What could be behind the mysterious disappearances
of ships and airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle?
Aliens?
A series of scary coincidences?
A supernatural phenomenon?
Or are there other explanations for the secrets
of such an enigmatic place?
It all happened in December 1945,
a few months after World War II ended.
Five Avenger bombers from the US Navy
took off from a base in Florida and flew to the Atlantic Ocean
for a training mission.
The flight plan was pretty simple.
They would fly eastbound for a bombing exercise.
Then, they would return to base with no major issues.
The first part of the exercise went well.
Led by the experienced Lieutenant Taylor,
the squad, also called Flight 19,
finished their training and continued east.
The problem is, after flying for an hour and a half,
Lt. Taylor noticed that the compasses in his plane
were not working as they should.
Believing he was south of the base,
he requested coordinates from air traffic control,
who recommended he went north.
But that led the squad straight to the middle of the ocean.
When Taylor realized that, it was too late.
The planes didn't have enough fuel
to go back to the continent.
A little over four hours after the mission started,
the base picked up a message from Taylor telling the other pilots
to make an emergency landing on water.
It was the last we heard of Flight 19.
Nobody heard from the planes or the 14 crew members ever again.
More than 200 planes and multiple ships from the Navy
searched the Atlantic, looking for traces of Flight 19.
They never found anything.
To this day, we don't know exactly what happened to them.
Or do we?
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Have you ever heard about the Bermuda Triangle?
Did you like it? I spent two dollars on this ringtone.
Betinho, how long have you been sitting there watching me?
Not long, about 20 minutes or so.
But I heard a good amount of the story.
Is it true that the planes vanished? Five of them?
Yes, it's one of the most famous mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle.
I'm not talking about Bermuda shorts
-like you might be thinking. -I'm thinking this is about Bermuda,
the center of an archipelago of hundreds of coral islands,
discovered by Juan Bermúdez in the early 16th century.
But you were talking about Bermuda shorts, so...
No, dude. You're right. Studying hard for that GED, huh?
Yeah, I'm trying to make up for lost time.
Anyway, keep going. I need to take some notes here.
-Can't wait to get to the aliens part. -No, hold on.
The alien stuff deserves some special attention, Betinho.
I'll get there, but first things first.
The Bermuda Triangle is a region in the Atlantic Ocean
that is nearly twice the size of the state of Bahia.
ALMOST 2X BAHIA
The entire area is shaped like a huge triangle.
One of its tips is in Miami, United States.
The other is in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And the third tip is right here, in the Bermuda Islands.
BERMUDA ISLANDS
This place became really famous in the second half of the 20th century
due to reports of disappearances of many ships and airplanes.
The most incredible thing is that nobody knew what happened.
They never found any shipwrecks or signs of crew members.
And I don't mean just one or two cases here.
Some people say the first accounts
are from the times of Christopher Columbus.
And he died in 1506.
It's a mystery that may have started centuries ago,
during the Age of Discovery.
But the most famous accounts began in the 19th century.
It's impossible to determine the number of cases,
but some people say that, to this day,
hundreds of ships and airplanes vanish around here.
Castanhari, my systems are getting unstable
due to the thunderstorm.
What do you mean, Briggs? You don't have a power cord.
My operation depends on the server located in Dr. Tayane's lab.
Okay. Castanhari, keep going. You were getting to the aliens, right?
I'll keep going.
Let's hope Briggs doesn't lose connection.
For a long time, many believed that the people who vanished
had been abducted by aliens.
Because only that could explain their full disappearance,
without a trace.
These theories got even stronger
with the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
directed in the 70s by Steven Spielberg.
It shows, in a very scary way, several alien abductions,
including those of the pilots of the mysterious Flight 19.
FLIGHT 19
Reports of disappearances in that place are filled with suspense and mystery.
It wasn't unusual, for example, to find ships wandering around
with no crew members on board.
Because part of the Bermuda Triangle
is in an area known as Sargasso Sea,
feared by past navigators
due to its calm waters.
The lack of strong winds
would make it extremely hard to cross through the place,
and multiple vessels would spend weeks, or even months,
trying to leave the region.
Feeling desperate, crew members would abandon their ships on rowboats
to try to reach the continent before dying from thirst and starvation.
Thus, the vessels would become adrift,
sailing for years and years with no living soul on board.
Ghost ships, in every aspect.
But wait. These abduct-- I mean, these disappearances...
They don't happen anymore, right?
