Original subtitles

Sam: When I was a kid I drew all over the wall with a marker,

I'm sure I had a good reason,

Although it escapes me now, but I did realize that I was

Going to 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 and gray hair grow an adverse

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 (bleep) shark, man.

Oh there he goes.

There goes the genius.

Sam: I used to be a professional sailor and at

Some point I've crossed most of the world's oceans on

Various sail boats, and I've seen some

Pretty strange things.

Cheers guys. Nobody knows.

If you wanna 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?

Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today

Sam: Deep underneath it? Man: Yeah. Sam: It's probably godzilla.

Man: Yeah. Sam: What's the vortex?

Neal: It's a spot where all the instruments go crazy and

It's like a portal to another dimension or something.

Sam: Have you guys seen anything like that around

Here, like, weird stuff?

Neal: I mean, there's no way.

Neal: I mean, you guys all know steve nolands, right,

Like his story about they're were like 40 knots or so,

You got 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 it took off like a rocket in front of them.

Man: (bleep)...

Sam: That's crazy, man. Neal: Yeah.

Sam: What do you guys think happened to flight 19?

Sam: Right.

Sam: Right.

Sam: The story of the bermuda triangle really has three chapters,

Plane crashes, ship wrecks and the

Mysterious disappearances of entire crews.

We call those ghost ships.

But are any of these chapters truly anomalist?

Is the bermuda triangle more dangerous than the rest

Of the world's oceans?

We'll analyze the planet's most infamous curse with a

Skeptical forensic mind.

So here it is, 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 ship wrecks

And plane crashes.

This cluster here has gotta 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.

Sam: As lovely as this location is,

As lucid and clean the water, I can't help but think that of

The 27 young men who flew over this 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

Geo-physical curse?

What happened out there in the darkness?

Terry: This is actually the lead ship of flight 19.

Sam: Wow, the exact same plane as this as flight 19?

Terry: Yes.

Sam: 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 it, what happened to flight 19, what's the deal?

Terry: It was a training flight for navigation

Training, believe it or not.

Sam: So we just back from the sapona, which we dove on.

That was their target.

So we know they dropped their bombs on the sapona.

What was their path after that?

Terry: Due east. Sam: Due east.

Terry: For another 60-70 miles. Sam: Okay.

Terry: Then make a turn to the north, northwest.

Sam: What happened? Terry: It's a big mystery to this day.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to them.

Sam: Nobody knows, but there are theories.

Colleen stirling is the lebron james of aviation

Probability analysis.

You maybe didn't know there was a 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 reanalyze the data,

They found the wreckage in less than five days.

Colleen: Well 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 mapped 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 got significantly blown

To a different heading.

Man (over radio): Powers.

What is your compass reading, powers?

Powers (over radio): I don't know where we are.

Must have gotten lost after that last turn.

Man (over radio): Mt-28, this is ft-74,

What is your trouble?

Powers (over radio): Ah, both my compasses are out and

I'm trying to find fort lauderdale, florida.

Sam: So this is the compass here.

Terry: That's the magnetic compass. Sam: That's the magnet compass.

So he would be looking at this, what else would he be looking at?

Terry: He would look at that and then hit down on

His instrument panel.

He'd have what's called the gyrocompass here that you set

This with this knob to agree with this.

Sam: To agree to that. Terry: This bounces around.

Sam: Sure. Terry: That one is very stable.

Colleen: Taylor, who's the flight lead was talking about

The compass didn't look right.

He was starting to get confused.

Sam: Don't they know they have to get back?

Colleen: Taylor thought that they needed to fly to the

Northeast because he thought they were over

The florida keys.

Sam: How did he think he was?

Colleen: 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.

Sam: I bet.

Taylor (over radio): We've just passed over a

Small island and we have no other land in sight.

Man (over radio): Turn on your emergency iff gear or

Do you have it on?

Taylor (over radio): Iff gear was off,

I'm turning it on now.

Sam: What's iff gear?

Terry: Iff is an acronym for identification friend or foe.

Sam: Okay.

Terry: Right here, for example, see this says 1,200.

In an iff they would have given them a code to squawk.

Sam: To put as friend.

Terry: Put in there and they would be picked up on their radar.

Sam: He didn't have it on. Terry: He didn't have it on.

Sam: Should he have had it on?

Terry: Especially if I want help in finding out where I am.

Sam: Right.

Taylor (over radio): Ft-28 to (inaudible) three,

One of the planes in the flight thinks if we went 270 degrees

We could hit land.

Terry: 270, that's due west.

Sam: So that's somebody with a descent compass or somebody else is like,

Hey we just go 270 we're gonna hit land.

Terry: 'cause to get to their bombing target they

Flew due east.

