Tonight, it's the most notorious stretch of ocean on the planet.
SAMI JARROUSH: Everyone knows about the Bermuda Triangle,
but yet nobody knows what's going on over there.
A place where ships, planes, and unsuspecting travelers
sometimes disappear.
JASON HORTON: An explosion, or a freak wave,
or even just a crash would leave some debris behind.
So, how come there isn't any?
Now, we explore the top theories
surrounding this enduring mystery.
We have plenty of records of rogue waves
outright destroying oceangoing vessels.
SAMI: We know that Bermuda is teeming with volcanic rock
that makes compasses go crazy.
DUSTIN GROWICK: These planes are flying at 4,000 feet.
I don't care if it's the perfect storm,
no wave can do that.
What could cause so many unexplained vanishings
inside Bermuda's infamous triangle?
[music]
1881, Liverpool, England,
a passenger ship named the Ellen Austin
sets sail for New York City.
SAMI: The Ellen Austin,
helmed by Captain A.J. Griffin,
has a full manifest of immigrants
excited to start a life
in the New World.
Back then, it was a long journey across the Atlantic--
about six weeks' time.
Now, halfway in, the captain decides
to alter their route to the south.
We can't say for sure why this is,
but turns out to be a bad idea.
LAURENCE: Soon after, the ship is becalmed,
and without wind, it simply drifts.
A few days later, another boat appears
moving erratically.
MARTIN PEPPER: No one can be seen aboard this ship,
nor is there a name or a flag
that identifies the vessel.
It appears to abandoned.
JASON: The captain pulls his ship
alongside the strange vessel,
and some of the sailors
cautiously board it.
DUSTIN: What the find, or rather, don't find,
is very strange.
It's an empty ship.
There's no logbook, there's no sign of violence,
nothing to explain the missing sailors.
JASON: Stranger still, the valuable cargo,
a hold of mahogany wood, is all still perfectly intact.
LAURENCE: Captain Griffin takes the schooner as salvage
and puts some of his best crewmen aboard.
The wind picks up, and these two ships
now set sail together to New York.
LAURENCE: But soon, they meet a turbulent storm
that separates them.
SAMI: When the weather clears a few days later,
Captain Griffin has to go searching for the other ship.
And when they finally spot it and pull up alongside,
it's eerily quiet.
JASON: Shockingly, the ship is empty again.
None of the new crew members can be found,
there's no bloodshed, no damage from the storm, nothing.
SAMI: It's as if they all just disappeared into thin air.
Once, okay, that's a little bit weird, I'll give you that.
But twice? Now, it's getting scary.
LAURENCE: Afraid to lose any more of his crew,
Captain Griffin leaves the mysterious ship behind.
According to records we have from Lloyds of London,
the Ellen Austin finishes its voyage alone,
docking in New York on February 11th, 1881.
I cannot imagine what the surviving crew
must have been thinking.
Two crews on that boat, including some of their friends,
just disappear seemingly into thin air.
LAURENCE: What could explain the strange events
witnessed by the crew of the Ellen Austin?
SAMI: They don't know it at the time,
but they've encountered this mysterious ship
in an area of the Atlantic Ocean that has been known to mariners
for hundreds of years as a place to fear--
a place they accidentally drifted into.
LAURENCE: In this stretch of the ocean,
there are countless stories of shipwrecks and lost boats.
In 1800, the USS Pickering disappears en route to Delaware
carrying 90 people.
In 1814, the USS Wasp vanishes along with 140 passengers.
And in 1921, the Carroll A. Deering is lost
and ultimately found abandoned near North Carolina.
But the actual location where the vessels go missing
isn't defined until 1964.
SAMI: Journalist Vincent Gaddis
catalogs some of the strange goings on in an article,
and he finally comes up with a name
for this mysterious area.
LAURENCE: He calls it the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle covers about 500,000 square miles
of the Atlantic Ocean, between Florida,
Bermuda, and Puerto Rico.
It has claimed numerous victims.
SAMI: As recently as 2015,
two boys disappeared in the Triangle
during a fishing trip that left out of Tequesta, Florida.
As the losses have piled up, the area has become infamous,
legendary worldwide, even.
Everyone knows about the Bermuda Triangle,
but yet nobody knows what's going on over there.
LAURENCE: There have been a number of different theories.
One of the earliest comes from Christopher Columbus.
