1
The Bermuda triangle,
one of the most enduring
mysteries of all time.
Strange lights, phantom fogs,
ships that go missing
with no wreckage.
For over 70 years,
people claimed mysterious forces
caused boats and planes
to disappear without trace.
Our instruments
are going haywire.
But is all that just a myth
that's grown out of hand?
One of them just disappeared
and never came back.
Experts try to get to
the bottom of this enigma...
It's like a water cage of ice.
So this is what it's like to be
right on top of a hurricane.
By using the latest technologies
to discover the truth.
We kind of think of ourselves
as high-tech
forensic detectives.
Can science
finally answer what decades
of legend and myth cannot?
Look at that!
What actually happens
in the Bermuda triangle?
Captions by vitac...
captions paid for by
discovery communications
over the last 70 years,
a popular legend
originating deep in
the waters off Florida
refuses to die.
That's where the DC-3
was last reported.
Hundreds of boats and planes
have disappeared seemingly
without trace.
Star tiger was here.
Investigator Brian j. Cano
has it all mapped out.
In 1950, we have the ss Sandra,
which was last reported here.
Scorpion, 1968.
Flight 19,
a little closer to Miami.
That was in 1945.
This is where the USS cyclops
was last reported.
1996, the intrepid.
Each one of these x's
represents a lost ship or plane,
and it's forming a shape
with concentrations
here in Miami,
here in Bermuda,
and finally, San Juan,
Puerto Rico.
A triangle, and in this case,
the Bermuda triangle.
The stories
behind these disappearances
have grown to
often-outlandish heights,
as people struggle
for an explanation.
So what's fact
and what is fiction,
and where did it all begin?
The first
Bermuda triangle mystery
was the disappearance
of flight 19.
On December 5, 1945,
flight 19 left fort lauderdale
on a low-level bombing exercise.
The pilots were mostly trainees,
but the commander,
Charles Taylor,
was an experienced combat pilot.
Weather clear
over fort lauderdale,
over the Bahamas, cloudy.
The five bombers flew east
and completed their mission
over sandbanks in the Bahamas,
but their problems began
when they hit fog.
The pilots appeared to
lose track of where they were
and in what direction
they were heading in.
What does your compass read?
We must have got lost
after that last turn.
The crew of flight 19 were lost,
but luckily, a separate mission
flying over the Bahamas
overhead their confusion.
The lead pilot,
lieutenant Robert Cox,
offered his help.
What is your trouble?
I'm trying to find
fort lauderdale.
Cox asked Taylor
for his position.
I will come meet you.
He replied that his squadron
had somehow drifted
over the Florida keys,
hundreds of miles
south of his flight plan.
Put the sun on your port wing
if you are in the keys
and fly up the coast
until you get to Miami.
Taylor took Cox's
advice and headed north,
but found no sign
of the mainland.
The radio cut out.
And now, in fading light,
the squadron began
to be battered by
hurricane-force winds.
Taylor was desperate.
He still couldn't see land.
So he started to think he must
be to the west of Florida,
in the Gulf of Mexico.
The five bombers were now
running dangerously low on fuel.
Taylor made a series of
increasingly irrational
commands.
Turning east...
Change course to zero-90 degrees
for ten minutes!
Then west...
We'll fly 270 degrees west.
Then east again.
But it was all in vain.
At 6:20 P.M., over four hours
after taking off,
flight 19's last message
came over the airwaves.
When the first plane
drops below ten gallons,
we all go down together.
The pilots were
never heard from again.
That same night,
a Martin mariner seaplane
was dispatched to search
for the missing squadron,
but it too disappeared.
A nearby warship
reported a distant fireball
on the surface of the sea.
The Navy spent five days
searching for the wreckage,
but astonishingly,
they didn't find a single trace
of either of the missing planes.
What are the hard facts behind
this dramatic disappearance?
How could simple fog
cause such confusion?
And why has no wreckage
ever been found?
We're going to go out
to where the last
reported position was
and we're going to start...
start running a survey
around that area.
We've already bounced between...
Former army pilot Jon myhre
has spent the last 30 years
trying to find them.
Looks like we are where
for the position?
Today, with aviation
archaeologist Andy marocco,
he's surveying yet another patch
of the Bermuda triangle
for the aircraft remains.
Flight 19 is probably
the biggest aviation mystery
in... in the world.
The answer to what happened,
nobody really knows.
