What do you know about Bermuda Triangle??

Known for mysterious disappearances, plane crashes, and deaths, it's no wonder the Bermuda Triangle was one of Michelle's childhood fears. Also, what is it exactly?

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Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
One time there was this couch surferand she was a singing teacher, like,
and I'm like, huh, canyou teach anyone how to sing?
And she's like, if you cantell the difference between two notes, you
can sing. So you can dothe wooo, you can sing. Welcome
to Scary Mystery Surprise, where wetalk about scary things that surprised us.
Around the inter half, I'm Edwinand I'm Michelle Edwin. What do you

(00:30):
know about the Bermuda Triangle? Youknow, it's one of those things that
I hear a lot about, butuh huh, I don't know anything about.
I don't even know where it is. That's so funny, you know,
like in grade school, why wasit? Because I thought it was
such a big deal that in likequicksand I just assumed the Bermuda Triangle and

(00:51):
quicksand we're going to be bigger partsof my life. Then they Yeah,
you know, I remember reading amagazine like you know, Scholastic. Yeah,
they must have done something. Yeah. Honestly, I knew it was
off the coast of Florida and Bermuda, but I was like, where is
the triangle? But it's like FloridaBermuda and Puerto Rico. But yeah,

(01:11):
in this triangle, I guess Ialways just imagine some sort of swirling triangular
vortex and you cross the boundary andthen you're just sucked into like another dimensioned
like Amelia Earhart's there for some reason. And then I I've been here all
this time. I somehow ended upin the Bermuda triangle. But yeah,

(01:37):
then everyone who's disappeared throughout time isalso in this vortex. So you know,
you just walk in and you're like, uh, oh, do you
remember there's a Stephen King book thathas like a wall, like a it's
called I think it's the Dome.Is that what it's called. I forgot
that. I don't know. That'swhat I imagined it like literally a physical
thing. That's what I did too. Yeah, you just like somehow cross

(01:57):
it and then you're in trouble.And it's always like in perpetual fog.
You know you're going to cross thisweird boundary and possibly get lost forever in
the folds of time. There havebeen some notable disappearances that have contributed to
this story. As we all imaginethis foggy triangle vortex, there's like ships

(02:19):
that have disappeared, there's planes thathave disappeared, there are people that have
disappeared, So it all adds tothis legend, right. So the HMS
Atlanta, which ironically is the goddessof running in Greek mythology. The ship
was originally called the HMS Juno andas we know from our episode, the

(02:43):
very Celeste as bad news to renameyour boats mistake. So in eighteen eighty
the sailing ship the HMS Atalanta disappearedwith her entire crew after setting sail from
the Royal Navy Dockyard in Bermuda,and it was going to go to England,
but no survivors or the ship wereever found. Wow, I know,

(03:06):
which is pretty nuts. And thenanother one that happened in nineteen eighteen
was the loss of the USS Cyclops, which resulted in the single largest loss
of life in the history of theUS Navy, not related to combat.
It was carrying a load of mangalesor super heavy stuff, and it had

(03:28):
one of its engines out of order, and then it disappeared without a trace,
with three hundred and six members ofthat crew disappeared. There were like
tons of theories about it. There'slike, no evidence to really support anything.
I mean, there's like blaming storms, some capsizing, some suggesting there
was wartime enemy activity to blame forthe loss, but there's no definitive pirates.

(03:53):
Nobody said pirates. I mean,pirates are pretty logical. Pirates could
be it too. And then probablyone of the more famous cases is Flight
nineteen, so oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you know fly Everyone kind
of knows Flight nineteen. Flight nineteenwas a training flight of five TBM Avenger

(04:16):
torpedo bombers that disappeared December fifth,nineteen forty five, while over the Atlantic.
The squadron's flight plan was scheduled totake them due east from Fort Lauderdale
and then back over a final legto complete the exercise. The flight never
returned to base, and the planesand the crew disappeared without a trace.

(04:39):
We're in modern times, right,and even when a plane now like disappears,
I'm like, how can we notfind where it went? What is
it? That? Malaysia Yeah,Malaysia Airlines, yeah, flight yeah,
I mean yeah, where is it? How can you not find it?
It's weird. And then one ofthe search and rescue aircraft that was deployed

(05:00):
to look for flight nineteen also disappeared. What yeah, it was a PBM
Mariner. I don't know planes,but apparently that's what it was. They're
just there there, hanging out still. They're like, ah, let's just
not go back. It was justlike, oh, yeah, you know,
it's kind of nice here in thiscloudy vortex with Amelia Earhart. Another