SAMI: Columbus is actually one of the first Europeans
to cross through the Bermuda Triangle in 1492,
and wouldn't you know it,
he almost immediately encounters a problem.
DUSTIN: The Santa Maria and her sister ships
get stuck in an abundance of algae,
which in Columbus' diary, he refers to as weeds.
The ships are stuck for three days
and the sailors become paranoid and panicked.
They fear running aground or being tangled in the weeds
and being dragged to the ocean floor.
The crew would eventually manage to cut their way out,
but they remain convinced that this is a dangerous area,
all thanks to highly unusual seaweed.
What Columbus and his men call weeds,
scientists eventually name sargassum,
from the Spanish word sargasso, meaning seaweed.
LAURENCE: The area ultimately becomes known
as the Sargasso Sea.
SAMI: The Sargasso Sea measures about 700 miles wide
and 2,000 miles long.
It takes up about two-thirds of the Bermuda Triangle,
and is full of these dense mats of sargassum.
LAURENCE: Could seaweed explain the loss of so many vessels?
PAUL SUTTER: Sargassum is a seaweed.
It's made of long thin stalks,
and then there are lots of leaves,
and air-filled sacs
called pneumatocysts.
JASON: If you get stuck in it, the sargassum
wraps around the rudder so you can't steer,
and barnacles begin to grow on the ship,
slowing it down.
LAURENCE: But getting stuck
is just one small part of the problem.
When sargassum groups together and begins to rot,
as it decomposes, it produces hydrogen sulfide gas.
This gas smells really awful, like rotten eggs,
and it's toxic.
SAMI: If you breathe in this hydrogen sulfide,
it can irritate your eyes, your nose, and your throat.
But it can also cause some serious psychological issues
if inhaled for an extended period of time,
possibly even insanity.
JASON: A recent study in Nanchang, China, in 2021
tested the effects of hydrogen sulfide on rodents.
And they concluded without a doubt
that it causes depression-like behavior.
SAMI: Obviously, just getting tangled in the seaweed
could explain a disappearing or a wrecked ship
if it's stuck out there for long enough.
But when you take into account this psychological effect,
this might explain the wilder Bermuda Triangle stories.
LAURENCE: Could this deadly gas
explain the experience of ships like the Ellen Austin?
SAMI: Remember, the mysterious ship
that they find doesn't wreck or disappear.
It's the passengers that do.
So, could it have been those toxic brain-altering fumes
from the sargassum that drove them to dive overboard?
It's possible.
LAURENCE: An eerily similar incident
appears to take place in 1968,
but this time, there's more evidence.
DUSTIN: On October 31st, 1968, British businessman
and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst
sets off on the Sunday Times Golden Globe race.
It's a competition to be the first man
to singlehandedly nonstop sail around the world.
JASON: Unfortunately, he's ill-prepared,
and his boat has been hastily constructed.
He barely makes it out to sea
when he starts encountering problems
with navigation and leaks.
SAMI: But if he goes back home,
he'll lose everything he's invested in this race
and be a laughing stock, he'll be humiliated.
LAURENCE: Instead, Crowhurst devises a plan, to cheat.
SAMI: He decides to stay in the Atlantic
and radio back false coordinates
to make it seem as though he's traversing the globe.
JASON: Eventually, race organizers catch on
that Crowhurst's radio communications
are not coming from the coordinates he's giving.
So, Crowhurst goes silent.
Sometime thereafter, he makes the mistake
of drifting into the Bermuda Triangle.
And that's it, he's never seen
or heard from again.
LAURENCE: Crowhurst's empty boat is eventually found
in the Atlantic along with a logbook.
DUSTIN: The writings paint a clear picture
of a descent into madness.
They start off perfectly normal,
but once he hits the Sargasso Sea,
Crowhurst starts writing mathematical formulas
that he claims represent a universal truth.
He disputes Einstein's theory of relativity,
and his magnum opus--
a rambling 25,000-word meditation
on freewill, perception, and the nature of God.
SAMI: He wraps all of this up with his final words,
quote, "I have no need to prolong the game.
"It is finished. It is finished.
It is the mercy."
This is someone who has experienced
some sort of mental instability,
which may have led to his suicide.
But was this due to prolonged exposure
to rotting sargassum?
MARTIN: Let's just assume that sargassum is to blame
for the Ellen Austin and the Crowhurst incidents,
along with other entanglements and shipwrecks.