Jon believes
that finding the wreckage
is the only way to solve
the mystery of flight 19.
Started in 1982.
Read a short article
on flight 19.
And I said, based
on some data in it,
I could probably figure out
where one of the planes crashed.
And I've been on it ever since.
That wreck that we saw?
Right.
I have all that in here.
So this is your
position presently...
Jon and Andy search for answers
in order to separate
fact from fiction.
We also have a search pattern...
we don't get paid to do this.
We're just researchers
and we love it
because of the history
and the subject matter.
So for us, we kind of
think of ourselves as
high-tech
forensic detectives
that are trying
to solve mysteries.
29.59.
Right.
They believe
that when Taylor reported
he was over the Florida keys,
he was actually
over the Bahamas.
Headed out
on a 3-6-0 heading.
And if they're right,
it means that the squadron's
desperate search for land
simply took them further
and further
into the Atlantic ocean.
This is the background noaa map.
During each expedition,
Jon surveys a different patch
of the ocean floor for wreckage,
ticking it off the list
and then moving on
to the next likely spot.
Basically we're using
side-scan sonar
and echo sounding devices
that will help us build
3D models
of what is on the ocean floor
and be able to give us
a profile of things.
Today,
despite a full day of scanning,
the team draws
yet another blank.
But it's a big ocean,
and they're not ready
to give up.
I truly believe flight 19
is going to be found.
It's just a matter of when,
and I think right now we have
the best shot in history
to find them.
Jon's convinced
he'll find flight 19
because the technology today
is better than it's ever been.
But what if the planes
aren't there to be found?
Is it possible
the entire squadron
were transported somewhere else
by a ripple in space-time?
This wild theory has long been
derided many experts,
but one man believes
he has proof,
because he claims
it happened to him.
Experienced pilot Bruce gernon
believes he once had
a brush with death inside
the Bermuda triangle.
Was I lucky that day?
Yeah.
It was fate, really.
The extraordinary events
he experienced
have convinced him
that forces unknown to science
are to blame for disappearances
in the area.
Could he be right?
In December 1970,
23-year-old Bruce
took his father
and his father's
business partner
on a short hop from
andros island to bimini island
in the Bahamas.
It was exactly 3:00 P.M.
when we lifted off.
Ten minutes into the journey,
Bruce encountered
a gathering storm.
You can probably go over that.
Yeah, we can probably
go over it.
He attempted to fly over it,
but the storm clouds
below expanded,
engulfing the tiny plane.
It's just a few clouds,
don't worry about anything.
I kept climbing up
and I got caught in this cloud,
and this went on
for another ten minutes
until I got to 11,500 feet,
and then I finally
broke free of the storm.
Looking back
at the storm clouds,
Bruce was amazed
to see them curling,
forming a horseshoe around them.
- Do you see this?
- Ahead of Bruce,
the two ends of the horseshoe
appeared to be closing shut...
I'm going to go through them.
I have no choice.
Leaving just a tunnel of
clear sky to fly through.
And so I figured
I could shoot through that
since it was aiming toward Miami
and it looked like clear skies
the whole way.
As they flew through,
the tunnel filled with
a swirling vortex of fog.
What the hell is this?
And then the tunnel started
to collapse around them
as they left the cloud.
It felt like zero gravity,
like we were floating.
All the electronic instruments
started to malfunction.
Dad. Dad,
I can't see my compass.
Bruce broke free from the storm,
but the fog still
clung to his plane.
Disorientated and unable to see
beyond his windscreen,
he called Miami air traffic
control for help.
We're 80 miles east of Miami,
10,500 feet.
Bruce assumed
he was over bimini, bahama,
but the radio controller
told him he was actually
over Miami beach, 50 miles away.
It's impossible.
Looked at my watch,
I'd been flying for 33 minutes,
and it's like... and I told him,
"no, that's impossible."
And after about ten seconds,
all the fog was gone.
And I look down and I see
Miami beach right below me,
so I told the radar controller
he's right.
We're right over Miami.
Bruce's tiny aircraft
appeared to have covered
the extra 50 miles
in no time at all.
It's impossible.
This makes no sense.
Somehow I was traveling faster
through space and time.
Bruce is convinced
he was the victim
of an abnormal, energized fog
that he believes transported him
to Miami beach
in the blink of an eye.
He calls this strange
time-shifting weather phenomenon
"electronic fog."
Somehow it attaches itself
to the aircraft
and it almost blurs your vision.
