Haunted Cosmos - The Bermuda Triangle

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben continue Season Two by exploring the many stories of mystery and woe surrounding the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Join us on this epic voyage in a dark place of the world.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode of Haunted Cosmos is sponsored by our friends at The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, great project hosted by Matt Whitman.  Visit them at www.thetmbh.com online.This episode is also sponsored by Private Family Banking Partners. Email them at:  [e-mail] — For a free book go to: www.protectyourmoneynow.net —or if you want to make an appointment to talk to a wealth advisor click on the calendar link here: https://calendly.com/familybankingnow/30min.This episode is also sponsored by Bible Discovery Television. Check them out at their website here.This episode is also sponsored by TinyBibles.com. Visit their website here and get a great gift for yourself, your kids, your pastor, or any other loved one!Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Right Response Ministries, 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, Bible Discovery TV, private family banking, tinybibles.com, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that patrons get early access to ad-free main episodes, as well as an exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome? Support the show today and get these benefits and more. And now on with the show. On December 5, 1945, just three months after the close of World War II, a group of Navy and

Marine pilots geared up for a routine training flight. The instructor and supervisor of the day, Lieutenant Carroll Taylor, had logged over 2,500 flight hours in the Grumman TBF Avenger planes. They would be flying that day. He was beginning to feel as at home in the clouds as he did on the dirt. Confident, jovial, competent. He was the archetypal Navy pilot. The other pilots were fairly.

new to this particular aircraft, but not to flying in general. Each of them had at least 300 flight hours logged in all sorts of different conditions. But as luck would have it, they wouldn't have to worry about any adverse conditions today. The weather was favorable in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the base they'd be taking off from and returning to. And that same report was given for all the airspace along the eastern coast of Florida for that day, all the way up to where it meets with Georgia. It was shaping up to be a great day of flying. The greenhorns would get some more hours under their belts while Lieutenant Taylor would supervise and do what he loved most, soar across the vast open sky. But in this part of the world, conditions can rapidly change,

and not always for the better. What everyone thought would be a pleasant day on the job, soon devolved into one of the largest air and sea searches in world history. This is the story of Flight 19. The training flight was specifically a navigation exercise. The goal was to teach the pilots and principles of something called dead reckoning, which is determining one's location by noting the relative distance traveled from some fixed landmark over a given period of time. This may seem a bit crazy. Imagine doing something like this over large and featureless stretches of the sea, but these guys were experienced and the coast of Florida is peppered with well-known and recognizable islands and keys. They'd be fine. Plus if force comes to worse,

they'd still have their compasses with them. The only thing that was missing from the aircraft were the clocks. They didn't have any onboard clocks, but again, they'd be fine. They all had watches on their wrists. So the boys took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida and started out by flying due east into the Atlantic Ocean for 64 miles until they reached their first landmark. Hens and chickens shoals. Here they practice some bombing exercises before continuing east another 77 miles. This is where the dead reckoning comes in. They didn't have a landmark to watch out for this time. Instead, they had to use their position as it related to the shoals they had just left behind to approximate when 77 miles had been reached, at which point they'd turn 90 degrees due north and fly over the Grand

Bahama Island before turning around and heading home. Well, they certainly made the turn north, but this is where things start getting a little fuzzy. Radio transmissions between crew members and the flight hardly shed any light on what happened here, but of course they're still worth hearing. At some point, one of the trainees, pilot named Powers, got a message from one of his other flight members, who it was, we don't know. The other pilot asked Powers for his compass reading, to which Powers replied, I don't know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn. This transmission was picked up by another pilot who was supervising the same mission, but for a different group of trainees behind Flight 19. Lieutenant Cox was his name. He was concerned by what he heard,

he chimed in with a reply. This is Ft-7-4. Plain or Boat with Call Sign Powers, please identify yourself so someone can help you. A few moments passed before some other members of Flight 19 replied to Cox asking for some suggestions. Cox couldn't help them unless he knew who they were, even what they were, planes or boats.

He replied asking them to identify again before Lieutenant Taylor, again Flight 19's instructor, obliged Cox and let him know who they were. Both my compasses are out and I'm trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I'm over land, but it's broken. I'm sure I'm in the keys, but I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale. Wait, what? Okay, in case you don't know why this is insanely weird, let's have a little geography lesson. Imagine you're looking at a map of the United States. We all know where Florida is down in the far southeast corner, America's little kickstand.

well, this flight was supposed to only be flying on the eastern side of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean only. But Taylor is now saying that he's sure he's in the Keys, and he means the Florida Keys, a chain of small islands extending south and west off of Florida's southernmost tip. This is hundreds of miles away from where he was meant to be, from where he was just not less than 40 minutes before. There's no way, no way at all, that a point. lane of that size, with its speed and fuel capacity, to have made the flight over to the Florida Keys in 40 minutes. There's just no way. Despite this completely incorrect assessment of his own position, an assessment that the other pilots did not protest, Taylor was absolutely certain that he

was somewhere over the Florida Keys flying in the Gulf of Mexico and needed to turn east and north if he wanted to get back home. But the opposite was true. Taylor needed to turn his people south west to reach land, but he didn't. He and all of his pilots continued going northeast deeper and deeper into the Atlantic, certain that they must be right. By the way, we know they did this because about two and a half hours into this debacle, the flight's position was triangulated by the base nearby. The triangulation confirmed that they were incredibly far off course to the north and slightly east. After repeatedly being told the switch to a cleaner search and rescue frequency on the radio, and repeatedly ignoring the request,

Taylor eventually replied to the request with the mysterious phrase, I cannot switch frequencies. I must keep my planes intact. Eventually, someone in the crew noticed they had gone wrong. We don't know who it was, and we don't know how they figured it out, given the total confusion of the whole group. But sometime into the trouble, one of the flight members transmitted, If we could just fly west, we would get home. Head west. Taylor, who was either coming to grips with the truth himself or was just completely out of ideas and willing to try anything, eventually acquiesced and commanded the flight to change course to do West, but it was too late at this point.

Nothing could be done now. The fuel reserves were too low. The flight was going to go down in the ocean, and nobody knew exactly where it was. All search and rescue would have is a triangulated position from some time ago that gave them about a 50-month-year. mile radius out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to search. Taylor's last transmission was received at 6.20 p.m. All planes close up tight. We'll have to ditch unless landfall. When the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together. What followed was, as we said before, one of the largest sea and air searches in world history, and nothing was ever recovered. No wreckage, no debris, and certainly no

bodies were ever found. Eventually, the Navy would conclude that Taylor wasn't actually at fault, assuming his compass really had started acting up. They attribute the cause of everything to that favorite of government categories, unknown. Had Flight 19 been where Taylor was so sure they were, he would have reached land within 20 minutes of the northeast bearing he was on. And he would have known this. And yet, that time, 20 minutes, came and went, with seemingly no effect on Taylor's certainty and confidence. His crew, though they were trainees, weren't stupid people. And they also didn't give any indication of having a right idea as to where they were, at least not until one of them recommended turning west. But that was hours into the ordeal.