The problem is, this doesn't solve
all the mysteries of what's been going on here.
SAMI: While the Sargasso Sea is pretty sizeable,
it only takes up part of the Bermuda Triangle.
There are many incidents on ships
that didn't come anywhere close to the seaweed.
So, we know for sure that it's not the whole answer.
There must be something else going on.
LAURENCE: From the time of Christopher Columbus,
the dangers of the Bermuda Triangle
are ascribed to deadly seaweed.
It's an interesting idea,
but because seaweed only covers
part of the Triangle,
it can't explain everything.
LAURENCE: Could another sailor's tale
offer a different explanation?
SAMI: It starts off as something of a legend
among weather-hardened,
sea-weary sailors.
As they share stories
over a pint in the pub, you may hear a tale
of some enormous wave as big as a mountain
capable of destroying a ship,
sweeping away its crew, or just swallowing it whole.
And for most of the 500-or-so-year history
of transatlantic shipping,
these have been thought to be myths or exaggerations.
LAURENCE: Then, in the 19th century,
French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville
reports seeing 100-foot waves in a different body of water--
the Indian Ocean.
However, no one believes him.
During that time, the models that oceanographers use
to predict wave height say that these random giant waves
are an impossibility.
LAURENCE: But a recent discovery shows d'Urville
might have been right.
These phenomena have been observed, measured, and proven,
and we call them rogue waves.
LAURENCE: The proof comes on New Year's Day, 1995.
SAMI: About 100 miles off the coast of Norway,
there's an oil-drilling platform called the Draupner.
In addition to its main equipment,
it contains a whole slew of instruments
that can monitor wave height, slope, acceleration, et cetera.
On January 1st of 1995,
a laser range finder
on the bottom of this oil-drilling platform
measures a wave headed for the Draupner.
DUSTIN: The Draupner wave, as it becomes known,
seems to come out of nowhere and measures 85 feet high.
It has characteristics that don't fit
any previous wave model.
SAMI: Researchers have found that rogue waves differ
from regular waves in a few ways.
First is that they are greater than twice the size
of surrounding waves-- these things are massive.
And they are also notoriously unpredictable
and arise unexpectedly from directions
other than the prevailing winds.
So, these things could potentially come from anywhere.
PAUL: These rogue waves, because they are so gigantic,
so tall, so steep, and moving so quickly,
they can carry up to 16 times the amount of force
than a regular wave.
And in fact, the bigger the ship,
the worse you fare when it comes to rogue waves,
because these rogue waves, they don't come on slowly.
They're not giant, wide things.
They're very sharp, they're like cliffs of water.
And so, when a ship encounters a rogue wave,
it gets sent straight up the side of the cliff,
and then when it reaches the top, it teeters over
and slams back down into the water.
And the bigger the ship you have,
the more force there is,
and the more damage that rogue wave can do.
That kind of massive force grossly exceeds the limit
of what ocean vessels today can tolerate.
So, you could only imagine what it would do to a wooden ship
from hundreds of years ago.
It would decimate it in one fell swoop.
LAURENCE: But scientists still aren't certain what causes them.
DUSTIN: One idea is that they're caused
by constructive interference.
This is when different waves travel at different speeds
and start to pile up on each other.
SAMI: Now, constructive interference can occur
when huge storms converge from multiple directions at once.
LAURENCE: The Bermuda Triangle is well known for such storms.
The Triangle is right in the middle of Hurricane Alley,
where storms from the north
and the south can come together.
If there's a third storm that comes in from Florida,
forget about it.
You've got the recipe for a deadly rogue wave.
LAURENCE: This phenomenon might explain
a series of mysterious shipwrecks.
SAMI: One ship that may have been impacted
by these rogue waves is the USS Cyclops.
Back in 1918, it was one of the largest ships
in the U.S. Navy, measuring 550 feet long
with a crew of over 300 people.
MARTIN: On March 4th, after the ship is loaded up
with over 11,000 tons of manganese ore,
it embarks on a voyage from
the West Indies to Baltimore.
After nine days at sea, the Cyclops sends a message
that reads, quote, "weather fair, all well."
This is the last message it ever sends.
The entire ship just seems to vanish,
along with its crew, without even an SOS.
MARTIN: It's an absolute heartbreaking catastrophe.