Sam: Right.

Terry: Well just fly due west and it will take you back where you came from.

Sam: Right, we'll hit land some point.

Terry: Yeah.

Man (over radio): Ft-28, all planes in flight

Change course to 0-90 for one minute.

Sam: So now they're going...

Terry: Back east again. Sam: Back eat again.

Powers (over radio): Dammit if we just fly west we

Would get home.

Hold it, head west. Dammit

Colleen: Powers, who was the ranking guy on the flight,

He kept saying we need to go west.

And then it gets corroborated with a radar track

That came from the solomon's aircraft carrier.

Sam: And where did that see them?

Colleen: The radar track showed aircraft going south,

Sam: Hm colleen: Over land.

There's a good chance that it could be somewhere in

This mid peninsular, east coast of florida region.

Sam: So that wouldn't surprise you at all?

Colleen: No, the model supports that.

Sam: Wow.

Taylor (over radio): We are now flying 2-70 degrees.

We will fly 2-70 degrees until we hit the beach or

Run out of gas.

Sam: And now they know they're in trouble cause it's like...

Terry: They're out of time.

Sam: They're gonna run out of gas.

Terry: And they just don't have a clue where they are.

Taylor (over radio): When the first plane drops

Below ten gallons we all go down together.

Everyone understand that?

Five planes flown by navy pilots vanished into the night.

Then one of the rescue planes that went after

Suffered the same fate.

Collectively the strange event is known as flight 19.

Taylor (over radio): We have just passed over a small island and

We have no other land in sight.

Sam: 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?

Taylor (over radio): When the first plane drops

Below ten gallons, we all go down together,

Does everyone understand that?

Colleen: There's a good chance that it could be somewhere

In this mid peninsular, 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.

Sam: Wow.

For 70 years this disappearance gripped the

Imagination and people assumed they crashed at sea,

And what this model is showing me is that there is this whole

Other search area that no one's even looked at.

Colleen: There are still corners of florida that

Nobody's been in because it's inaccessible for

One reason or another.

Sam: 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 plane we're looking for,

Flight 19?

Nate: Well john myhre,

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.

Sam: Right, when they got real low on fuel.

Nate: Right, john thought the ft-81 actually made it

Back over land.

Sam: Right.

Nate: 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.

Sam: Really?

Nate: So, we've been out here looking for this particular

Wreck site for a while because we've been out here choppering

Around in basically everglades type of conditions.

Sam: 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.

Nate: 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.

Sam: With colleen stirling 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?

John: So it is a multirotor quadcopter and it has a lidar unit on it.

Sam: Right.

John: Basically the same principle as a police man with a speed gun,

Shoots out a laser, hits something solid,

The return comes back and then it highly accurately

Marks those points.

It's millions of points of rotation,

Thousands of rotations a second.

And 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.

Sam: Great, well let's get it done.

John: Arming the props.

Alright taking off.

Michael: 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 gonna, you know, allow us to give you guys some

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 in here is a nice little cross,

You 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.

Sam: Alright.

Nate: Straight ahead here.

Just head a little bit left.

We should be getting pretty close.

There's a break in the weeds right there.

Sam: There's something there. Nate: What you got?

Sam: Something burned up. Oh yeah, that's it man.

Nate: There we go. Sam: Right that's gotta be it.

Nate: That's, that's gotta be it. Look.

That would have been attached to a back of an engine.

There's the tire.

Sam: Cool.

Nate: It came in pretty steep.

There's all kinds of debris in here.

That would have been the iff unit.

The friend or foe unit.

Sam: Okay, yeah.

Taylor (over radio): Iff gear was off.

I'm turning it on now.

Sam: What would be the next step for you?

Nate: The rest of the airplane is probably buried.

What we're looking for is a data plate on the front on 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.

Sam: While we need a serial number to say if this wwii era

Wreck is one of the plants from flight 19,

There's a chance that at least one of them is not lost

In the bermuda triangle at all.

Nate: You know, this could be ft-81.

Sam: Which would mean some of them, at least,

Made it back to land.

Nate: Right.

Sam: 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.

Sam: My investigation moves to phase two, ghost ships.

Yourself sitting in a dark room at 3:00 am,

Half eaten turkey sandwich, typing bermuda 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 us hydrographic survey.

They documented 1,600 ghost ships.

Yeah, there's something very sort of eerie and terrifying

In this idea of 1,600 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 us hydrographic office found the existence of

1,600 ships floating a sea without a single

Soul on board.

1,600 floating ships and zero sailors.

That math seems off.

Now, I'm not saying that it's not aliens,

Cause it could be,

But let's see how a scientist who studies the

World's oceans explains it.

Arthur: They call this area the doldrums.