What happened to these men? What strange forces could spin a compass, confuse an experienced pilot, and swallow ships and planes like a hungry kraken? What lurks in the air and beneath the the waves of the Bermuda Triangle. The Bermuda Triangle has been an area of at least some mystery for centuries now. As he sailed to the west, Columbus reported seeing balls of light falling from the sky into the sea in front of him. He said some of them didn't fall, some of them just hovered there as if waiting for him. He even reported anomalous compass readings the closer he got to the shores of the new world. But the modern legend of the Bermuda Triangle, as we know it now, began a little later, late 19th century, early 20th century, as reports of maritime incidents and

disappearances with little or no explanation or resolution began to pile up in the area. The story you just heard, the strange case of Flight 19 would bring the public eye onto this weird place. After this, the triangle gained its now solidified reputation for death, disaster, and despair. Many even go so far as to call it the devil's triangle. stretching from the eastern coast of Florida up to the small island of Bermuda and back down all the way to Puerto Rico, an area of ocean about one and a half million square miles, the triangle remains one of the world's greatest mysteries and shared fears.

What is it? Is it anything at all? Or is the sea simply a dangerous place for those who dare to sail on its depths or even fly over its waters? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we dive into the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Haunted Cosmo, Season 2, Episode 2.

So glad to be here. Which is pretty fun. I'm very glad to be here. Brian, do you have anything really special that you want to say to the people? I just want to say thank you all for listening, for supporting the show. Thanks to all of the great companies that have jumped in and sponsored the show and hope you guys continue to support them. We've heard great feedback from the way you guys are supporting those sponsors. are all great Christian businesses and we'd encourage you guys to definitely check them out.

That helps us and it helps them. Let's build Christenum. Yeah. Let's build Christendom. Let's do it. And let's make Christendom weird again. Let's make Christendom strange. Yeah. And let's make Christendom slightly unhinged. Haunted Cosmos, the world is not just stuff. And let's make Christenum slightly weird again. Just slightly on hint. I mean, compared to the materialists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying. Losers. But compared to like, but compared to like some new ageers, maybe a little bit more. Yes.

Real men. Yes. And, man, I am, I'm excited for this episode because I think we've talked about this a little bit, but the Bermuda Triangle has to be one of those strange mysteries that I think everybody who is in that Gen X or millennial generation especially, we grew up with this being one of the first weird things that you remember hearing about. Yeah, 100%. Like Discovery Channel was laced with Bermuda Triangle documentaries.

All of them the exact same. They were all the same format. But they were so good. And Zoomers now, they grew up with like Reddit and they grew up with Wendigo and Slender Man. Like lots of other creepy stuff, Black Eyed Kids. Actually, we'll get to it, guys.

Actually, way creepier. Way creepier stuff. It was at more innocent time. We had like cheesy ghost hunting shows. Yeah. And the Bermuda Triangle. And Shark Week was at its peak. Shark Week.

Shark Week was king of summer. Was Guy Fierry's Chef's Kiss. Okay. So let's talk about this. We're talking about Bermuda Triangle. Some people might put this into a category similar to like Point Pleasant West Virginia, Skinawock a Ranch and say, is this a cursed area or is it a natural phenomena? What are your thoughts? What kind of categories are you thinking through in this place? Yeah. So my thoughts on the Bermuda Triangle has, they really haven't changed since I was first introduced to it. Even as a kid, I was like, this is amazing. these stories are so cool. Like, this is so weird. Yeah.

But I was never like, oh, there's a sea monster killing boats and somehow reaching up and getting planes. Yeah. There isn't like, I don't know, a big massive whirlpool that's swallowing vessels. I never really thought it was supernatural. I think that it's still a mystery. Yeah. But I actually think it's one that we can solve. So I'm kind of showing my hand early.

Yeah. And saying that I do think that it's a mystery, but I do think that it's one that's like, not out of the realm of our understanding. Yeah. What about you? Well, you put this in the notes, but it really captured my thoughts exactly that Proverbs 252 is kind of the life verse of this show, you might say. It's the verse that if we were youth group kids in like the early 2000s, we would have got tattooed in Hebrew for no reason at all. I'm still going to do it.

Somewhere dumb. I'm going to, hey, if we get to a thousand, when we get to a thousand patrons, he will not do this. This is satire. He will not do this. No, that verse that it's the glory of God to conceal a thing. It's the glory of kings to search a thing out. And that doesn't just go, I know we're haunted cosmos. We've talked a lot about what the demons are up to.

And maybe there's some demons in the Bermuda Triangle. We'll get there. Yeah. But there are also natural mysteries that are fascinating. Yeah. And I think are also clearly part of the glory that God is hidden in the world to go and search out. Yes. Yes.

So I do lean that way as well. I think that there's some things that. what makes me really continue to be interested in that will unfold through this show, especially by the end of this episode, I think, are some natural phenomena that I think have compelling witnesses and evidence for that are currently beyond our understanding of the natural world. Yeah, we're going to end this episode with one of the weirdest stories that I've ever heard. Yeah, and it's one of the rare Bermuda Triangle stories where we have a living eyewitnesses.

Yeah, yeah. survived. Yeah, so I'll put that Easter egg in early. It's one of the craziest things I've ever heard and yet I don't think there's anything supernatural about it. But it's still just as strange. And it really opens up a window for the show that I want us to be able to tap into.

Like in light of Proverbs 252, I don't think that the people like us that are interested in these sorts of things really have to restrict themselves to supernatural all the time. In fact, you shouldn't. Right, you shouldn't. That would be bad. That would be an over-emphasis on something.

Like, why did the, why did everything, all the plates start rattling in my cupboard? It's a poltergeist. Well, no, it's an earthquake. There was a train passing. Everyone's passing. Everyone's plates were rattling. So in this episode, we're going to be telling you guys some stories from the Bermuda Triangle, a lot of different phenomena that has happened. Some of it with, you know, very clearly documented, like Flight 19 is very well documented.

This happened. We know it happened. And we're not sure exactly what took place at every detail. but this isn't like a legend, all the way through to some stories that are, especially the older ones, that where the documentation is a little fuzzier and it's sometimes hard to trace down, chase down all the primary sources and things like that. We're going to tell you some stories about that. We're going to discuss these stories and talk about maybe what's going on in them.

But before we do that, it might be a good idea to just explain where is the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's really important to note. So we kind of gave some reference points for it in the cold open. East Coast of Florida, Island of Bermuda, and then down to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico. The thing is, is that no one can really agree on the actual boundaries. Yeah.

It's not like there's a fence, you know, and once you cross it, you're suddenly in danger. Is it is it? Well, what are we talking about here? I think it actually, it would actually be close to equilateral. Okay, it's an equilateral. If it was those, which, you know, people are like, oh my gosh, triangles. Are triangles evil then? I think they are.

Okay. No, I'm kidding. I actually think they can. can be. Okay. I think it's much harder to make squares evil than it is triangles. I'll put it that way. If you're watching this on YouTube, you see me looking at the camera. Well, no, think of the medieval, just, all right, this is an... Here we go. Think of the medieval conception of the triad where, you know, you have the Holy Trinity. All right. And the idea of this Holy Trinity or this good trinity is all laced throughout nature. Like things and threes are oftentimes very good and beautiful.

But then you also have the corruption of that where you do have a lot of unholy trinities, so to speak. And I think that triangles can be both. All right. All right. And that's why I say that it's harder to make a square evil than it is a triangle. That is. That is an interesting take. It's so true.