To this day, aside from active combat,
the USS Cyclops was the largest loss of life to the Navy.
LAURENCE: In 1941, two more Navy ships
meet a similar fate.
JASON: The USS Proteus, decommissioned
after World War I, departs the Virgin Islands
with 58 crew members and a cargo of bauxite.
It never reaches its destination.
A month later, the USS Nereus
leaves from the same place with the same type of cargo.
Sadly, it suffers the same tragedy.
The ship and the 61 people aboard
are never seen again.
SAMI: Both the Proteus and the Nereus
are sister ships to the Cyclops.
All three, massive, strongly fortified vessels,
all gone.
How can an enormous ship just go "poof"
and just disappear?
PAUL: Even if you destroy a big ship,
there's gonna be lots of bits and pieces floating around.
It is very odd for a giant ship
to go missing without a trace.
MARTIN: But in these cases, there's nothing.
These certainly sound like candidates
for rogue wave disasters.
LAURENCE: In 2018, oceanographer Simon Boxall
attempts to prove this theory.
PAUL: At the University of Southampton,
Boxall conducts an experiment to investigate if rogue waves
could destroy modern oceangoing vessels.
And specifically, Dr. Boxall was trying to explore
whether the USS Cyclops was destroyed by a rogue wave.
And we can't recreate that exact scenario,
so instead, he built a scale model.
SAMI: And once the simulators are turned on,
enormous waves rise up and easily destroy the model.
Boxall's study demonstrates just how powerful these waves are.
PAUL: They come out of nowhere. You don't have warning.
You may not even have time to send a distress signal
before you're simply consumed by it.
LAURENCE: For some, this experiment
solves a long-standing mystery.
We've actually proven the existence of rogue waves,
and we've proven that they can happen
all over the Bermuda Triangle.
Some people would say that, yeah, rogue waves
are likely responsible for the disappearance
of the USS Cyclops as well as a number of other ships
in the Bermuda Triangle.
MARTIN: And for the non-wrecked boats
that have turned up with their crew missing,
perhaps a small rogue wave could have tipped the boat,
and everybody fell overboard.
LAURENCE: But this still doesn't explain every incident.
Now, if you came to me with all of this information
and told me that rogue waves are responsible
for every single missing ship in the Bermuda Triangle,
I might have a difficult time arguing with you,
but ships aren't the only things that have disappeared here.
What about all the airplanes?
LAURENCE: For centuries, ships have gone missing
in the notorious Bermuda Triangle.
But after airplanes are invented in 1903,
some follow the same mysterious fate.
Perhaps the most famous incident
occurs on December 5th, 1945.
Around 2pm, five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers
collectively known as Flight 19
take off from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida,
on a routine training flight.
SAMI: The 14 men on these planes
are extremely competent soldiers.
They've logged over 300 hours in the air.
They know what they're doing. and the flight's leader,
Lieutenant Charles Taylor, is an incredibly experienced pilot
who successfully flew numerous
combat missions in World War II.
So, we're talking about the best of the best.
These are Top Gun type of guys.
MARTIN: The exercise begins normally.
Everything starts smoothly.
But soon after entering
the Bermuda Triangle,
something strange happens.
SAMI: Lieutenant Taylor radios that his plane's compass
is malfunctioning, and he believes
that they're flying in the wrong direction.
But they're not.
Something has caused the airmen or their equipment
to become mysteriously disoriented.
LAURENCE: The situation worsens when a heavy storm rolls in.
DUSTIN: At this point, the pilots are very confused.
They believe they've drifted
hundreds of miles off course,
somewhere near the Florida Keys.
SAMI: As they get farther and farther away,
their radio communications become increasingly faint.
And after hours of flying, they're running out of fuel.
Their last recorded communications
discuss having to ditch the planes
when they get below 10 gallons of fuel.
MARTIN: From that point on, their transmission cuts out.
The only thing the naval base hears
is an eerie buzz.
LAURENCE: It's the last time any of these men
are seen or heard from.
DUSTIN: Despite their high-level skills and some of the day's
most technologically advanced aircraft,
all five planes and 14 crew members are lost.
LAURENCE: The tragedy doesn't end there.
The Navy immediately releases two large seaplanes
to hunt for Flight 19.
After 27 minutes, one of those seaplanes
radios back that they're approaching
Flight 19's last location.
SAMI: But then, this rescue plane
is never heard from again.
