Original subtitles

(waves crashing)

- [Johnny] In the last 200 years,

20 planes, 50 ships and hundreds of people

have just vanished in a small area in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a part of the ocean called the "Bermuda Triangle,"

or the "Devil's Triangle."

It's an aquatic graveyard where over the years

researchers have uncovered hundreds of wrecks.

Scientific hypotheses have been crafted

to try to explain what is happening here.

The idea, the fear, has spread

sparking countless books and documentaries

attempting to prove that there's something strange

happening in this triangle of ocean.

- [Speaker] There's some kind of a anomaly

going on down there that we can't explain.

Something that goes on down far, far below the deepest

rays, the last rays of sunlight.

- [Johnny] In this video,

we're gonna explain what the mystery

of the Bermuda Triangle really is,

and why this perilous patch of ocean

has captured the curiosity and fear of millions of people.

(ominous music)

Hey, I'm excited to get into this story

because it gets really juicy.

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Let's get back to the Bermuda Triangle.

It's generally regarded as this area of water

in the North Atlantic,

drawn from Miami, to San Juan, to Bermuda.

The mystery here kind of started back in 1492

when Christopher Columbus who, incidentally,

is getting a lot of air time on the channel lately,

for better or worse.

This is where the biggest light bulb moment

of the century goes off in this guy's head.

I know, I know.

The sources are in the description, I'm sorry.

Can we move on, please?

Thank you.

Anyway, Columbus is out there trying to reach Asia

and he passes through this triangle of water,

and this is where things get weird.

Columbus kept a very detailed journal,

which I have a first edition English translation of

that I'm not freaking out about because I love old books.

Did I need to buy this for this story?

No.

Did I spend way too much money on it as an excuse?

Yes.

But while I have it, let's look at it.

God, look at this freaking book, gorgeous.

Okay, anyway, on September 13th, 1492,

Columbus says that as he's going along this route

something weird starts happening with his compass.

On this day, "at the commencement of the night,

the needles turned a half point north-west,

and in the morning they turned somewhat more north-west."

Whoa.

Creepy, Chris.

But it doesn't stop there.

He also reported the sea rising

and a strange light out in the distance.

He described it like a wax candle moving up and down.

What is going on here?

The mystery continued throughout the centuries.

In 1606, while traveling through the triangle,

a large English ship carrying 150 travelers

became wrecked at Bermuda

after encountering a huge hurricane.

Even though this wasn't mysterious,

because it was just weather,

it left an impression on how people saw this body of water.

In fact, it is supposed that this ship wreck

inspired Shakespeare's play, "The Tempest,"

which often referred to Bermuda, or Bermoothes,

as being vexed or cursed.

Okay, but listen to this one.

Next up is 1881.

This ship is sailing from Liverpool to New York City.

When it passes through the triangle,

the people on board say that they

came across a ghost ship with no one on board.

There are varying reports on exactly what happened,

but the people on board generally reported

that some of the crew decided to get on the ghost ship,

but then the ships were separated by a massive storm.

When they were reunited with the ghost ship the next day,

there was no trace of the crew.

This stuff is kind of spooky if true.

But wait, we're just getting started because

when you get to the 20th Century,

that's when the Bermuda Triangle,

as a mysterious body of water,

started to gain a lot of attention.

In February, 1918, one of the US Navy's largest ships,

the USS Cyclops, was carrying 300 men

from Salvador, Brazil to Baltimore, Maryland.

The route goes right through the Bermuda Triangle,

but the ship never arrived to Baltimore.

Despite being able to, The Cyclops

never sent out an SOS distress call.

No wreck was ever found.

As one article published

a few years after the disappearance said,

"Usually, a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver

identified as belonging to a lost ship

is picked up after a wreck,

but not so with the Cyclops."

"She just disappeared as though

some gigantic monster of the sea

had grabbed her, men and all,

and sent her into the depths of the ocean."

In an official statement, the US Navy said that, quote,

"The disappearance of the ship has been

one of the most baffling mysteries

in the annals of the Navy."

That's an official quote.

Again,

kind of spooky.

Oh, and the Navy boats kept disappearing.

In 1941, the USS Proteus,

carrying 58 passengers and a bunch of metal,

suddenly vanished within the Bermuda Triangle.