On shapes. Which this episode is brought to you by shapes. Geometry. By geometry. Yeah. No. So some people think that it's, you know, one and a half million square miles. this massive area. Some people think that it's half that size.

And others think that it's actually way, way bigger than that, like three million square miles. So really, like I said, it's not as simple as just roping off a section of ocean and calling it the devil's triangle. The point is, is that it's off the east coast of the U.S., in the southern part of the U.S., in the Atlantic, and that's kind of it. Yeah. Like you even have reports of people sailing from London to New York, and they're seeing really weird stuff. or weird stuff is happening and people are attributing that to Bermuda Triangle activity. That's nowhere close to the area that I'm describing. Right.

So the basic idea is that is there something happening within the Atlantic Ocean, especially in the southern portion of it and to the western side of the ocean that's causing these sort of weird disappearances? So think of it more in terms of a category. Like there are attributes of events that would make people label it a Bermuda Triangle disappearance. And geography is just one of those attributes. And it would also, things like disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances without ever finding a trace.

No trace of any wreckage. Planes, wreckage, something floating. Yeah. If they have any records, like, you know, we heard that they had radio transmission or if they have diaries from sailors, they're, they usually express confusion. Like there's some level of confusion. Or it's completely normal and everything just goes crazy immediately. Everything disappears with no distress call whatsoever. Right.

That's another. And what's somewhat strange about that is that if you think about, we're going to talk about some sailing ships and things like that, think about a sailing ship and all the stuff on it and that it's made out of. A lot of that stuff will float and the debris and wreckage is identifiable to the vessel and would often, in many cases, end up on the shore somewhere with the currents. and the tides and bringing stuff in and leaving it on shore. That often happens.

Yeah. With Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, wasn't there some wreckage that was... They think that they saw some wreckage. Yeah. So Malaysia 330 is one of those lost flights. It completely disappeared from radar. They have no idea where it went. And that was in the Indian Ocean.

So that's a Bermuda Triangle-type disappearance that's completely removed from the Bermuda Triangle. This is part of why I don't think. think it's as simple as just like some geographical anomaly like, say, Skinwalker Ranch. Yeah. I think that it may be something a little bit more natural. Malaysian flight 370, I'm just looking at a little, like, summary of it to refresh my memory. It was 2014 when it disappeared. It was a big overwater flight.

And the first piece of debris was not found until July 29, 2015. And it was the right wing flapperon was discovered on a beach on the French island of reunion. Nice. About 3,700 kilometers, which is how many school buses is that? That's how many dogs? 2,300 miles west of the Indian Ocean area that was being searched by the Australian authorities for this craft.

And then over the next year and a half, 26 more pieces of debris were found on the shores of Tanzania and Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Morat, I don't even know this place. Moritius. Another place. Maritius. So 27 pieces. were positively identified as coming from flight 317.

And then 17 were thought likely to come from the plane. And the only point I'm trying to make here is that I know it, like the ocean's very big and it's easy to lose stuff there. But when something like a plane goes down or when a ship goes down, it's not uncommon to be able to eventually say this came from this vessel. And especially, so take Flight 19, for example. Yeah. You're, first of all, it's actually difficult to sink a plane or a ship.

It's not the easiest thing. You can't just, like, shoot a BB gun at a boat and then it'll sink. It's really not that they're made to actually float. I don't know if you know this. Are you kidding me? Boats and planes are made to float. So it's actually difficult to sink them. And when you're only in Flight 19's case, you're not even 200 miles off the coast.

And that's the far estimation. You're not even too. And nothing washes up on shore? Huge search. Yeah. Huge search. Let's talk a little bit more about flight 19 because this one's really fascinating to me for a couple reasons.

Number one, I think the naturalist explanation, purely naturalistic is that human error. Yeah. Pilot error. Taylor who's leading the flight makes a mistake, navigational error. Let's say his compass broke or somebody, people make mistakes. Someone didn't log the time properly, thought they were supposed to be. And they didn't. And then everybody else just assumed that things were normal.

And it's like, because dead reckoning, it's like, okay, we've been flying at this airspeed on this heading for 17 minutes. That means we've gone 77 miles or however long. So now we need to execute a turn to this bearing. That's dead reckoning. I mean, that's what the exercise was. So you could see how they might make a mistake. And especially if the leader makes a mistake, then all of a sudden everybody is in trouble. because it's really difficult once you've introduced an error into that series of equations to recover.

Yeah. But what's straight, so the totally natural is that they made a mistake, something happened, they ended up going the wrong way, and they just went down the ocean, never found the parts. Yeah. But what's difficult about that explanation, there's a couple things. The first is that with how experienced the flight leader was, it should, It should have been the most obvious, like as obvious as where is the sun going to come up tomorrow? Yeah.

For him to know that they needed to fly west to get home. He should not have thought that he was in the Florida Key. Picture America, and I know we're using cardinal directions. Some people aren't like as natural with that. You know, Canada's north, south is going to leave the continent. Mexico. To Mexico. If you go east, you're leaving out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Yeah. And there's nothing there for a really long distance. You'll eventually hit Liberia. Yeah, it's like thousands of miles. So it's pretty obvious to anybody flying in at a Florida Lauderdale going east that the way to get back is to go west. Right. It's like, that's obvious. And the thing is, like, we know that they were going east.

We know that. We know that they went to the chicken and hens sholes or whatever it is. We know that they were basically due south of the big Bahama Island, which is not far east of Florida. It's like, and somehow, super obvious. Some minutes later, after radio silence, this guy, Lieutenant Taylor, is certain. 100%.

Betts his life, literally, that he's over the Florida Keys. It needs to go west. To get home. And it was 40 minutes of a gap where he was headed to the Bahama Island, and then 40 minutes later, he thinks he's over the Florida Keys and needs to go northeast. Yeah. And you cannot make that flight in 40 minutes.

No. It doesn't make anything. sense. Part of it too is that in this area there are lots of examples or witnesses who say that their compasses begin to do really strange things.

Think of Skinwalker Ranch in part three particularly where we were looking at a lot of the GPS anomaly that they experienced. This is another example, a modern example with much more modern technology. Global positioning satellites and systems are very accurate, often like to the meter. And

yet again and again on Skinwalker Ranch, as investigators would fly drones with advanced GPS tracking data to do mapping of the terrain and things like that, their GPS data would all of a sudden just be corrupted to where it would say like the drone was flying a thousand feet underground. There was an episode that actually of the show on Skinwalker Ranch that aired after we recorded Part 3, where they, the drone said that, oh, no, you know what, this is. actually another, this is the same crew that was investigating another location

in a show called Beyond Skin Wall Walsh. Anyway, it was hilarious. They were in the Western United States. I think it was around Nevada by the Nevada test site. There's this ranch. Strange Ranch, another one. And they're doing an experiment with a drone

that has GPS on it. And when they go to track the data, the drones said that they were operating near Cuba in the Bermuda Triangle. Ooh, nice. Okay. Nice.

Like, wow. My whole opinion just changed. Okay, like the GPS date. And I'm like, did the Nevada tap, did the NSA to just troll them? Yeah. Said, oh, you guys are trying to find spooky stuff. Your drone was flying in the Bermuda Triangle. Like, but that was what, in the GPS data was totally coherent.