And then your instruments
start to malfunction
and you can't navigate by
instrument flight rules, either.
According to Bruce,
the electronic fog
latched onto his plane
as he left the storm cloud.
It jammed his instruments
and caused his tiny plane
to glitch through
space and time.
I believe this is
the main reason
of the mystery
of the Bermuda triangle.
It's what happened to flight 19
and any other planes
and boats that have
also been in it.
Bruce's story
sounds fantastical,
but how does it stack up
to science?
Well, in Bruce gernon's story,
he talks about two thunderhead
anvils coming together,
and that's certainly
entirely possible.
If you have two thunderstorms
drawing next to each other
and their anvils spread out
at the top of the atmosphere,
you could see them converging
and creating a tunnel
through which you could fly
an airplane quite safely.
The cloud tunnel
may have been real,
but what about Bruce's claim
that he jumped through
space and time?
What Bruce thinks
happened when he...
his plane was going along
and he was here
and then somehow
he goes through a fog
and he gets confused
and he finds himself over here
is that he didn't just
fly the normal way
that airplanes go like this.
But, in fact, that somehow
if this was treated
as like the fabric
of space and time
and it crumpled up like that,
you could cover
the same amount of space
in a much shorter period of time
and so that would be kind of
a warping of space and time.
Traveling vast distances
by warping space and time
is a staple of science fiction.
You mean, you come
and go just like that?
Without anyone ever seeing you?
Surprisingly, the laws of
physics say it is possible,
but only if you have access
to phenomenal amounts of energy.
In terms of the laws
of physics, you would...
you would have to have
so much energy
to warp the space time
around you
that it would be more
than all of the energy
that humanity has used in
10,000 years of civilization.
So where Bruce got that energy
for his little airplane
or where this would have
happened naturally
inside the Bermuda triangle,
it's...
it's pretty much impossible.
If Bruce wasn't warped by fog,
what else might have happened
over bimini 40 years ago?
In terms of what's more likely,
that a person who gets lost
and disoriented ends up
in a place
that he didn't expect to be
or that this almost
impossible thing happened,
this warping of space
and time happened to him
and him only in this
one particular instance,
what's more likely?
We know all about human error,
human confusion.
We've all gotten lost before.
We've all ended up in places
where we weren't expecting
because we got orien...
disoriented.
That's a very common thing.
The warping of space and time,
we know of no place
where that's ever happened.
The most natural explanation
for Bruce's time-hopping flight
seems to be that he was blown
out of a storm by high winds
and he lost track of time.
But even if he's right,
and electronic fog
is downing planes
in the Bermuda triangle,
it's hard to imagine
how the same fog
could sink an enormous ship.
One of the most
enduring mysteries
of the Bermuda triangle
is its seeming ability
to swallow up individual ships
without affecting
the other craft around them.
Large, industrial,
military-grade ships
disappear without a trace
while fishing vessels
and pleasure craft
in the exact same area
leave port and return
with no problems.
Why are these boats
being targeted?
Is it specific or just bad luck?
Some scientists
believe the secret
to this apparent targeting
is actually the chance release
of huge methane gas deposits
hidden under the seabed.
Geologist Martin pepper
has come to
a commercial diving center
in Florida
to find out if there's
any truth to this theory.
So the idea is that
methane is coming
from basically the decomposition
of all this old dead matter.
So it could be really deep
within the sediment.
And as the decomposition
happens, methane is formed,
and it basically kind of rises
its way through the sediment.
Just below the seabed,
the sediment freezes,
and as the methane molecules
rise up through this layer,
they can get trapped
inside ice crystals.
The result is
a subterranean layer
of gas-rich snow
called methane clathrate.
What it is is it's
like a water cage of ice.
And this ice cage
can actually house 170 times
the volume of gas
into this cube of ice.
Somehow, when you disrupt that,
it can cause the methane
to just boil out of it.
And as this rises
in the water column,
it'll actually lower
the density of the water
and ships sailing over that can
actually fall through that water
because of the density change,
suddenly.
In theory,
the pressure of gas built up
inside these icy deposits
could create an explosion
of methane from the seabed.
Bubble, boosh,
instant disappearance.
To investigate the theory,
Martin devised an experiment
using the closest thing
to rare methane clathrate...
dry carbon dioxide ice.
So what I need to do
is make a big gas explosion,
and to do that,
I have a two-liter bottle,
and we put some of this dry ice
in the bottle.
