The Truth About the Bermuda Triangle: Science vs. Mystery

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In this Nature Mysteries Minisode, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into one of Earth’s most famous unsolved legends: the Bermuda Triangle—also known as the Devil’s Triangle.

For over a century, this stretch of ocean between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico has been blamed for the mysterious disappearances of ships, planes, and the people aboard them. But is it really cursed—or just misunderstood?

🛩️ What really happened to Flight 19 in 1945?
 🌊 Could methane bubbles or rogue waves swallow ships whole?
 🧭 What’s up with those compasses that go haywire?
 🌪 And why the Bermuda Triangle might not be as dangerous as everyone thinks

From magnetic anomalies to human error (and a sprinkle of 90s X-Files nostalgia), this episode separates science from sea legends—because sometimes the truth is stranger than the conspiracy.

🎧 This is part of our Nature Mysteries series—short, weird, and full of scientific “wait, what?!” moments.

Transcript

Katy: [00:00:00] Well this is week two of our mini episodes where we're talking about just how we know stuff, but also we don't really know a whole lot of stuff still about Earth and general. So Laura talked about something in space, which I'm, I think that was a good division. Is your next one talking about something on earth.

yes.

My, the, my one that I'm talking about is something on earth. So I think I've said this before, that I hit a really hardcore XFiles phase when I was in middle school, and this was definitely one that was discussed on the XFiles. There was a whole episode about it. And it's the Perino triangle,

Laura: Ah, classic nature

Katy: right?

Yeah, cla

Laura: And we've even mentioned it in passing on

Katy: we have.

the 

Laura: Sharks one, 

Katy: a

Yeah. In talking about the eels and how we don't know really know what's going on 'cause that whole place, whatever what it's called, but that whole area where that we know that they mate is in the Triangle. Yeah. Alright. So when you think of mysterious places on earth, one name pops up again and [00:01:00] again, it's the Bermuda Triangle and it's not really like.

I don't know. It's not like a, something visible. It's just the triangle area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. That's it. It's about a half a million square miles of water, which is an area bigger than Texas, which if you've never been to Texas, that means nothing. If you live here, you know that you can drive from the north side of the state to the south and be driving for 10 hours, and you're still in Texas.

So it's, it's pretty darn big. So sailors and pilots have nicknamed at the Devil's Triangle, which actually existed no. Right, and that existed way, way longer than the term and the name Bermuda Triangle. So for over a century, it's been blamed for the disappearance of ships, planes, people that are on them.

The earliest reports go back to the early 19 hundreds, but the legend really took off in 1945 when Flight 19. A squadron of five US Navy planes vanished during a training mission.

Laura: Yeah, and [00:02:00] that's like a big, I mean like that's military

Katy: Yeah, and they just poof gone. They radioed in confusing messages about faulty compasses and then nothing a rescue plane sent after them also disappeared. That story set the stage for decades of speculation. Um, what was it about this patch of ocean that seemed to swallow? Just anything and everything whole.

And it wasn't until, like I said, 1964, that we actually coined the name Bermuda Triangle. So yes, like a lot disappears here. But to put this in kind of a perspective, actual records indicate that around 50 ships have disappeared in 20 planes.

Laura: That's a lot.

Katy: well, it, it, it is, but also whenever you consider the number of planes and everything and ships that actually go through here on a daily basis,

Laura: that's true. That's true.

Katy: it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a whole lot here.

So, um. [00:03:00] So this area though, with disappearances is still more concentrated as far as disappearances goes. Still a more concentrated area than any other area, the Atlantic. But oddly enough, it's not like hundreds and hundreds of what I think the Bermuda Triangle gets like a wrap for. Is that like, oh, hundreds and hundreds of things

Laura: Yeah, right. Or like you aren't guaranteed to go missing 

Katy: if you happen to yeah. It's like a horrible place to go through. So, like I said, this area is a busy shipping corridor for sure, but a study conducted by the by WWF where Wildlife Federation, which I thought was a weird one to 

Laura: con. 

Katy: Yeah. Well,

Laura: Aor,

Katy: what is she even doing back there? Oh, she's mama toy.

Laura: Okay, go for it.

Katy: Is she still back there?

Laura: Mm-hmm.

Katy: Okay. Okay. Um, [00:04:00] but yeah, so it was WWF, they conducted a study in 2013 that found that this area wasn't even on the top 10 list of most dangerous bodies of water on the planet. So. Because again, most of the ones that are like the most dangerous North Sea, like that kind of stuff, 

Laura: you know Yeah. Like shipwrecking

Katy: Yeah. This is like 50 and 20 go missing, you know, objects are missing. So the be beta triangle definitely isn't just some quiet forgotten corner of the sea. It is one of the biggest, like I said, shipping and flight corridors in the world. 'cause you, you picture how big it is, Bermuda, Miami, like it, it's a huge area.