It vanishes off the radar.
The blip just disappears.
Shockingly, the remains of that plane
and its 13 crewmen are never recovered either.
The other plane keeps looking, but finds nothing,
and ends up just returning to the base.
DUSTIN: No bodies, no debris.
No sign at all that these aircraft
even ever existed.
JASON: Six planes and 27 men are gone.
It's like they just vanished
off the face of the Earth.
Now, all of a sudden, the sargassum
and rogue wave theories,
though they are scientifically credible,
they seem a lot less likely as the root cause
of the Triangle's problems,
because they simply don't impact the air.
The planes are flying at 4,000 feet.
I don't care if it's the perfect storm,
no wave can do that.
SAMI: People have studied Flight 19
for almost 80 years now, and nobody believes
that they were brought down by waves or seaweed.
LAURENCE: Then, in 2015, Russian scientist Igor Yeltsov
offers a possible explanation.
SAMI: While working at the Trofimuk Institute
of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics,
Yeltsov proposes that the Bermuda Triangle's dangers
are caused by an undersea build-up
and subsequent explosion of methane gas.
PAUL: Methane itself is a colorless, odorless gas.
You might be familiar
with methane as natural gas
to heat your home.
But in very special cases,
especially at the bottom of the ocean,
these pockets of natural gas can get so compressed,
that they turn essentially into an ice,
into a form of solid.
DUSTIN: If the sea floor cracks,
or that ice gets pushed up to touch the water,
an exceptional amount of gas can be released.
SAMI: You ever drop dry ice into water,
like, for Halloween, you know, so you can make that fake fog?
Now, imagine all that happened in the span of an instant
with all that gas trapped in a bubble under water.
LAURENCE: The gas heats up the surrounding water
and surges quickly to the surface.
DUSTIN: Methane is highly flammable,
so the intense heat from the plane's exhaust
could cause a massive explosion,
enough to blow the plane to smithereens.
LAURENCE: Could this also explain what happened
to the missing rescue plane?
JASON: The night of the Flight 19 incident,
a tanker ship, the SS Gaines Mills,
reports seeing flames from an apparent explosion
billowing 100 feet high.
SAMI: Maybe the search-and-rescue seaplane
flies through the same patch of methane gas,
their engine exhaust ignites the methane
and destroys the plane.
JASON: But let's say the plane doesn't explode
and the pilot manages to keep it aloft.
DUSTIN: If an airplane were to hit this gas bubble,
there's a few possible things that could go wrong.
SAMI: For example, if a plane suddenly flies
into a patch of methane gas,
a pilot would quickly lose control.
His wings, his engines, his instruments
are all calibrated to create loft in air,
not methane, which has a totally different density.
So, the plane would just drop.
JASON: Well, methane affects the human brain too.
If a pilot inhales the gas,
it will reduce the amount of oxygen
they draw in from the air.
SAMI: This can cause mood changes, slurred speech,
vision problems, memory loss,
and most notably, disorientation.
So, if those 14 men that were a part of Flight 19
inhaled a significant amount of methane gas,
it is possible that they would become so disoriented
that they'd have trouble reading their compasses
and discerning where they are.
LAURENCE: In 2016, one year after Yeltsov
publishes his theory, another team
looks for further evidence to support it.
Researchers at Arctic University in Norway
study multiple giant craters on the floor of the Barents Sea.
PAUL: These massive craters on the sea floor
were created thousands of years ago,
and the best explanation for them
is exploding methane deposits.
SAMI: And these same craters are present in the Bermuda Triangle.
So, these methane gas explosions
have almost certainly happened there.
LAURENCE: If true, this story could also explain
the Triangle's lost ships.
SAMI: When the gas explodes underwater,
it creates this giant sinkhole at the surface.
Think of a toilet flushing with extreme force.
The suction created from the blast
would suck any large object down below the surface,
never to be seen again--
even something as large as a ship.
MARTIN: Just like in an airplane,
methane offsets the oxygen which we need to breathe,
so it could easily confuse sailors
that are in the ocean around it.
It checks most of the boxes of what we've seen
in the Bermuda Triangle.
Unfortunately, until we get some sort of eyewitness account,
we won't know if it's the answer.
Over the last 500 years, the Bermuda Triangle
has claimed some 8,000 lives
and hundreds of ships and airplanes,
none with a definitive cause.