Sam: The doldrums.

Arthur: 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

Towards the poles, and at a certain latitude,

Which is in this area, the air starts sinking.

Sam: Yeah.

Arthur: And associated with them is very little wind.

So pre-19th century all the ships were sails.

Sam: Right.

Arthur: So these sail boats required wind to move.

Sam: Right, so it just sort of sits there.

Arthur: 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 mats of sargassum weed that you just

Literally got stuck in,

Big mats,

100 yards wide and almost a mile long.

Sam: Wow.

Arthur: You're stuck.

Sam: Yeah, you imagine six weeks of it or seven weeks of it,

Running out of water.

Arthur: And you're hoping for some wind,

You're hoping to find some current.

Yeah.

Sam: You're hoping for something to blow, right?

Well I can't imagine anything creepier than running into a ship

Arthur: In the middle of nowhere.

Sam: With nobody on it. What's your theory?

Why would all these boats end up empty?

Arthur: There are some people out there that believe aliens are involved.

Sam: Sure.

Arthur: But you know, I'm a scientist,

I'm waiting to see the first true documented case of the alien abduction.

Sam: Right.

Arthur: But they do have these ocean vortices.

If you got caught in those, you go, oh great...

Sam: I'm going somewhere.

Arthur: I'm finally in some decent curent

Arthur: But they spin around and in the order of nine,

Ten days, they basically bring you back to the same location.

Sam: Which would be tough if you're running out of water.

Arthur: And as you know, if you drink salt water,

Over time it makes you a little crazy if

You're getting dehydrated.

Sam: You can hallucinate and things like that. Yeah.

Arthur: And that, it helps to add to all the great legends...

Sam: Right.

Arthur: About mermaids and monsters and maelstroms and...

Sam: The bermuda triangle, right.

Arthur: And the bermuda triangle.

Sam: You can sort of imagine the mariners out here during

The age of sail being stuck, but I think that's why sailors

Get so superstitious cause they have so little control

Over the weather and so many things.

So you never sail on a Friday, you gotta be careful whistling

On a boat cause 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 trapped.

We were at hamilton harbor in bermuda and I was anchored

There in an 85 foot steel ketch.

A tail end of a hurricane came through and we heard

On the radio six vessels, 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 and putting them in a bad spot where, you know,

If they had been through it one time,

If they had lived through it one time they would have known,

They're gonna survive it and that their other

Options are worse.

So 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.

Sam: Listen, inexperienced sailors make mistakes,

But for that to be replicated 1,600 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 fear,

Instincts kick in and we all move in unison.

But is that enough to explain how 1,600 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.

George: What would cause a seasoned professional, a professional sailor...

Sam: Right.

George: To lose rationality and abandon the 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.

And the amygdala is the home of what we sometimes call the fight or flight response.

Sam: Right.

George: And every once and a while the amygdala can hijack

Executive functions, it overrides it if you will.

Sam: Okay.

George: So we begin to do irrational things and it

Begins mildly irrational.

If I can drink some salt water maybe it will 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

Until you go overboard and find out it's not.

Sam: 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 core came up with condition 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.

Tuff 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 flag ship, the santa maria.

In the five centuries 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 ship wrecks.

I'm curious as to whether we can find, you know,

Some kind of root cause for this pattern of ship wrecks.

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 1 foot, 2 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 ship wrecks litter the ocean bottom

And less than 1% 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 to ship wrecks,

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.

Sam: What do the conditions down there look like?

Neal: They're good, I mean, you can definitely see it's

Snapped in half.

There's half of a wreck sitting on the bottom.

It's the stern portion of it.

It was a shipping boat that went down in the early 90s.

Sam: It's not the cyclops,

But neal 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?

Neal: It was shortly after the hurricane. They were bringing supplies.

Sam: They didn't hit anything out here?

Neal: There's nothing to hit out here.

Sam: Who knows what happened. Neal: Yep, who knows.

It took a little while for us to find it,

But we fixed a mooring on it and there's a

Temporary chain and line that we'll follow down.

Sam: So if I don't make it back, tell my mom I love her,

Okay you guys? Thanks.

Sam: Yes. No. Man: No come on.

Sam: No. None of you get my vuarnets.

Sam: I can understand how bad weather can make a ship

Capsize 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?

Tim janssen 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?

Tim: The general definition that everybody understands,

It's a very, very big wave and then there's the sort of

Scientific version of that, which doesn't like big or

Large because it's not very precise.

Sam: Okay.

Tim: 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 formally called a rogue wave.

Sam: Right.

Tim: So the draupner wave was the first time that we

Actually measured a wave that was qualifying as a literal

Rogue wave, like, you know, two times the significant wave

Height in an already very large wave field.