Are you sure, Betinho?
In 2015, the cargo ship El Faro disappeared while navigating
in the same area where a hurricane crossed the Triangle.
The shipwreck was found
at the bottom of the ocean.
DEPTH 5 KM
But they never found the slightest sign of crew members.
But didn't they know they were heading towards the hurricane?
Wasn't there a compass to...
What if it happened just like you said about that plane,
-with the crazy compasses? -I don't know, Betinho.
Maybe something there makes the compasses go haywire.
The UFOs.
Communication failure with the circuit--
Huh? What the--
Why is the light in the lab the only one that's on? This is weird.
What is that?
-Tay? -Who else would it be?
DOCTOR TAYANE
I just wore that outfit to repair the power system.
Briggs's server should be rebooting now.
The power will go back to normal in a few seconds.
System rebooted.
Error found.
The lights on the second floor are not responding.
Initiating security repair.
SECURITY REPAIR
So, Tay, I was wondering
if there's anything that could make a compass go haywire.
Did you know I made my first compass when I was seven?
The Earth can be seen as a giant magnet
because it's surrounded by an enormous magnetic field.
This field is generated in our planet's inner core,
where huge amounts of molten iron and nickel
move constantly.
Since the compass needle is magnetized,
it is attracted to the pole where the magnetic field is stronger,
which, in this case, is the South Magnetic Pole.
SOUTH MAGNETIC POLE
This may confuse some people,
since the South Magnetic Pole is close to the geographic North Pole,
the one we use in maps.
The compass appears to always point to the North Pole
because it's actually reacting to its neighbor's magnetism,
the South Magnetic Pole.
It's also important to know that magnetic poles aren't fixed.
They shift as time goes by,
and have even been inverted in the past.
The difference between the Earth's magnetic pole
and the geographic pole is called magnetic declination.
The magnetic declination changes over time,
depending on where you are in the planet.
In some places, it can be as much as 20 degrees.
But, Tay, is there anything,
specifically in the Bermuda Triangle, that makes a compass go haywire?
In the Bermuda Triangle?
Apart from the magnetic declination that I mentioned,
science doesn't know of other external factors
capable of making a compass go haywire in that region.
By the way, in the 19th century,
when the Triangle became famous due to the disappearances,
there was no magnetic declination there.
In fact, that was one of the few places on the planet
where the compass needle actually pointed to the cardinal North.
So it's precisely the opposite of what we thought.
Wow, that's disappointing. I thought the compass
went all crazy, like this.
But then, there's only one logical explanation left.
Aliens.
You really want to blame aliens for this, don't you?
But we can't talk about aliens
before looking into all the impressive natural phenomena
that occur in the Bermuda Triangle.
Just imagine them being divided into two groups.
The first group is responsible for the accidents.
In other words, the things that can take down planes and sink ships.
HURRICANES
Hurricanes are extremely common there,
since the Bermuda Triangle
is filled with tropical storms
that can often become these scary natural phenomena.
There are also waterspouts,
which are almost like tornadoes
that appear over water.
Imagine this:
a waterspout can reach speeds of over 100 km/h,
and it's possible to have several occurring simultaneously,
in the same place.
Experts believe that several stories about accidents,
especially with small boats,
may be connected to hurricanes and waterspouts.
But unfortunately these aren't the only factors responsible for this.
Isn't that right, Briggs?
Exactly, Castanhari.
There are also microbursts,
a weather phenomenon that occurs during thunderstorms,
when an enormous column of air that has cooled
plummets to the ground.
It's like a bomb made out of air and water
that can completely destabilize a plane
or create waves over ten meters high
that could easily sink a ship.
But keep in mind that microbursts and hurricanes
are directly related to the weather.
Because the Bermuda Triangle hides many of its traps
in the Atlantic Ocean itself.
A boat navigating the Triangle
encounters several obstacles to sail across.
One of them is the imminent danger of hitting a coral reef.
REEFS
They can even tear the hull of a modern ship.
Fortunately, with the navigation systems we have today,
it's easier to escape this kind of danger.
But many shipwrecks may have happened because of them.
Another powerful trap in the Atlantic are the rogue waves.
They are massive waves
formed by winds or ocean currents
that appear out of nowhere and can sink a ship
in a matter of seconds.
The funny thing is, like many ocean phenomena,
they were considered a legend for centuries.
It's important not to mistake rogue waves for tsunamis.
Tsunamis also have big waves, but they're a bit different.