But in 2019, a shocking new theory emerges
thanks to a scientist who experienced
a surprising event in the area.
PAUL: One of the top investigators
studying shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle
is Dr. Phillipe Rouja.
He's the Custodian
of Historic Wrecks at Bermuda's
Department of the Environment
and Natural Resources.
SAMI: It's his job to go in and out of the Triangle
all the time, and to investigate
and keep tabs on the hundreds
of shipwrecks surrounding Bermuda.
LAURENCE: So far, Rouja has managed
to defy the odds, despite some unusual incidents.
MARTIN: When he was out diving in the early 2000s,
he encountered a strange phenomenon.
None of his compasses were actually working.
He had multiple compasses on his dive gear and his boat,
and they were all pointing in different ways,
none of which were accurate.
And because he's a lifelong local
and conditions were clear,
he was able to find his way back to Bermuda by sight.
LAURENCE: Rouja has since discovered several more
of what he calls hotspots in the Triangle,
places that make navigational tools useless.
Clearly, this could be the reason
why some of the wrecks, both planes and boats,
could have happened in the area.
LAURENCE: But why is it happening?
MARTIN: After hearing many stories like Rouja's,
scientists investigate.
In a 2019 study published in Nature,
they might have found the cause,
and it has to do with the make-up of Bermuda itself.
JASON: Bermuda is a volcanic island,
like Hawaii and many others.
But researchers discover that
Bermuda has one major difference.
DUSTIN: Most lava comes from about 20 miles deep.
But the lava that formed Bermuda
came from a whopping 400 miles
below the surface of the Earth.
JASON: That's immensely deeper,
and obviously much closer to the Earth's core.
This is entirely unique to Bermuda.
LAURENCE: This geologic feature turns out
to have surprising consequences.
Because this volcanic rock in and around Bermuda
originated so deep within the Earth,
it has a heavy concentration of a mineral called magnetite.
In fact, Bermuda is 18-20% magnetite,
nearly 20 times more than typical soil.
Magnetite is the most magnetic naturally occurring mineral
on the planet.
DUSTIN: And this is what could be making so many ships
and airplanes go haywire in the Triangle.
LAURENCE: In other words,
Bermuda is basically a giant magnet.
SAMI: This phenomenon can be pretty easily demonstrated.
If you pass a compass over a small amount
of Bermuda's magnetite-rich limestone,
it can throw it off by several degrees.
DUSTIN: And that's just one little rock.
There's 500 billion tons of this stuff
in the Bermuda Triangle,
so just imagine what that could do.
Without a trustworthy compass, ships can easily veer off course
and crash into the rocks.
LAURENCE: But what about planes?
Planes would have problems with not only their compass,
but also their altimeter readings.
A pilot could get quite disoriented
and potentially make a fatal mistake.
LAURENCE: According to one pilot,
magnetite could also be powerful enough
to generate a literal cloud of magnetism.
MARTIN: In 2017, Bruce Gernon publishes a book
called "Beyond the Bermuda Triangle."
In it, he recounts many pilots' stories
saying they've been in this electronic fog.
SAMI: Until the modern advent of GPS navigation,
the compass is the tool that enables travelers
to accurately navigate the globe.
It does this by always pointing
in a constant direction-- magnetic north.
JASON: It can, however, be instantly rendered inaccurate
by the presence of a strong magnet.
DUSTIN: According to Gernon, electronic fog
is like a grayish cloud of electromagnetic fields
that form above the ocean.
It can appear out of nowhere
and completely engulf an aircraft.
SAMI: Gernon himself says he experiences this phenomenon
while flying through the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.
His airplane is suddenly surrounded by a strange fog
that he can't break through.
It seems to stick to his plane,
and he experiences the sensation of zero gravity
as it propels his aircraft forward.
LAURENCE: According to Gernon,
once he's out of the Triangle, the cloud disintegrates.
SAMI: When his instruments work again,
he realizes that he just traveled 100 miles
in only three minutes and 20 seconds.
He landed 30 minutes ahead of time.
The fog practically teleported him.
Gernon and the others he cites in his book
believe that the natural magnetism
in the Bermuda Triangle may be giving the droplets
within the fog an electromagnetic charge.
SAMI: If this is true, then those droplets
would naturally be attracted to anything they encounter,
and once they're attached, they're dense enough
to carry a vessel right along with them.