It just thought it was flying in the Bermuda Triangle. One of the things that happened in Skinwalker Ranch, and this is actually after we recorded, is they had this guy come on who was, an investigator for the Nids team. And he was particularly a catalyst for weird stuff on the ranch. Yeah. And so they brought him on and they were like, we're going to use you as a guinea pig.

So they take him on this route and their GPS tracking. And it's nothing weird. They're just driving around the ranch. Like nothing crazy is going on. And then when they come back, he leaves, he goes back home, and they just do the same route again. And they compare the two. When they had him in the car,

there was this big gap in the GPS. data on a stretch of road. They were like, where is this data or whatever? And then you get that great, that great shot, man, of Eric. He like shifts the, he shifts the map up so that it like flips. And all of that data was underground. It was on the moon. It was where they supposedly landed on the moon.

No, I'm just getting that to happen. Yeah, definitely. No, it was all underground. Yeah. So these GPS anomalies are relatively frequent, on that location. And they're not relatively frequent. I know.

But I mean, yeah, in certain areas of the world, they're relatively frequent. And so you're left kind of being like, what the heck? Yeah. And this brings me, so back to Flight 19 and the point that's connecting here with Skinwalker Ranch is that I do believe that there are areas where there are physical characteristics of the area that interfere strongly with technological devices that we're using. Yeah. We know this is true. I mean, like, you have on charts, on aeronautical charts where, you know, people are flying over. Basically, there are some places where on the chart it says, just be careful.

Yeah, yeah. There's magnetic interference here. Yeah, it's like a dead zone. It does weird things. Or be careful, people have reported this phenomenon with their instrumentation. So, Flight 19, I think one interesting theory about what might have happened is that they experienced, some kind of interference, some kind of magnetic anomaly or electrical anomaly that confused them enough that by the time they had figured out that they were being confused, they had no idea

where they were. Yeah. Now, there's another phenomena that I think that we're going to talk about in the Bermuda triangle that might even account for some of the confusion about where they were. Right, right. Because that's the thing that gets me is you can have your compass spin. around or whatever, but you're not just going to forget that you were literally just over the Big Bahama Island.

Well, yeah, it's like, it's hard for people who aren't familiar with, like, this world, to understand how weird that would be. It would be like if you were driving on I-80, on 89, Highway 89 here in Utah, and you're heading, you know, from Layton to up towards Ogden. Which is just a short drive. You're just going up north. And you realized that you're, you're, you're. sphinometer wasn't working properly.

Like, you knew you were going 60 miles an hour. Everyone's going 60 next to you. And it says you're going 20. Yeah. You would not all of a sudden think that you were on I-15 South in Salt Lake City. Yeah. Headed towards. You just wouldn't think that.

Like, even a 16-year-old driver wouldn't think that. So it's really confusing. And it adds in this element of, is there something here that caused mental manipulation? Right. All the way up to and including, now everybody, buckle up. Are we all buckled up?

All the way up to including time shifts. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Portals. This is so much more tame than I thought. Portals? Yeah, there can be portals. You know, like, what if they experienced some kind of seemingly impossible

translocation? Yeah. Back and forth. I don't know. Ben, I don't know. Yeah, Brian is talking about teleportation back to a place and then immediately back. What if a storm swirled around and it translocated them to the Florida Keys? No, I don't actually think that's what happened.

We will, we're going to talk more about that kind of thing later in the show. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm getting out of us. No, no, no, you're not getting ahead. I'm just saying, for now I'll let that lie because I have thoughts. The reason I'm saying this is I have thoughts. But here's the thing.

I don't want to underplay the variable of like group think. in this type of situation? Because you have a higher up in the military and then you have his subordinates. And look, this is, this happens all the time. Oh, yeah. If you're higher up, think something

and it's actually wrong. It's going to take the subordinates a while to say, hey, you know what? I, like respectfully, sir. I don't, but there's two things that I don't like about just explaining it away with that. One, actually three things.

One, it doesn't explain Taylor's confusion. Like, why did the guy get confused? And why was he so wrong? Two, the flight was supposed, if Taylor was right and he had to fly northeast, it would have taken less than 20 minutes to get to land. Yeah. And he would have known that if he was over the keys.

Yeah. So why would the guys wait two and a half hours to say something? They also would have known that it would have taken less than half an hour. Yeah. And then the third thing I can't remember. The third thing, though, it was going to be the best thing. The third thing was, oh, also, Taylor in all the accounts, he doesn't seem like that kind of guy.

No. Where if a subordinate would have respectfully questioned, even like he was training, they're supposed to be learning. So if one of them said like, oh, I thought we were going this way, why are we now doing this other thing? He wouldn't have just barked at them and gotten mad. Like that's not what he was. He actually loved his job and he liked these guys.

So I really don't like that explanation. Even one other technical detail. It's hard to remember the technology at this time. in the 1940s, like the changing of frequencies, they kept telling them, you need to change this other cleaner frequencies so we can get cleaner transmissions and communicate with you on a frequency that's not so taken up with other traffic. Because again, you didn't know at this point if it was a boat or a plane talking to you automatically. They didn't have transponders the same way and all this stuff. But what they had to do to change frequencies wasn't just turning a dial. They actually had to do

some maneuvering of different equipment. It's like a switchboard. A switchboard type thing. And so what Taylor, what Lieutenant Taylor was seen when he said, I don't want to lose everybody, he was worried about him switching frequencies, all of the rest of his unexperienced pilots in the formation, not changing frequencies, and then not being able to get back to where they could communicate with one another. And that's a recipe for disaster, where all of a sudden he can't communicate with his people. And pretty much everyone thinks that that's what he meant when he said, I have to keep my planes intact. Yeah. It's not like they were about to burn up and disintegrate. It was that

he has to keep the group on the same channel. So they can all talk. Yeah, so that they don't get even more confused. So look, all that to say, this is a big intro that's leading up to this show is going to be much more investigative than the other shows. Much less speculative about what

supernatural thing could be happening. Much more investigative about like, well, what could be a natural explanation for all this if there is one? And in that light, we have to nail down one thing and we have to get this right, that no matter what's going, no matter what it is, it has to account for the loss of both aircraft and also seacraft. Yeah. Because it's really easy to find explanations that are for just one,

but that completely missed the other. So to that end, we want to share two really awesome stories. These stories are really cool. They're really interesting. With you guys that kind of helped nail it, get it all fresh in our minds that this is both sea craft and aircraft. So Brian, can you start off by telling us the story of the Ellen Austin? Absolutely I can, Ben. So in 1881, a ship called the Ellen Austin was sailing west on a trip from London to New York. When they encountered something troubling, the 210-foot-long passenger vessel caught sight of an unidentified sailboat floating nearby, almost as if the Ellen Austin was being tracked by it.

The sailboat, much smaller than the ship it was shadowing, showed very little sign of activity when Austin's Captain Blake viewed it through the lens. But it was sailing, and I mean it clearly could not have been abandoned from their assessment of the situation. Captain Blake spent two days trying to contact anyone on the vessel to no avail. Finally, he decided the ship should be boarded to ensure everyone on board wasn't in trouble. He and his crew formed a boarding party and went over to the craft. As they stepped foot on the boat and started their investigation,

they quickly found that nobody was there at all. Every compartment, every nook, every cranny had been checked, nothing. The strange thing was that despite the lack of people, the ship was completely well stocked with supplies. Food, water, fuel, navigation and communication equipment. It was all there and it was all functioning. So where was everybody? That was a puzzle for somebody else to solve, though, namely the insurance companies. You see, back then, like today, whoever owned a ship would take out insurance on it

in case it was lost or damaged. A ship that was abandoned like this, while not damaged, did count as being lost. So whoever found it could tow it back to the shore and collect a pretty generous finder's fee from the insurance provider on behalf of their client for the vessel and for the cargo it was carrying. Captain Baker would have been a fool not to do this.