(05:25):
disappearance was an aircraft Douglas DC three. It disappeared without a trace, thirty
two people on board and no onewas ever found. So that's pretty weird
too. The Katamara four was apleasure yacht and was found adrift in the
Atlantic Ocean just south of Bermuda innineteen fifty five, and it's usually stated

(05:46):
that the crew vanished while the yachtssurvived, being at sea for during three
hurricanes. So it was another mysteriousdisappearance I know. In nineteen sixty three,
two aircrafts collided in the Atlantic threehundred miles west of Bermuda. While

(06:09):
they did collide, there were twodistinctive crash sites, apparently separated over one
hundred and sixty miles of water.That didn't make sense to anybody, like
why were they so separate? Paranormally. The explanations range and they are delightful.
It's Atlantis, that is one ofthe biggest theories is that it's where

(06:30):
Atlantis is. And like a lotof the disappearances are blamed on leftover technology
that is, you know, damagingmechanics doing all sorts of like wood ships
didn't have mechanics. Book, it'syou know, doing stuff like that,
and that's submerged rock formations. Andweirdly enough, there was that rock formation

(06:54):
called the Bimini Road that was foundin the Bahamas off Bimini in the Bahamas,
which is in the triangle according tosome definitions, like the triangle we've
established is pretty loose, but likethe trying sometimes the Bimini Road is considered
in there. Bimini Road. Yeah, it's this road they found that like

(07:15):
just leads into the water. Yeah. And then followers of reported psychic Edgar
Casey. Have you ever heard ofEdgar Casey? No? Oh, he
might be a good episode to dobecause he was like an American clairvoyant who
like talked all about healing, reincarnation, dreams, after life, past life,
nutrition, atlantis, and future events. He like made predictions and he

(07:39):
was like born in like eighteen seventyor something like that and died in nineteen
forty five. So he made allthese predictions, and he predicted that Atlantis
would be found in nineteen sixty eight. Referring to the Bimini Road, the
discovery of the Bimini Road is likewhen that was discovered. So believers in
the bimen Any Road describe it aslike a road or a wall. Other

(08:01):
people think the Bimini Road is justlike natural, like a natural occurrence,
but that can be argued about everythinglooks cool. Another theory parallel universe.
You know my favorite Amelia Earhart universe. Some people hypothesize that of parallel universe
exists in the Bermuda Triangle, thuscausing time and space to warp that sucks

(08:26):
objects around it into it into aparallel universe, which it might be.
My favorite is that there's a paralleluniverse of lost adventurers who are just kind
of stuck. We slipped through timeon accident. It's like lost, that's
what I lost. And then ofcourse our classic UFO, it could just

(08:46):
be aliens. They're just kidnapping,taking planes and ships and just every couple
of years they decide to like abductsomeone in that zone. I don't know.
Like after reading about that pilot thatdisappeared in the air, I was
like, yeah, I mean hedescribed something hovering, something underneath. You

(09:07):
never know, you never know.Maybe that's where flight nineteen went. Yep.
But are we ready? Are weready to suck the magic out?
Oh? No, I hate thetruth. I know we're about to have
all the magic sucked out of allof this. So Appearance's man named Larry

(09:31):
Kusha, who wrote this book innineteen seventy five, called the Bermuda Triangle
Solved, and he claims that manywriters have exaggerated dubious and unverifiable claims,
and all you really have to dois go back and look at newspapers from
the time periods of each of thesedisappearances and cases to find out if the

(09:54):
weather was unusual, if things likethat that just weren't reported in the story
and so like. He concludes thata number of ships and aircraft's reported missing
in the area was not significantly greateror proportionally speaking, than in any other
part of the ocean. So hejust remove the triangle. Just yeah,

(10:16):
there's no triangle. It's all ofthe ocean in an area frequented by tropical
cyclones. The number of disappearances thatdid occur where, for the most part,
neither disproportionate, unlikely, nor mysterious. Furthermore, riders often fail to
mention such storms and represent disappearances ofhaving happened in calm conditions when meteorically records

(10:41):
clearly contradict this. Numbers themselves havebeen exaggerated in research. A boat's disappearance,
for example, would be reported,but eventually return to port and then
not been reported that it had returned. So like, there's like a few
cases of that, and then insome cases some disappearance had not even happened.
One plane crash that was supposed tohave happened in the Bermuna Triangle happened

(11:05):
in nineteen thirty seven off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of
witnesses. So like that got attributedto But the legend of the Bermuda Triangle
is a manufacturer mystery, perpetuated bywriters who either purposely or unknowingly make misconceptions