MARTIN: It's kind of like a magical carpet ride,
where if you're lucky, it'll send you
in the direction that you wanna go.
But if you're unlucky, it might send you
into a watery grave.
LAURENCE: Despite Gernon's claims,
mainstream science has yet to support the existence
of electronic fog.
Gernon himself isn't a scientist.
He's an accomplished pilot and flight instructor,
but not a physicist.
SAMI: And based on a lot of his experience
flying through the Triangle,
this is what he personally believes.
Now, Gernon claims to have worked
with numerous scientists who all believe
that this phenomenon is plausible,
and maybe to him, it is.
But until we have some hard data
or visual evidence like a video recording,
I think it's too early to blame electronic fog
for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle.
DUSTIN: Meanwhile, the magnetite around Bermuda is proven,
and we're still only beginning to uncover
all the strange effects it might be causing.
LAURENCE: For some, the most startling thing
about the Bermuda Triangle mystery
isn't the number of lives it's claimed.
It's the number of vessels that have seemingly vanished
into thin air.
When ships and planes go down,
most of the time, we can find
at least some of the wreckage.
Even 2014's Malaysia Flight 370,
one of the most mysterious plane crashes of all time,
we still don't know where it crashed.
But a bunch of wreckage eventually washed up.
LAURENCE: However, with the disappearances
in the Bermuda Triangle, it's a different story.
JASON: These things just disappear
like they never existed.
Not even a trace of an airframe
or an anchor chain.
For a number of these disappearances,
such as Flight 19
or the USS Cyclops,
massive search efforts are undertaken,
yet nothing is ever found.
But logically, an explosion, or a freak wave,
or even just a crash would leave some debris behind.
So, how come there isn't any?
LAURENCE: In 2014, physics and meteorology professor
David Pares suggests a surprising new answer
to that question.
He thinks that some of these vessels
were never found because they
were transported out
of the Bermuda Triangle
and into another place--
not by magic, but a scientific phenomenon
that he calls a space warp,
but you might know as a wormhole.
A wormhole is a tunnel or a passage
through space and time.
It's basically a shortcut created by gravity
which can take you from one part of the universe
and place you in another.
Wormholes are strictly theoretical
at this time, they've only been proven
to be mathematically possible on paper.
They were discovered in 1935
by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen,
which is why they're also called Einstein-Rosen bridges.
PAUL: And these are based on Albert Einstein's
general theory of relativity,
which tells us that space
and time are interwoven.
We actually live
in a four-dimensional universe--
three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
LAURENCE: Is it possible that a wormhole
could exist in the Bermuda Triangle?
SAMI: If you take a look back at Christopher Columbus' accounts
traveling through the Bermuda Triangle,
he mentions something incredibly strange.
He reports seeing a great flame of fire
crashing into the sea one night.
And afterwards, he sees strange lights in the distance,
and his compass readings are erratic.
Today, experts believe Columbus was witnessing
a meteor strike, and if that's true,
there are those that believe it could cause
enough of a gravitational anomaly to form a wormhole.
LAURENCE: Today, many institutions
and top physicists are delving into the complex science
behind possible wormholes.
SAMI: Quantum mechanics is the science of studying
subatomic particles, the smallest building blocks
of our universe, and how their motion
and interaction relates to energy.
PAUL: Within quantum mechanics, we understand
we know that at the tiniest scales in nature,
microscopic wormholes can naturally form
and then just snap out of existence.
MARTIN: Now, we don't know how to scale wormholes up
to fit a giant ship or aircraft, but anything can happen.
PAUL: Theoretically, wormholes allow you
to travel not just through space,
but also through time.
It is actually possible, if wormholes do exist,
for you to be able to travel through them
and end up in your own past.
DUSTIN: And when you start thinking about that possibility,
there's some stories from the Bermuda Triangle
that perfectly fit that description.
LAURENCE: Including one that takes place
on June 7th, 1964.
There's a veteran pilot who charters vacations
in the Bahamas, and her name is Carolyn Cascio.
She's flying through the Triangle,
and when she approaches Grand Turk Island,
something odd happens.
Cascio radios the tower and says that despite her instruments
telling her that she's above the island,
when she looks out her window, it appears to be uninhabited.
DUSTIN: This doesn't make sense.
Grand Turk has buildings, farms, houses,
and a Navy base.
It has an airport and a population
of nearly 5,000 people.