So he hired a separate crew, paid them, sent them out to the ship to sail it back to land where he could collect the finder's fee. And for two days, it seemed like the plan would work out fine. Eventually, the small ship's crew would turn up somewhere. The owner would get his boat back, and Baker would get some extra money. Everybody wins. But as they broke into the third day of travel, so tantalizingly close to the safety of the shore,

a massive storm hit the vessels. The mystery ship, along with that crew Baker had paid to bring her home, was lost. He searched for it for days, scouring the nearby seas to the north and the south, but no luck. It was gone, and he assumed probably sunk in the rough waters. But then was the strangest thing. One day while Baker was back out in the Atlantic, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. He snatched up his telescope and peered through. There was no doubt in his mind at all. It was the same ship again. And again, it seemed abandoned, but somehow still sailing. He went through the now familiar song and dance of going over.

over to the boarding party, confirming there's no crew aboard, also confirming it was fully stocked with supplies, getting a separate crew and paying them to follow him back to shore and he'd get that finder's fee. But again, the sea is a fickle mistress. Tempestuous and vindictive. A storm came, and by the next morning, Blake realized that the small vessel was once again with his second crew lost to the waves. The owner of the Ellen Austin, which was not Captain Baker, by the way, was informed of all of this. Strangely, he immediately sold the ship. To this day, the mystery is unsolved.

No records can be found in either direction to shed more light on the events than what has already been told. There's one thing. Legend has it. A pirate ship was sailing through this area of the Devil's Triangle back in the year of Our Lord 1701

when suddenly a giant squid dubbed by the locals, Gargantos, shot its tentacles up from beneath the water and dragged the ship in her crew down to its den. Since then, the ghost of the outlaw ship has roamed the waters of the Bermuda Triangle, looking for other souls to bait in and steal away on the Earth's floor.

Awesome story. Crazy story. And here's the thing. It accents a really key part of the Bermuda Triangle mystery, and that is that it's mixed in with actual stuff and also urban local legend. Yeah. And you're getting the, you're conflating the two,

or it's really easy to conflate the two all the time. And I know I said at the beginning of the show that I don't think this is a sea monster and I still don't. I don't think that the Gargantos thing actually happened. What I think is that there was a ship named the Ellen Austin. What I think is that they may have encountered something strange. But then what I think is that it got turned over in the people's minds until it became this fantastic urban legend that really has no ground to stand on. There are, it's important to note like where the legend two branches off. because there's an initial story that seems pretty likely to have happened,

which is the discovery of this ship that was unmanned, and it was like what happened. Trying to take it back for a finder's fee. And this has happened with several other ghost ship type encounters. We'll probably talk about them at some point, Ben. Yeah, hopefully. But, hi there, faithful listener. If you've been enjoying the Haunted Cosmos podcast,

and you'd like to see Ben and I live, then come and meet us in person at the Right Response Ministries Conference, happening March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The title of the conference is Blueprints for Christendom 2.0 7 doctrines for ruling the world. Some of our other speakers include Doug Wilson, Joe Boot, and the host of the conference,

our friend Joel Webbin. Yes, the whole conference is going to be really awesome. But the best part to me is that Brian and I will be on stage with Joel talking about the most unhinged things imaginable. Plus, by coming to the conference, it will give us a chance to meet each of you in person. You can register for the conference by going to writeresponseconference.com. Again, that's

writeresponseconference.com. And don't forget to use the promo code haunted to get 20% off of registration exclusively for our listeners. Lastly, if you're looking for another fantastic podcast, you've got to check out Jules' podcast called Theology Applied. It's on Apple and Spotify, but you can also watch Theology Applied by searching Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Check the links in the description. Brian, studies done throughout the U.S. show that almost one in five churchgoers, that's 20% of churchgoers, never read their Bible. It's very sad. And in Canada, it's even more than half. It's no wonder the world is in such a dark place as it is. But our sponsor for today's show, Bible Discovery, wants to fix that and fill a void. From apologetics and theology to archaeology and science, Bible Discovery is a family-run ministry that takes you through the entire. Bible in one year and encourages you to actively engage God's Word in all ways to help you discover

or perhaps rediscover the reason for your faith. So you can watch the daily TV show or read the monthly guide, which is available in print and digital formats with a donation of any amount. So journey through the Bible at Biblediscoverytv.com. That's Biblediscoverytv.com for all these benefits or check the link in the description. So he sends the crew on board. they are going to sail it back, they get separated in the storm and they're never found again. So that seems pretty reasonably what happened.

There's a branch off at that point where kind of two stories branch out. And one of them is that he then found it again, like we read, and couldn't get a crew. They were too scared to go on board, and so they just had to leave it floating. And then a second version of the story

is that they did get a crew, and it literally happened again. And then he saw the ship again. Like this ship itself seems to be like eating people or dematerializing that. It's like Davey Jones Locker confirmed. Exactly. Like that kind of, so this is another one of those stories where I think there is a pretty solid or at least likely core. Yes.

That had some fantastic. Yeah. We know that the Ellen Austin existed. Yeah. We know that, you know, it was first commissioned as a ship called the Meta. And then it was recommissioned as funny, which I know. Zuckerberg, time-traveling reptilian confirmed. Go ahead.

He was a lizard sea captain. Lizard sea captain. Back in the 18th. Named his ship in the first. And then it was recommissioned in 1880 as the Ellen Austin. And there does seem to be records indicating some story of the Allen Austin, seeing the ship, trying to get back with a finder's fee. They get separated in a storm.

But then the piling on of the led. Yeah. Leading up to this gargantos squid that swallows up this old pirate ship and it really is like a Davy Jones thing. Mm-hmm. Could only be traced back to a story published in Stargazer Talks in 1943. So we think that the author of the story Rupert Gold kind of took this seed of truth in the Allen Austin, latched onto the Bermuda Triangle mystique, and then created this urban legend that... Or he...

Or he knew something. Or he heard a lot of urban legends. Or he knew something we did. What if he just heard at the pub about this story? And it had just grown in the retelling. And it's a good story. He said, this is what they said. That could very well be the case.

Could be it too. But we do know that there was a ship called the Allen Austin. We do know that some weird stuff happened with them at sea. And it was in this Bermuda Triangle area. Super strange. Finding a ship where everybody's gone. Can you imagine that? And it's for two days sailing.