Laura: to visit 

Katy: the Caribbean. 

Laura: I mean, like it's

Katy: Yeah, just flying back and forth, going shipping quarter, it, it's huge. Thousands of vessels pass through every year, so maybe it's not surprising that accidents happen, but still it's weird that it's like a complete disappearance in these areas, you know what I mean? Like other ones, we at least, like, there's been some huge, unfortunately some, you know, major plane [00:05:00] crashes in the ocean and then we, we see like, we don't see any wreckage for months and months and months, sometimes years after.

You know, and a lot of these ones that that happened that were recorded have happened a long time ago where we're not gonna have people like with the data and like QR codes on all the pieces and parts of the plane and stuff like that. But, so anyway, so let's dive into the mystery real quick. So what actually happens here?

All right. Reports tend to show a few different patterns, vessels disappearing without sending distress calls. So they either just completely. Go MIA, um, as if whatever happened was like too sudden to react to compasses and instruments behaving erratically like the one in 1945. They actually sent the distress call saying like their compasses and things were going crazy and they didn't know what was going on.

Laura: But it's not like that with everybody's instruments, right? But just like for people that have had weird stuff happen, it's not like every instrument that goes through here has that.

Katy: Correct? Correct. Correct. Yeah, it's just like [00:06:00] a lot of the ones that have disappeared have the ones that could send out a distress signal, have said like, especially the one in 1945 with the planes where like, Hey, everything's going crazy. I don't know what's going on. Um, but even modern, uh, radar, sonar and GPS, some wrecks in this region are, are just never found, like I said, like no debris, no oil slicks, nothing at all.

So it's kind of weird. And it, and it's not like, like I said, it's not like this is the only place that ships are planes vanish. Oceans are dangerous anywhere. I mean, you're flying, you're traveling over absolutely nothing for hours and hours on end. But the Bermuda Triangle adds another layer of just like complexity and just like, Hey, this is odd that it keeps happening here.

So what are some theories that go on? So I think the more popular one. Um, whenever I was a kid that was like, oh my gosh. I think this is what's happening that scientists came out with was the methane hydrates. So under the sea floor in this region, there are deposits of [00:07:00] methane dehydrates, which is basically frozen methane gas trapped in sediments.

If those suddenly rupture bubbles of gas can shoot the water, you know, dropping its density, a ship floating on water of normal density suddenly finds itself floating on like a, like a froth, you know what I mean? Like a from a beer or something. And it would sink almost instantly. And this could explain the sudden disappearance without the stress calls.

'cause you're just like bobbing along and you're playing all of a sudden just boom, and you're just gone, which would be. Terrifying. 'cause you wouldn't have any time to react to, to anything. You know what I mean? Nothing.

Laura: float anymore.

Katy: Yeah. Yeah. It just gone. Just poof. Gone to the floor. Another theory is rogue waves. So the Bermuda Triangle sits in a storm prone part of the Atlantic where multiple weather systems collide.

Under the right conditions, waves can stack together into a single monster, what they call rogue wave, which is over hundred feet tall.

Laura: like my nightmare.

Katy: No. Right. [00:08:00] Like you see those, uh, the videos of like the North Sea and everything. I'm just like,

Laura: Never in a million years that movie, the Perfect Storm, that would gimme, that like gives me a panic attack. Even like that's the limit. Like that's

Katy: couldn't. Yeah, I, I,

Laura: the ocean. You're already in the middle of nowhere. I'm not in an element I'm very in. And then like you see that, I'd be we are going to die.

Katy: but, but also, okay. It's 2025, right?

Laura: Yeah.

Katy: There is no reason for me to be in that situation,

Yeah.

wherever I'm going, wherever I need to see, like there's another alternative mode to get there, rather than being on a ship with a hundred foot waves, like there's a thousand other ways I can do whatever I need to do to get to the end desk.

Like there is zero reason for me to go through that. So that's how I look at it as like I'm never gonna. See that because there's, there's no, there's no reason for me to see it. Um, so yeah, so rogue waves, and, and [00:09:00] again, they're not like sailors tall tails. These, I mean, have been shown on satellites and by like the buoys that they have in the oceans that record like heights.

Um, and so obviously slamming one of those into a ship would explain like, oh my gosh, why they got hit. But typically they, nowadays they see like these storm fronts coming and things like that. Um.

Laura: but not that 

Katy: unexpected.

whenever there's like storms coming. So one of the weird ones though, and this what definitely at least explains part of what happened in 1945, um, magnetic anomalies.