And the beauty is,
is once you lock this cap,
the dry ice is subliming,
so it's going straight to a gas,
and you can see that it starts
working the pressure up.
It's going to get up
to about 300 psi
before this thing
finally cannot take it.
Boom! And that's our
big bubble of methane
that we want to simulate
to see if we can sink that ship.
For safety reasons,
Martin first wants to
first test his experiment
using a half-filled bottle.
This is something
you should not try at home,
because it is very explosive,
and if you don't understand
the power of this,
it can actually take off
fingers, take out an eye.
It's very dangerous.
All right.
He pulls the bottle
to the bottom
of the ten-foot deep test area
using a weighted pulley system
and waits for
the pressure to build.
Look at that!
The whole dock jumped!
Could terrifying
gas explosions like this,
but on a much bigger scale,
really be sinking ships
in the Bermuda triangle?
That is impressive.
A significant clue lies in
the frozen wasteland of Siberia.
In 2014, reindeer herders
discovered huge holes
blasted out of the icy tundra.
Scientists investigated
the holes and discovered
unusually high levels
of methane at the bottom.
They're finding these pockmarks,
and the only thing that makes
sense is that these clathrates,
because of the rising
temperatures around the earth,
they're starting
to boil so quickly
that they're forming pressures
right underneath
the ground level,
and so they get to
a pressure like this
and finally just, boom,
they explode,
leaving this giant crater
in the earth.
With the safety test complete,
pepper preps a new experiment,
filling a plastic tub
with 33-pound building blocks.
So what we're doing is...
with this plastic tub
is we're simulating
a loaded cargo ship.
So cargo ships
are filled with goods
to the point where there's
just a little bit of 'em
sitting above the surface.
He wants to see what effect
a explosive release of gas
will have on this heavily
weighted floating target.
So we really don't know
what's going to happen.
It could go down because
of the density change.
It could go up because of that
vertical water flow coming up.
Or it could just tip over
on the edge of the bubble.
Are you ready to do this?
I'm ready.
All right.
So I've now positioned the tub
right out here in safety,
and you can tell
that it's really deep.
So what I want to do
is be here in this kayak
and keep it positioned
while we wait for the pressure
to build in that
two-liter bottle.
Fully loaded and primed,
the gas bomb is dragged to
the bottom of the test area
and the barge
maneuvered on top of it.
A boat hook keeps
the target in place
against the changing tide.
Now we wait.
Look at that!
It's like a magic trick!
Just gone.
The rising gas rips
open the surface of the water,
and in a puff of icy vapor,
the barge appears to vanish.
Aw, wow!
Slow-motion cameras
reveal what happened
to the model cargo ship.
First, a shockwave of water
traveling ahead
of the rising gas
lifts the barge
clean out of the water.
A camera inside the barge
shows how the heavy craft
drops like a stone
through the hole
left by the rising gas.
The experiment proves that
a large enough gas explosion
could sink a heavy
floating ship,
but there's a problem.
Nobody has ever seen
a methane gas explosion
in the Bermuda triangle.
You don't see these
big explosions of bubbles
coming up all the time,
and you would expect to see that
if this were a real problem.
It would have to be one
heck of a coincidence
for one of these bubble fields
to form right underneath
a big ship and sink it.
And you would have seen
other bubble fields
going up in the...
in the sea lanes elsewhere
and not take down a ship if this
were a common phenomenon.
I don't think that
there is much chance
that methyl hydrates are...
are sinking a lot of ships.
Maybe one ship way back when
as a heck of a coincidence,
but I don't think
it's a regular phenomenon
and is something
that we have to worry about.
If it's not all gas explosions,
what else could be
sinking ships?
The Bermuda triangle
is one of the busiest patches
of ocean in the world.
Cargo ships, yachts,
and cruise liners
all fight for space.
On a good day, it's paradise.
But on a bad day,
these warm tropical waters
can stir up the most
destructive storms on earth...
hurricanes.
At the university of Miami,
the world's most advanced
hurricane simulator
generates the kind of winds
that slam into
the Bermuda triangle
during hurricane season.
Okay,
we're going up to category 5.
Professor Brian haus
heads up the facility.
All right, now we're
seeing an 150-mile-an-hour-wind,
what that would look
like at the ocean surface.
I mean, just all
that water in the air,
all the bubbles
down here in the water.
I mean, it's what the sailors
will actually call
whiteout conditions.