And then one month later, another Navy ship disappears.

61 people on board totally gone.

But it wasn't until 1945

when people started to get really suspicious.

This is when a bunch of World War II airplanes

were doing a three hour exercise over Grand Bahama Island,

flying out and then pivoting back to their airbase,

back in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

But these planes never returned

and the disappearances just kept happening.

A long haul flight with 25 people and six crew

disappeared in the triangle without a trace in 1948.

And a year later, it happened again

to another plane of the exact same model.

All in all, there have been over

70 mysterious disappearances here

in this little patch of ocean,

where all those years ago, Columbus noticed

something strange happening with his compass.

With time, more and more people started noticing.

One writer in the '50s said, quote,

"There have been other disappearances

in this backyard sea of ours;

and always the record,

when the account is finally closed,

has an ominous notation: 'No trace found.'"

And then in 1964, the term "Bermuda Triangle"

was actually coined in an article.

Vincent Gadace asserted that, quote,

"Sea distances are relatively short."

Referring to the Bermuda Triangle.

"And yet this relatively limited area

is the scene of disappearances that total

far beyond the laws of chance."

People wanted answers.

10 years later, this book came out.

The author goes deep and he makes the argument

that something is really happening in the Bermuda Triangle.

It's not just bad weather.

This mysterious patch of water

is actually a gateway to something much bigger.

And then he is not afraid to explore

some alternative theories about ancient civilizations

and energy that was left over from those civilizations

affecting this area.

It's magnets, it's crystals, it's worm holes,

it's the ripping of space time.

These forces connect us

to the physical potential of our universe.

All shown to us because of the

mysterious disappearances of the Bermuda Triangle.

No, no, no!

Come on, guys.

I hope no one was actually

following me down that rabbit hole because,

you can't read a book like this,

talk about a bunch of mysterious things,

and call that evidence.

That is not what this is.

I was really into this for a moment.

Actually, when I was going through all of the disappearances

until it started to become about freaking crystals

and alien life coming to save humans from nuclear fission.

We can't do this.

We can't present a handful of data points,

even if they're factually accurate,

separated by hundreds of years and call that proof

that this patch of ocean is cursed.

What blows my mind is that this book,

the one that really put the Bermuda Triangle on the map,

sold over 14 million copies worldwide.

It was translated into 22 languages,

despite being riddled with completely invalidating errors.

I mean, what?

Come on.

I'm actually not surprised.

I mean, look at us.

Look at what we're doing here.

We're sitting here eating this stuff up like it's ice cream.

People love this stuff.

Mysterious stories and finding connections

in observations that we can see and understand.

I know that at least for me,

no matter how data minded and objective I am,

I kind of get intoxicated by a good mysterious story.

Our brains are like built for this stuff.

Especially when the storyteller

throws in little embellishments like-

Despite being able to, The Cyclops never sent out

an SOS distress call.

This tendency is really concerning to me.

And honestly, more and more as I realize

how powerful of a tool storytelling is.

Especially visual storytelling,

where I can layer in the music and the visuals

to make your brain think that it is real.

Okay, wait a minute, you're asking,

"Is this a video about the Bermuda Triangle?"

"Or is this Johnny Harris's current soul searching

about factual accuracy and storytelling on the internet?"

It's both.

But let's keep going on this Bermuda Triangle story

because there actually is a very satisfying

evidence based answer

to what is really going on with all these disappearances.

Here we go.

(tense music)

There have been some serious scientific hypotheses

developed on what's going on here.

They range from things like,

the Bermuda Triangle having a disturbance in geomagnetism,

which throws off compasses and other navigational tools.

Remember, Columbus, creepy Chris?

Or methane blowouts, which is a real thing.

We have these huge deposits of like methane

under the ocean floor, and if these blow up,

you get this massive explosion,

and then a huge crater that just sucks down

anything that is floating on top of it.

That could easily explain it, right?

Okay, but then there's the plane disappearances.

Here's another more simple explanation, hurricanes.

The Bermuda Triangle is in the Caribbean,

which does seem to have an abnormal number

of high intensity storms.

That kind of makes sense.

And one popular theory is that these storms

can cause what are called rogue waves,

which are massive waves that reach a hundred feet or more.

Maybe it's those that lead to the disappearances.

See, this is making more sense.