So the Bermuda Triangle is one of the few places on earth where true north, which is the geographic North Pole, and a magnetic north, the magnetic pole compasses. Point two, actually a line, and this is called the Agno Ag. Agno line. So this means that compasses here can point correctly, but it still confuses navigators.

So if you think of like a [00:10:00] plane in 1945, it was very, very, very manual systems. You know what I mean? It wasn't satellites, nothing like how we have today. It was very manual. So them calling and being like their, their compasses are gone. All weird and stuff like that? Yes, because if you have two separate systems and you're.

Your math and everything to work. Those two systems are taking into consideration two different points and now all of a sudden it's one, yeah, it's gonna throw your stuff off. So that, that would make sense, but that also means that compass is here point correctly, but can still, like I said, confuse navigators, especially before GPS.

Um, and then we already kind of hit on this one a little bit, uh, just the extreme weather. Weather, um, because of. Like just storms and all those systems. This is Hurricane Alley. And again, before we had all the technology that we have, I mean, you would never know that a hurricane, you know, was coming to, you'd be like, oh, look at the [00:11:00] skies.

That looks like bad weather. You wouldn't know that A to, you know, a hurricane is coming at you. So where does all this stand? Many disappearances in the beauty meter triangle have been explained with good old fashioned science. Sip shank in ships, sank in storms, you know that was one.

Laura: Just couldn't call for help 'cause they had no radio like.

Katy: or pilots ran out of fuel 'cause they miscalculated, they got like disoriented because of the navigation stuff.

I mean, human errors account for more than a few tragedies of, of course. And statistically, as far as proportions go, the triangle doesn't actually have. More accidents than any other heavily traveled part of the ocean. It just seems like it has a lot 'cause of the high amount that is going through there.

So of course, like the thousands and thousands, you know, of things that go through there every month. Like that's not gonna make the news,

Laura: Well, and right. Like how much in modernity is actually happening? Like how many have [00:12:00] gone missing in the last 50 years? Probably a lot less than in the beginning all these, yeah,

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: Like we can explain these disappearances now.

Katy: absolutely. And so the X-Files episode was, they were on a, there was a ship that went missing, so they went on the, on a ship to go find it. And then it's like they time traveled back to whenever that ship was, was missing in like the forties or something like that.

Laura: Yeah, man. I watched like a really disturbing red box movie back in college about the Bermuda Triangle. was called like the Devil. It might've been called the

Katy: it, I wouldn't, yeah, probably.

Laura: And it was like not a good movie, but like one of those movies where afterwards I was like, oh, I don't like this at all. Like I can, like basically this girl wakes up on a cruise ship and there's nobody on it but her and then horrible things keep happening and she keeps dying

Katy: Oh,

Laura: and then coming back of this weird time loop here in the Bermuda Triangle.

Horrible, ho, horrifying like,

Katy: that's how like the X-Files [00:13:00] episode was, it was like all the people that they knew were on the ship, but it was like them in 1947 if they existed in, back in like the forties or whatever. So it was like, it was just, it was just like a, a time loop thing. And they were stuck in like a, a, a weird time loop.

Laura: woo. That's horrible. 

Katy: Yeah.

Right. So anyway, so yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff, like we said, can be explained now. Um, it definitely doesn't happen like as much. And again, it, it's something that like we would come across as kids in the nineties and like your, not like, like your dk and y books and stuff, like, that'd be like Bermuda Triangle Mysteries, but you don't really see it anymore.

And it, it is because it's kind of like.

Laura: talk about it as much.

Katy: Yeah. 'cause it is like, yeah, technology is advanced, you know, so our ships and everything, they rely on satellites, not just like earth mag, you know, magnets and things to able to nav navigate. So, so things are a little bit different. And again, understanding hay, the, just the logic behind the proportions of it.[00:14:00] 

Um, but yeah, so Bermuda Triangle still, I'm still always gonna be an X-Files kid. Um, still love the X-Files.

Laura: Still should be called the Devil's Triangle. It's just a way cooler

Katy: Yeah. Way cooler. Way more ominous too. I

And 

Laura: like also the other parts of the triangle that aren't Bermuda.

No, you're like,

Katy: right. 

Laura: Yeah.

just about Bermuda.

Katy: it starts at Miami and I think a lot, I think was missed by a lot of people growing up is like, that's like right off like Yeah, right off the coast and that's like a huge like heavy area of, of ports and planes and stuff.

So yeah. Bermuda Triangle.

Cool.

All right guys. Uh, that is our second mini episode. Again, we have two more left and then we will be starting season 13. So make sure you go check us out on social media, wildly Curious podcast, and we will talk to you next week.

Laura: see ya