Yeah. Like it was shadowing them. the other ghost ship, the famous. The Mary Celeste is another, I mean, and it's another one where there's always like a mystery solved. Yeah. Kind of with these, where people go,

oh, it was because it was carrying alcohol and the natured alcohol can explode. And the fumes. Yeah. They got off the ship and then the rope broke. And so the ship continued and they were just lost at sea. And like, there's always these mystery solved

things with these, but it's still just, you have to create this whole story. Yeah. to explain how everybody, and the thing is, it's pretty difficult to evaluate why your story, with all the natural, like the normal stuff happening, is any better than like a Nephlin spirit came on board and killed everybody and devoured them

and took them down in Davy Jones Locker. And left no trace. Fed them to the Cracken. Left candle still. Who can say which of those two stories happened? Or like the Philadelphia experiment, you know about that one? Which, by the way, was in the Bermuda, you don't know about the Philadelphia experiment? Are you kidding me? You're about to tell me.

I'm like a kid on Christmas one. morning. You're about to tell me a weird thing I haven't heard about it. I'm sure you've heard about this. Let's hear it. If I'm getting the name wrong, I'm going to be so embarrassed. So it was actually in the Bermuda Triangle area, which makes this even better. But it was supposedly, it was an experiment carried out on a U.S. Navy vessel, the USS Philadelphia. Okay, I didn't. Where they were using Einstein's field theory to develop teleportation. Right. And the reports are that, Everyone saw the ship vanish in this flash of blue and green light. And then it reappeared somewhere else in the ocean.

And people were like inside of the metal wall of the ship. Yeah, they were like encased in the metal wall. Like their atoms had coalesced with all the other. And they were like just dead. And they were dead and they were like screaming and agon. Great. Sound design. I will.

I will. More a Clementine's being crushed. Oh, gross. That's just, I'm so sorry, guys, for some of the sound effects that we choose to put in. I'm not sorry at all. They are gross. I regret nothing. I have heard that story.

I didn't know that. But it was like supposedly... There's a great X-Files episode on it. Is there? But it's one of those... Watch party at Chili's. Dude. With honor cosmonauts.

We actually love Chili's. We do. Few know this. Unironically. And so we would love to do a watch party at Chili's with the X-Files. Anyway. But it's one of those things where there was an experiment that happened. It wasn't anything like teleportation.

It was more like... weapons testing and stuff. But I choose to believe that it was teleportation because it's, it's more interesting. It is more interesting. That was another great Discovery Channel documentary from back in the day. But it just goes to show you can have these things where there is something weird. Yeah.

Maybe not weird, but just abnormal that happens. And then the mystique of the area, the mystique of the government cover up. Yeah. Kind of latches onto the people's imagination. And no one's immune to this. And then you get what's, by all accounts, a more interesting story. Right. just isn't quite as fantastic.

Right, right. But anyway. Love it. Ocean. We have ocean troubles and then we also have air troubles. Tell us another, tell us about some more air troubles. Yes. So I'm going to tell you the story about the Star Tiger.

Okay. One of the coolest names for any plane. Genuinely. Genuinely. So the Avro Tudor 4 was this beautiful passenger aircraft for its time. It was built in 1947 and it was one of the first passenger aircrafts capable of transatlantic flights. So it was bound to stay busy. It was bound to make the British American Airways Company a lot of money.

And many of those aircraft did live up to this hope, but some unfortunately didn't. And the most infamous of these that didn't live up was named Star Tiger. So by late January in 1948, after about a year of active service, the Star Tiger had logged 11 transatlantic flights, totaling 575 hours of airtime. In the morning that it was about to lift off for this next flight, the plane was scheduled to ferry passengers from Lisbon, Portugal, to the island of Bermuda. The flight plan also included a scheduled refueling stop in Santa Maria. Before the plane ever left the runway in Lisbon, though, there were some mishaps. As passengers finished boarding, they got news that the port inner engine, so just one of the engines, needed some extra work, and so all the passengers were forced to disembark from the plane.

plane, and then after they eventually lift off, they landed in Santa Maria for what they thought would be just a quick 75-minute refueling stop. But they received news that the weather was so bad there they'd have to wait overnight and leave the next morning. So the following day, the morning came and the weather was much clearer, though the winds were unusually strong, but this wasn't a concern. It was well within the boundary of the Star-Tigars capability. The experienced captain of the Star Tiger, Brian McMillan, had done this a time or two.

It wasn't his first time around the block, and so he knew that if he kept the plane at low altitude, the winds were going to be much more manageable, which is due to something in fluid mechanics called the no-slip condition. Wow. Which is that with any fluid flowing, which air is a fluid, of course. Yeah. Wherever it meets with a solid boundary, the velocity of that fluid is zero. Okay. So in a pipe, the fluid that's... on the outside of the pipe isn't moving.

Really? Yeah, and as you get to the middle, it flows faster. Interesting. Anyway. So if you keep the planet at a low altitude, the wind speeds are, of course, lower. The more you know. So McMillan decided that he wasn't going to go above 2,000 feet

to hopefully make the ride smoother for the passengers. About an hour before the tiger took off from Santa Maria, another passenger jet, the Lancastrian, started its trip to Bermuda. her captain reported back that the strong winds were joined by heavy rains not far beyond the coast of santa maria so preparing for a storm the tiger left the airport and slowly closed the distance with the lancastery and following it to bermuda the two aircraft remained in contact to support each other through the storm all the way to bermuda and after about ten hours of flying in the middle of the night the tiger's onboard navigator a guy named cyril ellison fixed the aircraft's position using celestial navigation. And Ellison found when he did this that the storm had blown them considerably off course.

The heavy winds were still continuing, actually, to make them crab away from the desired flight path. He provided Captain McMillan with a corrective course that turned them directly into the main force of the gale. But again, this wasn't a concern. Captain McMillan remained confident because he knew that they should still have plenty of fuel to land in Bermuda,

despite a nasty headwind. And at about 3 a.m., the tiger contacted Bermuda requesting a radio bearing to ensure that their flight path was still correct after this corrective action. They heard back that everything looked fine, so they acknowledged the receipt from Bermuda Radio, and that was it. The Star Tiger was never heard from again after that.

Bermuda operators never received a distress call. They never received an SOS or request for any aid, despite all of the operators being trained the tiger's frequency, listening for them. The Lancasterian was never contacted by the Star Tiger, and for the remaining duration of its flight, the Lancasterian encountered no more storms, no more fog or turbulence or anything else, just a little bit of rough wind. On the 30th of January in 1948, the press dispatch reported the plane's loss at 440 miles northeast

of Bermuda. No cause for the loss was ever proposed despite an extensive investigation. and search and no wreckage was ever recovered. Textbook Bermuda disappeared. Textbook. Textbook. And so one of the biggest curiosities about the Bermuda Triangle is, like I said, it's not just boats, it's also all of these aircraft.

That means that whatever explanation we give or that we explore has to cover both of these things. And some people might think that it could just be, you know, an ocean thing because any plane that disappears has to do with an emergency landing on the water. I've heard this before. Like you get in these rough winds, the plane runs out of fuel, Captain Taylor gets confused in the cold open, all the planes run out of fuel. So eventually everything ends up just on the ocean. Yeah.

But that's, we'll find, not the case. There's no reason that this loss of fuel wouldn't be communicated by these planes. Like, they're well within radio frequencies of different dispatches. I mean, Star Tiger was talking to Bermuda. Yeah. If they were running out of fuel, they would have said, hey, we're running out of fuel. We're going down here. none of that happened.

So it must mean that something happened in the air that was so quick, so urgent, so violent that they weren't able to radio for help. Tinybibles.com makes the smallest printed Bible on the market. That's right, Ben. It's the size of a key fob, and you can take it with you anywhere and everywhere. Wait, how small is it really?