You know, you just can't see
anything out there
if you're on the water.
And so, if you were
unfortunate enough
in a vessel to be caught out
in these conditions,
you can't send out a signal,
your power goes out, your...
your ship loses steerage,
you're done.
And nobody is going to
find the pieces.
Hurricane season
lasts from early June
to late November,
almost half the year.
Hot water vapor rises
from the tropical Atlantic,
sucking in the air around it
and condensing at altitude
to form a vast,
spinning cloud system.
These storms gain in strength
as they head west
along a well-trodden path
known as hurricane alley.
By the time they reach
the Bermuda triangle,
the hurricanes can be
1,000 miles wide
with wind speeds
of over 150 miles per hour.
Recreating that kind of
climatic violence in the lab
takes industrial-scale
equipment.
We start out really big,
three-story-high intake
so we're not bringing
in the air too fast,
not vacuuming the sky.
Comes in through, accelerates,
goes up, goes through
some sound attenuators
so we're not too noisy,
comes around this big turn,
and then we have to
compress it down
so we just have a nice, smooth,
well-behaved airflow
as it compresses down
and comes in over the tank.
Goes shooting through
at up to 150 miles an hour,
and then it exits through
that like trumpet bell mouth.
As it goes out, it slows down.
Brian uses the simulator
to take measurements
that would be impossible
to carry out safely inside
a high-category hurricane.
He's concluded that
in hurricane season,
the Bermuda triangle is deadly.
You know, the ocean
surface of these conditions
would be incredible
to see from the ship,
but it would also
be incredibly dangerous.
The Bermuda triangle
is situated right over
the heart of hurricane alley
in the Atlantic,
so it's really vulnerable
to storms.
And you see, you know,
many, many of the ships
that were lost were lost
during hurricane season.
Hurricanes do sink
ships in the Bermuda triangle,
but it's hard to file
these disasters as mysterious.
Far more intriguing are reports
of vessels sinking due to
hurricane-force winds
that appear without
a dark cloud in sight.
These bizarre, frightening gusts
are called white squalls,
and their destructive power
is legendary.
One phenomenon that has been
known for centuries by mariners
is something they called
a white squall.
This was a sudden,
violent windstorm
without associated dark clouds
or heavy rainfall
which normally accompany
a squall at sea.
But for many centuries,
meteorologists sort of
dismissed the idea as sort of
a mariner's urban legend,
you know, a...
a tall sea tale
that the old salts
would tell the...
the pollywogs
to kind of scare 'em.
Scientists now believe
that white squalls are real
and that they're sinking ships
in the Bermuda triangle
without a dark cloud in sight.
Their victims are
mostly sailboats.
Well, there are several
recent examples
of sailing ships
going down in white squalls.
The famous case
is the albatross in 1961.
There was also
the marques in 1984
and the pride of Baltimore
in 1986.
Now, these ships had survivors,
so we know
what happened to them,
and they all described
sort of the same phenomenon,
a wind without a...
a sudden violent wind
without warning.
Scientists believe white squalls
originate from
distant rain clouds
when they pass over warm,
dry air.
The falling rain
cools the air around it,
making the air heavier.
The cold air then
drops like a stone
and spreads out
over the ocean surface
in a powerful,
rolling vortex of wind.
This is the white squall.
The vortex can travel
for tens of miles
and still pack enough punch
to knock down a ship.
You sometimes get 60,
70-mile-an-hour winds
out over the ocean,
miles away from
where the storm is.
The white squall will
hit them totally unawares.
They won't have time
to take down sail,
they won't have
time to point the ship
in the right direction,
and they'll get caught broadside
by these...
these Gale-force
and hurricane-force winds
and just get hove over
and they sink very rapidly.
These surprise winds
have also been implicated
in cases of light aircraft
that have gone missing
in the Bermuda triangle.
A small aircraft has no defense
against one of these
rolling vortices that...
that are associated
with a white squall.
You don't see these
dark clouds approaching.
You're given
very little warning.
All of a sudden,
you're in a violent windstorm,
and all they can do
is take the blow.
Extreme weather
offers a rational,
scientific explanation
for the disappearance
of ships and planes
within the Bermuda triangle,
but some people are convinced
these reports are just
a convenient cover story,
part of an elaborate
government conspiracy
to close our eyes
to the real reason
behind the disappearances...
aliens.