You've got methane gas, geomagnetism,

tons of storms in the Caribbean.

It makes sense that this is a perilous place

for planes and boats.

These are scientific explanations

that validate the Bermuda Triangle.

We don't need Atlantis, and crystals, and aliens.

We have geomagnetism and weather systems.

Rational explanations for the Bermuda Triangle.

No, no, no, no!

Shine the light, folks

Do not fall for this, again.

No, another trap.

Me saying sciency things like

"geomagnetism" and "methane blowouts"

can sound like I'm presenting strong evidence to you,

but I'm not.

I'm saying words.

I'm speculating.

Okay, so will we ever get to the bottom of this?

Well, yes we can.

But not by listening to me tell you stories

about ghost ships and mysterious Navy disappearances,

or even 100 foot waves.

Instead, we need to approach this differently.

Humans have developed an amazing tool for seeing reality.

Instead of relying on our own observations,

which usually need to be couched as stories,

and that are limited by

how much we can hold in our brain at once.

Instead of this, we can collect hundreds, thousands,

or hundreds of thousands of observations about the world,

and they don't have to fit in our brains all at once

because we can record them over time,

and then process and aggregate them with math or maps.

And if you did that, you would see that,

of the tens of thousands of recorded

accidents or casualties at sea

recorded over the course of 20 years,

there wasn't anything out of the ordinary here.

It doesn't even make the top 10

most dangerous ocean regions in the world,

at least according to another analysis, another data set.

We wanted to make sure on this,

so we reached out to Lloyd's List,

which is a shipping publication

who graciously spent months aggregating data,

tons of data about marine casualties out to sea.

We found that 1.8% of all vessels everywhere in the world

have some casualty, including mysterious disappearances.

1.8%.

And that of the 8,634

boats that passed through the Bermuda Triangle,

there were only two casualties.

0.02% of the boats that passed through here had an accident.

90 times lower than the global average.

That was for 2021.

So yeah, that's the evidence

we should actually be looking at and talking about.

It's not as tantalizing as the stories told in this book

that sold 20 million copies.

But it's true.

It's what actually happened.

And the beautiful thing is,

you can then go and look at my sources,

look at the data sets that I used,

and you can interrogate them.

And you can come back and tell me that my data is weak

because of the way it was collected and what was left out.

That's called "discourse."

And it is the foundation

of how we know what we know about the world.

All of us need to be vigilant of this,

perhaps me more than anyone, I'm a storyteller.

But I also want to be a communicator

of true information about the world, to communicate to you.

And yeah, we'll definitely disagree

on what that information means,

and how important certain things are.

Interpretation, opinion, et cetera.

But I'm here to make a further commitment

to going the extra mile

to gather the best truth I can

to make sure that it's actually real.

So, thank you for being here.

For being a part of my discourse, my learning,

and to check me on this when I get loose.

And to make sure that together

we don't let the power of story

get in the way of the power of truth.

(low tempo music)

Hey, thanks for watching.

Something I didn't show in the video

was this model plane that Nick, our studio manager, made.

- [Nick] It's a TBM Avenger,

one of the Flight 19 planes.

- Nuances, man.

I really appreciate you being here.

It's wild to see this channel grow,

and even wilder to see the team behind it expand.

Like there's a lot of people behind the scenes.

If you want to know more about how we make these videos,

there is an entire universe behind the scenes

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And we make a behind the scenes vlog every month

that we publish for you to watch,

if you are a member of The Newsroom,

which is, effectively, access to scripts,

and interviews with experts that I do

that I just give you the full version of.

Custom tracks of music from our composer, Tom.

And this this BTS vlog.

So The Newsroom is what I'm calling our Patreon.

It's an extra video you get every month.

You also get to have an influence on what stories we do

by voting on polls

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If anything, your support will allow us

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Subscribe if you haven't already,

and I will see you in the next video.

"Several investigators of the Bermuda Triangle mystery

have suggested that alien intelligences

may be interested or even concerned

in the possibility that our development of

nuclear fission for warfare may be threatening

the existence of civilization on our planet.

As it may have previously destroyed

other civilizations on this and other planets."

"The time span of rational man on this planet

of the intelligence potential and comparable

to that of today may extend back 40 to 50,000 years."

Oh, this is good shit, dude.