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That's tinybibles.com. Yeah. Yeah. One of the interesting, so to me, again, you have like a tier, when you're investigating these things, I'm going to go for the simplest explanation first and then follow down. And if that doesn't work, I'll just keep. And maybe the simplest explanation isn't true, but in the lack of information, we can't say that it's not. Right. So that's the difficulty here. When I think about something like the Star Tiger, maybe it's flying low, it is not difficult. This is one of the things that pilots are. trained on, and particularly in the days of more analog instrumentation and, you know, in the 40s and back then would be making sure that you don't lose the horizon and your altitude, especially over featureless areas like water. Or mountainous terrain sometimes with clouds, people can begin to fly lower, lose their horizon, and then end up in the water.

So one thing that could have happened to the Star Tiger is that the pilot made a mistake or flew too low. He was already flying fairly low. And then they literally hit the water at speed because he thinks he's at 2,000 feet. He's actually right above the waves. Hits a wave, everybody dies. They just don't find any wreckage.

Is that plausible? Yeah. It could have happened. Absolutely, it could have happened. The things that you still need to explain is, I mean, I know that it was in the middle of the night, but something would have had to go wrong with the altimeter or they just weren't paying attention to the altimeter.

Yeah, he either isn't looking at his instruments properly, falls asleep, lulled, some kind. he has to make some sort of significant error. Like a significant error. And then they find a record. And then they find no wreckage. And they were close enough to Bermuda to be in radio contact. You'd kind of expect a plane especially is full of lots of, I mean, MH370, they're finding

dozens of pieces because seats float. Tons of parts of this plane literally float. And it just took a few years for them to start finding records for that. And this was almost, I mean, almost a hundred years ago. No one's ever found a piece of this plane. Yeah. So is it possible that that could happen? Of course it's possible.

Yeah. But it's still weird. It's still mysterious. And it's more fun to assume that that's not what happened. I'm going to go ahead and say with 100% certainty. I think we know that's not what happened. I think that we can all know that McMillan would never have done something. I know McMillan.

He was a solid guy. My guy, Cyril Ellison, too, the Navigator. He wouldn't have let that happen. wouldn't have let that happen. I'm going to go ahead and say that now that we've done our due diligence and we've said, yes, that could have been the case. Now let's talk about hexagonal clouds. Yes, hexagonal clouds. Much more interesting things. Okay. So, so hexagonal the idea of a hexagonal cloud is not, uh, it, we know that it happens. Yeah, they, they are real. I mean, if you assume that the ISS is actually in space orbiting the Earth and taking pictures, which is a big assumption to make.

But if you just say that the pictures you see of clouds... Next year you're going to tell me that we landed on the moon. I would never say that. The next thing out of your mouth, it sounds like it's going to be, and we landed on the moon in 1969, not 1968, but a year later. We did. It was this really cool room that Stanley Kubrick set up labeled the moon. Okay. But yeah, hexagon clouds.

Hexagonal clouds. They're real. If you assume the pictures are real, okay, then we know that these things exist. And for whatever reason, they really exist in high quantities in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. So somehow it's these massive rings form, and it's not actually the, it's like a negative image. It's not the cloud itself that's a hexagon. It's a boundary that the clouds form. Interesting.

They form a hexagonal boundary. And it's really, really low pressure, and it's higher pressure above it. And so it's like what we have. It's all with an inversion, you know. So the high pressure wants to go rapidly to the low pressure to equalize. Yeah, and so these clouds open up in a really short time. And as they do, you know, it's like pulling a drain out of a tub. All of this high pressure air is flooding down.

Yeah. So it's really big down force that can reach apparently up to 170 miles an hour. Very strong. Straight down. Is that hurricane force wind going down? I think so, like category two or three. Uh-huh. Yeah.

It should be. Or even like F1F2 tornado. Yeah. Maybe more. I don't know anything about tornadoes or hurricanes. I'm going to literally look at it right now, wind speeds for different hurricanes. But that's the idea. And so if you get a really quick impulse of almost 200 mile an hour winds going straight down onto an aircraft or on a boat.

That's a category five. Oh, okay. Anything above 157 miles an hour is literally, in category five, by the way, the highest category. Yeah. If you could actually have 170 miles an hour, how many school buses is that per minute? Just kidding. The weight of a school bus. Yeah.

That is. like having in a plane on that so a plane going horizontal it's flying right it's it's it's it's very it's like a big sail if you had a way going down from yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah i mean it's light yeah that is catastrophic i don't know if you know this about planes okay they fly you guys you have to watch youtube because you'll see the hand motion they fly parallel to the ground what i'm saying is planes don't fly like this that's rocket ships they and they don't fly like they don't like this is ICBMs. Okay. They fly like this. Sometimes like this, sometimes like this. In podcast listeners, I'm sorry. In crazy situations like this. Like when you have to to save the president. Yeah. I was inverted. Okay. Anyway. So anyway. Yeah, but that is, let's go ahead. That's really interesting. Yeah. So big wins and the ideas they could push planes down super easily. And,

And, you know, the wreckage thing, it's different currents, that's the word I'm looking for, that are taking all this debris far away. Yeah. And then maybe it's just somehow it's all sinking. It's getting waterlogged enough to sink. And it is possible to lose stuff without finding debris. Like, that is possible. 100% it's possible.

It's just. But is it? It's possible, but it's just, it is an open, it leaves something to be, there's a nagging in the back of your life. It's a hole in the theory. Where you go, but, but. But nothing? Yeah. Like you...

Maybe. You knew where they were. You knew the area that they went down. Yeah. And you've never found anything. And it was close to a coast. Yeah. And you never found anything.

Well, floating wasn't invented until 1973. People before 1973 just... Nothing could float. D drown. Yeah. It was crazy. No. So that's really interesting.

And actually, that is a reasonable naturalistic explanation. I've heard of the methane one. Yes. Ooh, the methane gas bubbles. I had heard of this one before. I actually remember some kind of just. discovery show. Oh.

And the basic idea of the methane. I'm pretty sure MythBusters did this, actually. Yeah, I think they did. The idea is that as the, all of the methane is building up on the seafloor, you have lots of decomposing materials, stuff just goes down. There's this big mud goo that's decomposing,

and you can have huge pockets of methane build up under the water. Like right under the surface of the bottom of the sea. Yeah. On the ocean floor. Yeah. And then sometimes, can, a disturbance or it can build up enough, like an earthquake can release it,

even a small earthquake, or it can build up enough that the pressure opens the valve ascension. Yeah, yeah. And these methane bubbles just go up to the surface in a concentrated area, and that when that hits the surface,

it can basically cause enough disturbance or a lack of buoyancy. Yeah, yeah. A ship could just fall into that methane bubble and be swallowed. Right. Yeah, it's like the bubble of air, well, it's not air, but it's methane.

It's different than water. Yeah. Provides enough of a vacuum, basically, to just suck the ship down. Yeah. Have you ever heard about how if you're, if you're like sitting right next to a cruise ship, which don't ever do that?

Don't. But as it's going, the engines are so powerful and they're churning up so much water that as it passes you, you get sucked in to the propeller because there's all that negative pressure. that the water's trying to fill. That's actually how it is able to go. It's the same idea here.