For hundreds of years,
this has been a location
that has been host
to many strange lights,
phantom fogs,
ships that go missing
with no wreckage,
people that disappear
into thin air.
Even though there's
plenty of logical
and rational explanations
for these disappearances,
the most common one
seems to be underwater aliens,
"u.U.O.S,"
unidentified underwater objects.
It sounds incredible,
but reports from
the former Soviet union
suggest the case
for underwater aliens
is stronger than you imagine.
The controversial reports
center on submarine commander
yury beketov,
who patrolled
the Bermuda triangle
during the 1980s.
Beketov claimed
that the instruments
on board his submarine
would suddenly malfunction.
At other times, they would jam,
as if being blocked
by a powerful technology
emanating from
outside the craft.
On more than one occasion,
beketov's sonar
is said to have picked up
unidentified objects
speeding at over 260
miles per hour underwater.
How is that possible?
The commander believed
these incidents
were evidence of alien activity.
It was like the objects
defy the laws of physics.
The creatures who built them
far surpass us in development.
But if the Caribbean sea
is really packed full of aliens,
why don't we see them today?
Bizarrely, some people
are convinced
flying saucers are hidden away
in a network
of underwater tunnels
called blue holes.
These blue holes,
people are theorizing,
might be portals
to another world,
another dimension.
This might be where
the aliens are based.
It could be a fold
in time-space.
Whatever it is,
it seems like sailors
and other vessels
are unwittingly
wandering into these areas
and potentially disappearing.
Blue holes actually do exist.
They can be found dotted
around the shallow waters
of the Bahamas.
They can descend to over
600 feet below the seabed
and branch into networks of
subterranean passages.
But were these tunnels
really built by aliens?
Geologist Martin pepper
isn't so sure.
Apparently a blue hole
is a portal
where aliens are able to
come from and abduct boats
and planes and other things.
So it's a cavity
that allows them to hide,
and that's where
they make their attack.
It's almost like
a funnel spider.
They wait down in the blue hole,
something comes over,
and got it!
Pepper thinks
there's a natural explanation
for these massive
underwater sinkholes,
and it involves limestone,
acid rain,
and a whole lot of time.
So here we have
a chunk of limestone,
and this is the surface
of our earth, basically,
around this area.
And what happens is sea level
changes a lot, hundreds
of feet throughout thousands,
maybe millions of years.
And so what we need
is we need sea level to drop.
That's in a cold time,
that's because polar ice caps
remove water,
dropping our sea level.
When the sea level
dropped over the Bahamas,
the exposed limestone
was open to its deadly enemy...
acid rain.
Once the limestone
comes out of the water,
we can actually apply acid rain,
and this happens
over thousand of years.
The surface of the land
has cracks, dips.
So this acid rain,
when we actually pour that on,
you can see what it's doing
to this limestone.
Those bubbles are turning this
into carbon dioxide gas
and liquid
and it's just running away,
and so that etches
through the valleys
and the puddles, and over time,
that's going to cause
a matrix of caves.
The walls of the caves
became so thin,
they collapsed,
creating a long vertical shaft.
Eventually, the sea level
rose back again,
leaving behind a blue hole
hundreds of feet deep.
As a geologist,
these are fascinating.
They're mysterious.
But when you figure out
how they form,
it's really magical in a sense
where it takes a long time
for them to form
and it's a beautiful
series of events.
You have to have
sea levels change.
You have to have acid ran occur.
You have to have
a whole scenario
for it to finally drop down
and form your blue hole.
It's not just geologists
who find blue holes fascinating.
They're near the top of every
scuba diver's bucket list.
That means the blue holes
of the Bermuda triangle
are some of the most widely
explored underwater habitats
in the area.
The chances of aliens
being hidden from
so many prying eyes
seems very unlikely.
But if aliens aren't
abducting ships,
why do so many of them seem to
disappear without trace?
There's nothing mysterious
about the fact
that we have trouble
finding the wreckage.
I mean, the ocean is a vast deep
and it's really hard to find
something on the bottom floor
even if you have
the general idea
of where the ship went down.
So, blue holes,
they're beautiful,
they're fascinating,
they're mysterious.
Aliens?
I don't know about that.
We've seen hurricanes,
time-shifting fog,
and explosions from the deep.
But there's one more
potential explanation,
and it could be
the most terrifying yet.
For over 70 years,
boats have been going missing
in the Bermuda triangle,
including vast cargo ships.