Sam: Where was it? What was it?

Tim: This was off the coast of norway, the north sea.

Sam: When was that?

Tim: This was in 1995.

Sam: So pretty recently.

Like, they've only had a real scientific proof of

Any of this in '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 draupner 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 draupner oil platform.

Recently a nasa study determined that any given time

There are as many as ten rogue waves happening in

The world's oceans.

Tim: Most people were sort of like discarding that

As sort of like, you know, mermaid type stories.

Sam: Right.

Tim: A rogue wave is rare, but it's not impossible.

Like, you know, three in 10,000.

Sam: Right.

Tim: You know, a 100 foot wave,

We see them all the time.

Sam: Really?

I didn't have a plan, but then an old family friend

Offered me a job fixing up a yacht and then sailing it

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 on the ocean will teach you a lot,

But luckily during all that time we never

Hit one of these.

Tim: A rogue wave is rare, but it's not impossible.

Like, you know, three in 10,000.

Sam: Right.

Tim: You know, a 100 foot wave,

We see them all the time.

Sam: Really?

Now I've never (bleep) 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.

Tim: 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 that are going to be way bigger than that.

They have to be.

Sam: There has to be a wave twice that at some point.

Tim: Absolutely otherwise you wouldn't get the

Average of 17 meters, yeah.

Sam: Right, wow.

That's a lot of water, man.

Tim: It is.

Sam: Okay, here's where we get to the good part.

You're on your freighter and you're in a storm and a

100 foot wave is coming at you from some unknown direction.

What kind of things might happen?

Tim: A single large wave could put stresses on a

Vessel that you normally wouldn't have.

You would have like just one very 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.

Sam: 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?

Tim: Whether or not boats disappear because of rogue waves,

Undoubtedly yes. How often, we don't know.

Sam: Sure

Tim: And whether or not all these vessels are due to rogue waves?

I think that question is open.

Sam: 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.

It's 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, my ask my sixth-grade teacher,

Miss sadowski 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?

Shermer: Our brains are not well wired to understand randomness.

Our brains are wired to find patterns and meaning,

Hidden forces at work, conspiracies,

Somebody is behind the scenes pulling the strings.

Sam: Right

Shermer: And reproductive success is the key to evolution.

So we are the descendants of those who are most likely to

Find meaningful patterns and infuse those

Patterns with agency.

You know, let's look at some of these examples here.

Sam: When you set out to make a documentary,

You're filled with hope that all this cool stuff

Is gonna happen.

You're going to find out that magic is real and

Then you're forced to confront reality.

The world caged your b, bro.

And you run into that one guy at the bar and

He ruins everything.

Shermer: We're looking at, you know,

Regional shipwreck data since 2007 and of course you would expect,

You know, in the pacific ocean, and,

You know, the indian ocean and so on,

But here's our triangle.

There doesn't seem to be a lot 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.

And you know who knows this statistic?

Insurance companies...

Sam: Right.

Shermer: People who have to pay out if there's a crash or some kind of financial loss.

Sam: And they don't charge anymore to travel through the

Bermuda triangle.

Shermer: Right.

Sam: If there was something happening the insurance

Companies would hundred billion trillion percent make

You pay more.

They're not gonna lose money, like, that's not happening,

There's no way.

Shermer: That's right, yeah.

Sam: 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?

Shermer: The origin myth begins in the early 1960s with

An article by a guy named vincent gaddis

In the magazine, argosy.

Argosy was one of the largest pulp fiction

Magazines ever published.

Fiction. Okay, that's it. Fiction, right.

Sam: Right, right...

Shermer: So that's your first clue, right.

And he was basing it on a fake magazine article that

Referenced this area around bermuda, might be triangular.

So he coined, the bermuda triangle...

Sam: Oh, okay

Shermer: And that meme really stuck.

And that's where the fantasy and imagination jumps in,

Especially fantasy writers, charles berlitz, 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.

Some writers go, it all goes back to columbus.

Sam: Columbus saw all kinds of crazy.

You know, those guys crossing the ocean they saw lots.

Shermer: Totally, of course, and what did they know?

Sam: 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 see saw a serious of lights dancing in the sky.

This could be the genesis of the triangle's

Larger than life reputation.

Sam: 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 triangle's moment in the place just like

This, 528 years ago?

Columbus, he was coming into 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,

The taíno people that might have had fires on a hillside,

And it's possible that columbus mistook fires on a

Hillside for 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

And 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 says that they knew

For sure is full of it.

In a sample of ten articles about columbus's sighting

Will give you ten 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 be have

Been caused by something extremely un-mysterious,

That's a word by the way.

That's the fire I set 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 is 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.

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.

Sam: Alright, 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 a 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.

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