called magnetic declination changes depending on where you are on the planet. There was a period where the so-called agonic line, the invisible boundary where true north and magnetic north line perfectly ran directly through the Bermuda Triangle.

[00:10:22]Navigators crossing it without adjusting their calculations could get badly turned around. Except that the Agonic line has since drifted into the Gulf of Mexico. It no longer passes through the triangle at all. The Gulf Stream is a more compelling candidate. [music] The current that flows along the western edge of the triangle is extraordinarily powerful, up to 300 times faster than the Amazon River in certain sections.

[00:10:47]Ships that don't compensate for the current can end up hundreds of miles off course. More importantly, the Gulf Stream moves fast enough to carry debris away from a sinking site before any search team arrives. A ship could go down and leave no trace, not because it was whisked into another dimension, but because the current swept everything away in hours. Then there's the methane hydrate theory, which is the most dramatic of the scientific explanations.

[00:11:14]In 2016, researchers at the Arctic University of Norway discovered massive craters on the sea floor caused by explosive releases of trap methane gas, some of them half a mile wide and 150 m deep. [music] Other scientists suggested that similar methane blowouts in the Bermuda Triangle could theoretically sink ships by reducing the density of the water, causing vessels to lose buoyancy and drop almost instantly. The original Norwegian researchers were very clear that they were not making any claims about the Bermuda Triangle. They were studying Norwegian craters. Other people made that connection for them loudly and in a lot of media headlines.

[00:11:53]Methane blowouts are real. Whether they've caused any of the famous disappearances is completely unproven.

[00:12:01]Here's where things get interesting.

[00:12:03]Because when you stop collecting dramatic stories and start looking at the numbers, the Bermuda Triangle gets a lot less mysterious. Lloyds of London, the same insurance company that's been tracking maritime disasters since [music] the 1700s, doesn't charge higher premiums for ships sailing through the Bermuda Triangle. If their data showed significantly elevated losses in that region, their actuaries would know higher risk means higher premium. The premiums are normal. A broader analysis using marine casualty data from 1982 to 2015 looked at over 150,000 maritime incidents worldwide. Of those, 361 occurred within the approximate boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle, about 4% of the global total. The region covers roughly 3 to 4% of the world's navigable ocean. That means the triangle's casualty rate is essentially proportional to its size, no higher than anywhere else. In that entire 33-year period, exactly zero incidents within the triangle were classified as unexplained disappearances. In 2021, [music] 8,634 ships passed through the Bermuda Triangle. two [music] experienced casualties, a rate of about 0.02%. The global average casualty rate that year was roughly 1.8%. [music] The Bermuda Triangle was statistically about 90 times safer than average. The US Coast Guard backs this up. Their data consistently shows that the number of incidents in the Triangle on a percentage basis is the [music] same as anywhere else in the world. If you want the actual dangerous ocean regions, look at the South China Sea and the waters around Indonesia and the Philippines, which dominate the global incident charts year after year. Nobody's writing bestselling books about that. Aviation tells the same story. [music] The NTSB's database covers every investigated accident from 1962 to the present.

[00:13:58][music] Incidents in the Bermuda Triangle are overwhelmingly explained. Bad weather, mechanical failure, and pilot error.

[00:14:06]Since 1965, there has been one aviation incident over Bermuda itself. A JetBlue flight [music] that hit severe turbulence, injuring one passenger.

[00:14:17]The honest answer is a combination of things that aren't individually that exciting. The region really is a difficult place to navigate. Hurricane [music] force storms, powerful ocean currents, shallow reef systems in the Bahamas that have claimed ships for centuries, and genuinely unpredictable weather year round. When things go wrong there, they tend to go wrong fast. The Gulf Stream can erase the evidence before anyone arrives to look at it.

[00:14:42]Human error plays a bigger role than anyone likes to admit. [music] Flight 19's commander got confused about his location and flew in the wrong direction for 2 hours. Many of the other famous disappearances, when examined carefully, show similar patterns, mechanical problems, poor conditions, [music] and decisions that compounded into disasters. The selection of which incidents get included in the Bermuda Triangle mystery is also doing a lot of work. Ships that sank in completely explained circumstances or that went down well outside the triangle's boundaries get folded into the narrative because the story needs the numbers to look impressive. And then there's the psychology of it. The Bermuda Triangle sits at the intersection of two things human beings find irresistible. An area of genuine danger and an absence of complete information. We know things have gone wrong there. We don't always know exactly why. [music] That gap gets filled with whatever explanation feels most satisfying. [music] And trapped methane gas never beats portal to another dimension [music] for raw storytelling power. The mystery exists in large part because we created it.

[00:15:49]That doesn't mean nothing ever happened out there. [music] People died, ships sank, planes went down. The human cost was real. But the supernatural explanation, the invisible force, the alien signal, the interdimensional drain, that part was always a story we were telling ourselves. And that's the Bermuda Triangle. Start to finish. For five centuries, this patch of ocean collected our fears and our imagination and our most elaborate explanations.

[00:16:15][music] It inspired best-selling books, blockbuster movies, and more arguments than probably any other geographical feature in history. And the actual answer is the weather is terrible, the currents are brutal, and we've been selectively collecting stories since 1492. [music] It's not as satisfying as Atlantis, but it's what the data says.

[00:16:36]Does that make the triangle boring? I'd argue the exact opposite. The fact that human beings looked at a completely ordinary stretch of ocean, one that's statistically safer than most, and turned it into the most famous mystery on Earth says something genuinely fascinating about how we process fear and fill in the gaps. We made the Bermuda Triangle. And honestly, that's almost more impressive than the alternative. If you like this one, don't forget to subscribe and let me know if you want to see more of these types of videos. As always, I'm Mike Estin. Stay curious and I'll see you in the next