A busy route for these
floating giants
passes by the island of Bermuda,
and it's the setting for
one of the most
mysterious disappearances
of them all.
October 24, 1980.
A vessel called the ss poet,
hauling a load of corn to Egypt.
This is a vessel that is larger
than the size
of two football fields,
and it goes missing
without a trace.
The coast guard search
the Atlantic for ten days,
but didn't even find a trace
of the 11,000-ton ship.
Okay, there was a little bit
of adverse weather in the area
at the time, but nothing
that should have capsized a...
a boat of this size,
so what happened to it?
Where did it go?
A clue to
the disappearance of the poet
is that the captain didn't issue
a mayday message.
This would seem to suggest
that whatever happened
to that vessel
happened so quickly,
there was no time to react.
Some scientists believe the poet
may have been a victim of a rare
but incredibly violent
freak of nature
called a rogue wave.
Rogue waves are
incredibly rare waves
that rise up much higher
than the waves around them.
They can sweep away ships
without warning.
When you have a big storm
or you have high waves
and you get one of these waves
that's just much bigger
than the other waves,
that's a rogue wave.
They're not common,
but when you look at
a large surface,
if it's a big storm,
maybe it could be
one out of 500 waves...
big waves that goes by
might be that really big one.
Rogue waves are rare
because they require
a specific set of
circumstances to form.
Are you ready to turn on
the coalescing wave packet?
Yeah, we're getting ready.
Five minutes.
No, I've got it in five.
Brian simulates
this process in a lab
by first creating a slow wave
and then a faster wave
which catches up to the first
and merges with it,
creating a much larger
rogue wave.
Scaled up to the open ocean,
rogue waves can break
with incredible force.
It can knock giant holes
into large ships.
It can twist them into...
to incredible angles
because it's just
such a huge amount
of energy being imparted.
The broken geology
of the Bermuda triangle
is perfect for
cooking up rogue waves.
In a storm, waves bend inward
as they pass small islands.
And sometimes,
the two converging waves
combine perfectly to create
monster rogue waves.
Rogue waves can also form
when a strong current
bends waves
in towards each other,
another feature common
to the Bermuda triangle.
Going right through the middle
of the Bermuda triangle
is one of the world's
great currents,
the Gulf stream,
which has tremendous
current velocities
and has large shears
that can focus the waves.
In the Bermuda triangle,
waves can sometimes
run into strong currents.
These currents alter the shape
of the rushing waves,
making them much larger.
The stronger the current,
the bigger the waves
it can produce.
It's entirely possible that a...
a ship such as the poet,
which was in a storm...
it was in storm conditions
and it was in an area
on the north wall
of the Gulf stream
where this kind of focusing
is known to happen,
and so that...
that's an entirely
plausible explanation for
something that could have
caused that ship to be lost.
For nearly a century,
we have sought answers
to the mysterious disappearances
of boats and planes
inside the Bermuda triangle.
Any number of theories
have been raised,
from alien abductions
to killer bubbles
from the bottom of the sea.
But the more scientists
look into the mystery,
the more they realize that
maybe there's nothing special
about the Bermuda triangle
after all.
So the Bermuda triangle
has this idea
that there's
an inordinate number
of missing planes
and ships and accidents
and things like that
in this little triangular area,
in a highly trafficked area.
And so when somebody says,
"wow, it's an unusual number
of accidents
and disappearances,"
unusual compared to what?
Surprisingly,
statistics show that
there are no more accidents
in the Bermuda triangle
than in any other heavily
trafficked tropical sea
in the world.
If you were to take a...
a triangular area
of any part of the ocean,
you would find mysteries there,
aircraft and ships
that disappeared
for unknown reasons.
You wouldn't assume
that everything
that happened within
this arbitrary triangle
we picked out would be due
to one phenomenon.
The world's oceans
are dangerous places.
It's just that here
in the Bermuda triangle,
the disappearances
get more publicity.
There's nothing at all unusual
about anything in the area.
The only thing unusual is
it's been embellished
over the years by writers.
People like to hear
ghost stories,
like to hear mystery stories,
and so it's persistent.
I mean, you can never discount
the strength of the legs
of any bad idea.
I don't necessarily think
that people want to get
to the bottom of
the Bermuda triangle mystery,
because the mystery itself,
the search,
is what keeps
the imagination going.
It keeps people interested
in this story.
And if we found all the answers,
there'd be no story left
to investigate.