A tsunami is a large water displacement
usually caused by an earthquake in the middle of the ocean.
That's why they're also called seaquakes.
In fact, since the 17th century, there have been at least
six tsunamis in the Bermuda Triangle.
1867 VIRGIN ISLANDS
1918 PUERTO RICO 1946 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
And one of the last items on our list of phenomena
that cause accidents here in the Bermuda Triangle
are the blue holes.
BLUE HOLES
An underwater cave with a collapsed ceiling.
It turns into a hole
that may be hundreds of feet deep
and have tunnels connected to other caves.
Depending on the tidal movement,
really strong water currents go through these tunnels
and when they reach the surface, they may seriously damage a ship.
Okay, but these things happen in the whole world, right?
Most of them, yeah.
Then why is the Bermuda Triangle
the only place where they can't find any sign of the accidents?
That's why I've divided the phenomena into two different groups.
One is responsible for the accidents.
ACCIDENTS
And the other, for the disappearances.
And here we have the ocean currents,
which are like rivers flowing inside the oceans.
One of the most famous is the massive Gulf Stream,
that directs the waters from the Bermuda Triangle
across the Atlantic, all the way to England.
It helps regulate the weather in Northern Europe,
and without it, winters in the region would be much more intense.
It runs at around five kilometers per hour,
and since it's huge,
it can make an adrift ship
or a crashed plane
move hundreds of kilometers
in just a few days.
So, if somebody looked for a ship
where it should have sunk, they wouldn't find anything.
The ship would be somewhere else, far away in the ocean.
Or, of course, it could have sunk in an oceanic trench. Briggs.
OCEANIC TRENCHES
The waters in the Bermuda Triangle, for the most part,
are not very deep,
but they hide some of the biggest trenches in the world.
These trenches are so deep,
that man can't even explore them properly.
After all, the deeper they are, the greater the water pressure.
This makes it even more difficult to access the trenches.
And the Puerto Rico Trench is the deepest place in the Atlantic,
about eight kilometers deep.
You can see absolutely nothing at its bottom.
If a ship sank in the Puerto Rico Trench,
it would never been found.
Castanhari, you haven't mentioned one of the coolest things about the Triangle.
Methane hydrate.
METHANE HYDRATE
At the bottom of the ocean, there are lots of plants and animals.
As they die,
the methane released during decomposition
can get concentrated in huge pockets
under the seabed.
It's as if the pockets were in the sea's underground.
When phenomena such as earthquakes or human action
form cracks in the pockets,
the methane is released in the shape of bubbles
that quickly reach the surface, causing the density
in that part of the ocean to become much lower.
And when an object is more dense than water,
it sinks.
Can you imagine?
A ship crossing that place
could sink almost instantly.
A ship would have to be really unlucky to sail over a methane pocket
right when the gas escapes.
But it's possible.
Let's check.
Let's pretend this water tank is the Bermuda Triangle.
This methane gas cylinder is connected to it through a pipe.
Now I'm going to release the gas, and it'll make bubbles in the water.
-"Release the gas." -Focus on the boat, Betinho.
Are you convinced, Betinho?
A ship going through this
could lose stability and eventually sink.
Dr. Tayane,
my system ran a security scan.
-No components were damaged. -Great.
Perfect timing.
Restoring power to the Curie Complex.
You are invited to stay and watch
the next experiment involving radioactive isotopes.
Radioactive what?
Doesn't that cause cancer?
It depends on the time of exposure.
I wonder if I'll grow another hand.
No, relax. It's more likely you'll lose this one.
But look, if they ask about the Triangle in your GED test,
you won't get an F, right?
Wow, Betinho. You really wrote everything down.
Impressive.
After everything we've explained, I'm sure our dear janitor
has come to the right conclusion.
As I was reading the notes,
I realized it has nothing to do with aliens, right?
I even spent two dollars on that ringtone for nothing.
Yes, it was for nothing. Nobody uses ringtones anymore.
When we look into each of the accidents that took place in this region,
we notice that these natural phenomena explain most of them.
A few centuries ago, the Bermuda Triangle was a dreaded area,
and even considered haunted.
But, little by little, we're unveiling its mysteries.
We are lucky to be living in different times
because we have an extremely valuable ally: science.
SCIENCE
Some past explorers could say our scientific breakthroughs
are witchcraft.
But thanks to them,
we're farther and farther from the unknown
and closer to the truth.