(11:26):
of faulty reasoning and sensationalism. SoI'm going to go back and revisit all
those stories that I just told you, you know about the famous cases and
gives like the logical thing that probablyhappened to them. I know, it's
going to ruin everything again. Iknow the HMS Atlanta, it was actually

(11:48):
a teaching vessel, so it waslike training these crew members. So the
crew was really unexperienced, and therewas a gnarly storm that hit like within
a couple weeks of it being atsea, and it's just assumed that while
there's no evidence of her fate,that it's just the crew being inexperienced in

(12:11):
a massive storm that took the shipout. Also the USS Cyclops, so
when it sank, people didn't knowwhat was going on with it. The
Cyclops had two sister ships and bothwere lost during World War Two, transporting
heavy loads of metallic or similar towhat the Cyclops had been doing during her

(12:35):
fatal voyage. And it's suspicious thatin all three cases it was probably structural
failure in the cargo. That is, you know, the boat wasn't designed
to haul a cargo, so itsank all three of the sister ships.
In the case of Flight nineteen,we still haven't found that they probably ran

(12:56):
out of gas and crashed in theocean, but where nobody knows that one
aircraft that was deployed to look forthem, the PBM Mariner with the thirteen
crew that Hals had disappeared a tankeroff the coast of Florida, saw an
explosion, observing a widespread oil slick, and when they went to search for
survivors they found none. And thenthe weather became excessively stormy by the end

(13:22):
of that like looking for them,so you know, they stopped, so
they quit. They stopped looking.Also, the Mariner seaplane was notorious for
exploding due to vapor leaks, andit was loaded heavy with fuel potentially looking
for the you know, flight nineteen. That sucks though, It's like so

(13:46):
like they they go to try tosearch for them, and then they also
get lost. Yeah, it justsucks. That's why there wasn't a third
airplane or whatever. They're just likethat, they're done, they're gone.
And then Douglas DC three, youknow, they haven't been able to determine
what caused that one to go downeither, so you know, like there's
still a little mystery the planes gomissing. The Kanamara four, the yacht

(14:11):
that I mentioned earlier, apparently theowner of the yacht had beached it because
there was going to be a bighurricane. What ended up happening, and
that someone wrote in to confirm thisfrom Bermuda is that they moored the boat
and in the wake of Hurricane Janetit was so awe inspiring and dangerous that

(14:33):
they observed that the Connamara had disappeared. And the investigation revealed that she had
dragged its moorings and its anchor outto sea, so it had just been
dragged. No one was on itwhen it got lost. And then you
know how I was talking about thosetwo planes that crashed into each other,
and they found the wreckage really farapart from it two separate ones. No,

(14:56):
but it's even stupider. Research showthat the Air Force investigation revealed that
the debris defining the second crash sitewas determined to be a mass of seaweed
and driftwood tangled in an old booie. Huh, So there was only one
crash site, but they thought therewere, and that was the mystery.

(15:18):
I don't know how I feel this. I know, I don't know how
I feel either, because you know, the plane still disappeared. There's still
some magic. Granted, they probablydid just crash into the ocean, and
we just don't know where they arein the ocean. The ocean is pretty
big, in fact, pretty fuckinghuge. And then there's this nice quote

(15:39):
from Larry Kushaw that'll end on becausewhen you've gone back to the original sources
or the people involved, the mysteryevaporates. Science does not have to answer
questions about the Bermuda Triangle because thosequestions are not valid in the first place.
Ships and planes behave in the trianglethe same way they behave anywhere else

(16:03):
in the world. So I guessthat resolves my childhood fear of the Bermuda
Triangle. But I still can haveQuicksand that's funny because I used to be
I used to think like, oh, yeah, worse is that Quicksand like
when I would see puddles at school, I used to be like, oh,
it's Quicksand they're also dramatic, likedramatic deaths. One time, my

(16:25):
cat was walking on this mud andjust like daintily walking on it, and
I went to follow him. Ijust I sank up to my knee.
What happened if my brother had tocome pull me out could I get out?
Like this is so so? Iguess that's my experience with Quicksand there

(16:45):
are like a few other weird littlezones, like there's one in Japan.
There's like a few little voids outthere that are just like the Bermuda Triangle.
They have like the same legends,but any of those are authentic.
But it just seems like the BermudaTriangles just the ocean guys solved by Scary
Mystery Surprise. Thank god we solvedthat. We still don't know anything about

(17:08):
quicksand that could still be a dailyproblem. That's good. Anyway, what
are we going to talk about nextweek, Edwin, I don't know.
I think it'll be a surprise.Scary Mystery Surprise is hosted by Michelle Newman
and Edwin Komarubies. This podcast wasedited and sound designed by Sarah Borhez Wendel,

(17:32):
a VW Sound