LAURENCE: The tower assures Cascio
that she is at the right place
and clears her to land at any time.
She circles frantically over a dozen times,
and all she sees are beaches and trees.
There are no towns, no buildings,
and definitely no airport.
SAMI: Cascio finally decides to turn around
and go back the way she came.
Sadly, she is never seen again.
Her last words are, quote, "Is there no way out of this?"
MARTIN: Wormhole enthusiasts believe that this is proof
that she actually traveled back in time
to a time before Grand Turk Island was developed.
SAMI: Even if you accept the possibility of a wormhole
large enough to transport a plane,
based on our current understanding of science,
it would be impossible for a person or object
to even survive the trip
due to the crushing gravity within.
DUSTIN: Obviously, if we could prove
the existence of wormholes,
that would be one of the greatest
scientific discoveries of all time.
SAMI: But until that day comes,
researchers are gonna have to stick to the science they know
to solve the Bermuda Triangle mystery.
LAURENCE: The phrase "Bermuda Triangle"
conjures both curiosity and fear,
and has inspired many differing theories
around the strange disappearances
in this mysterious area.
SAMI: Now, you might be thinking,
"Well, the sargassum theory
"seems plausible,
"but that's just one small area
of the Bermuda Triangle."
Okay, so then, how 'bout the rogue waves?
They certainly happen in the Triangle,
but like sargassum, they don't explain
the disappearance of airplanes.
MARTIN: Well, then how 'bout a methane gas explosion?
Maybe, but you'd think that a large explosion
would leave debris behind.
What about magnetite, wormholes,
or even electromagnetic fog?
Honestly, any one of these could be attributed
to the disappearances within the Triangle.
LAURENCE: Or, perhaps, could all these theories be true?
DUSTIN: We generally talk about the Bermuda Triangle
like there's only one
explanation for this mystery.
But given the numerous disappearances
across more than 500 years, there's absolutely no reason
why it needs to be only one of these things.
There's a combination of deadly factors
that are existing here.
MARTIN: Let's start with the methane gas theory.
We know these things happen within the Bermuda Triangle
based on evidence of craters on the ocean floor.
So, it's likely that some of these boat disappearances
were caused by methane bubbles.
SAMI: Other ships
have almost certainly been hit with rogue waves.
We now know that they've been scientifically proven to exist.
PAUL: We have records, we even have photographs.
And the Bermuda Triangle
is in a location on the Earth
that is ripe for the formation of rogue waves.
DUSTIN: So, it's quite possible that a freak wave
could rise out of nowhere and snap a vessel in two,
causing it to quickly sink and essentially disappear.
There also may be a simple explanation
for why no wreckage is found.
LAURENCE: Within the Bermuda Triangle
is an undersea trench called the Milwaukee Deep.
MARTIN: This is the deepest spot within the Atlantic,
over 27,000 feet down.
PAUL: The Milwaukee Deep is relatively unexplored.
There have only been a couple expeditions
to those depths in that location throughout all of history.
DUSTIN: If your ship ends up sinking this deep,
it's really unlikely anyone's gonna be able to spot it.
LAURENCE: What about the vessels that aren't destroyed?
Not every anomaly in the Bermuda Triangle
involves destruction.
Sometimes vessels just get hopelessly lost.
We know that Bermuda is teeming with volcanic rock
called magnetite that makes compasses go crazy.
There are even warnings on British admiralty charts
near Bermuda cautioning sailors that their compasses
may be off by as much as 14 degrees.
JASON: I think the magnetic anomalies
are the most likely culprit
for the region's plane crashes as well.
While they used to be more common,
we've seen very few casualties since the advent
of GPS navigation.
SAMI: One day, we may finally get some substantial evidence,
or capture a video of a destructive rogue wave,
or of the mysterious electronic fog,
or, I don't know, maybe a wormhole will open up
right over Bermuda for the whole world to see.
But until then, I think it's best
not to limit our minds to what the Bermuda Triangle
could or couldn't be, because there could be
a new scientific explanation next year.
The possibilities are endless,
and that's what's kept people fascinated
by the Bermuda Triangle for so long.
In 2022, a particularly tragic
discovery was made
in the Bermuda Triangle
by an underwater film crew--
not the wreckage of a plane
or boat, but of the destroyed
1986 space shuttle Challenger,
another unexpected moment
in the long saga of this mysterious area.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."