The problem is it would have to be the biggest methane gas deposit in the world every single time it happens. And it doesn't come anywhere close to describing the planes. You have to make the assumption that the planes are already on the surface of the water. And then they happen to be swallowed by a methane bubble that happens. Like, yeah, sure, all of that could happen. the problem like how does it happen with such high frequency relatively it's like supposition on supposition right it just doesn't and i just that one to me i was like no i like from the very beginning interesting i was like oh so interesting for ships interesting because if you can explain a good

percentage of the phenomena with some single thing yeah even if it didn't account for the planes well then maybe some of the plane crashes just happened with navigation error blah blah blah blah blah right okay fine it just doesn't seem like this is the thing methane is much much as I love it, as much as I depend on methane. It doesn't seem to make my wife laugh from methane. Oh, boy. What are some other naturalist theories, naturalistic theories? So rogue waves is a big one.

Okay. These happen. Yeah, they happen, but they're like a rogue wave to take down a ship the size of what was described as the ship the Ellen Austin found, which was smaller than the Allen Austin, but it wasn't like a life raft, you know, to take down a ship. that size with no trace to make it sink immediately. It would have to be like the biggest tsunami. Pretty big in the world.

Have you seen that the rogue wave that hits the large cargo vessel? Yeah, like the test? It comes up over the ship. I don't know if it's, it didn't look like a test to me. It was like from the bridge footage. Big wave. Oh, they're going like right into it. They go into it.

It's a big wave. Yeah. I don't know if it's technically a rogue wave. It did seem like rogue wave. A rogue wave. is a massive, you have a confluence of wave patterns that create one single wave that is far bigger than the normal waves around it.

Even in rough seas or calm seas, calmer seas. And these do happen. We know they happen. They can be massively tall, push a lot of water. There was one where this clip I saw was this big, huge wave came over one of those giant long cargo vessels. and it was like, damaged a bunch of stuff.

The ship didn't sink because those things are like, they're very hard. Those are very difficult to sink. Those vessels. I mean, they're designed to be, they're designed with that kind of weather in mind. Yep. Because, I mean, that's just how engineers work now.

They think, what's the worst case scenario and let's design for some safety factor over that? Like times that. Yeah. Two times that. One and a half times that or whatever it is. But they are, they are insanely powerful and scary.

So maybe. Still doesn't account necessarily for debris. Right. And we do know that it happens. It happens with sound all the time. This is why when you go into like a Coliseum or an amphitheater, you can like whisper and you can hear it across the Coliseum grounds or something like that. It's because you have resonant frequencies and water is just like air. Yeah, it's a fluid. It's just denser. Water is a fluid. Water actually is a fluid. And water is a liquid. It's also a liquid. So we know that rogue waves have to happen. It's not even a matter of if. It's just that whenever they happen, you have to be ready for it.

And then the last one that is probably the least compelling is the Gulfstream currents. Yeah. This one, I saw this and I was like, wait, is that just for debris? Or is that for like everything? Is it just for why debris doesn't show up anywhere around? Or are you trying to tell me that the Gulf Stream current? You're sailing and you hit a current and you like spin out. I've seen Finding Nemo.

I've seen the turtles get on. That current. Oh, dude. How much did you want to do that when you saw that? Man, I forgot. I don't like that movie at all. It's actually, anyway. It makes me sad.

Yeah, I think Gulfstream Currants is just an attempt at explaining. So the debris. None of those explanations are really that good to me. I don't think they're that good. Yeah. One explanation that I like that we mentioned earlier is time warps. We're starting to get into some, and we're not necessarily talking about supernatural stuff. I don't think this is supernatural.

We're talking about some kind of unknown or, Sometimes we have theories that could account for it, but currently unmeasured or untested, unreplicated in, like we haven't demonstrated this on camera or something like that. But time warps and even weather phenomena that causes high strangeness. Yeah, yeah. And in order to introduce this topic, I'm going to tell everybody the story of the USS Cyclops.

Oh, what a great name. In May of 1910, a new collier ship, Kristen's Cyclops, was launched and quickly placed into search. by William Cranpensons out of Philadelphia. The ship's commission was to serve the naval auxiliary service in the Atlantic Fleet. For seven years, Cyclops had a normal service life, traveling from the Baltic to Norfolk to Newport and down into the Mexican Caribbean servicing ships and helping transport refugees,

among some other tasks. The service record of the vessel and crew was flawless. In fact, they did such a good job that the U.S. State Department officially thanked the crew, thanked the crew a number of times. And then the First World War happened. With the involvement of the US in this great war that was unprecedented in scale and technological advancement,

the Navy needed all of the active duty help they could get. So apart from drafting men into full service, they also drafted what were otherwise auxiliary and even commercial marine craft. Cyclops was one of these drafted ships. As she tended to thrive in peacetime, so she also proved to be faced. and excellent in wartime. She served primarily along the east coast of the U.S. as part of the

Naval Overseas Transportation Service. But she saw more action when she sailed into Southern Atlantic Brazilian waters, delivering fuel to British ships in need of help. For this, she received more official thanks from the State Department. On February 16th of 1918, the ship put out at Rio de Janeiro en route to Salvador. It arrived there without incident on February 20th. Refueling and resupplying there the ship put out for Baltimore, Maryland, with no stops scheduled, carrying a cargo of manganese ore. Here's the thing though. Some details about the ship's cargo gave the shipyard captains and commanders pause before sending her off. The Cyclops maximum weight capacity was 8,100 tons. Usually the vessel was carrying coal

that other ships would then receive from her, so it was easy to eyeball how much much coal would be a safe amount given that 8,100 ton capacity. But like I said, this time she didn't have coal, she had manganese ore as her cargo, which is far more dense than coal. So the eyeball method simply wasn't good enough, but they didn't have time to perform a more precise calculation. So they tried to put in a conservative amount, but many men felt that it was still too much. They believed they had sent the Cyclops out on a more than 5,000 mile journey with no

ops and too much weight. That's not all though. One of the ship's commanders, a guy named Worley, had submitted a report before leaving port saying that one of the cylinders in the starboard engine had a crack and wasn't operative anymore. The report was acted upon, but the board determined that the best course of action would be for it returned to the U.S. for full servicing with no temporary fix. This wasn't a detrimental or really worrisome defect. It's just something worth noting. Given all of that, she set off on her voyage, but quickly realized the weight was not going to work. Cyclops made an unscheduled stop in Barbados, with the hopes of shedding some of that weight. But the crew was told by port that the weight wasn't actually of any concern,

so with shaky confidence, she set off again en route to Baltimore by March 4th. The Cyclops was never heard from again. And when I say never heard from again, I mean that in every simple of the word. The wreckage couldn't even tell investigators a story because no wreckage was ever found. To this day, no wreckage of the Cyclops has ever been found. The Santa Fe magazine's 15th volume released in 1920 states the following, quote, not a bit of wreckage, nor sign of any description has been found. Usually a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver identified as belonging to a lost ship is picked up after a wreck, 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, and the sadness of her destruction is amplified by the absence of any wireless calls for help being picked up by any ship along the route that the Cyclops followed. End quote. And according to the National Archives Special Media Division, Quote, in an eerie set of coincidences, both of the USS Cyclops' sister ships, the Nerius and the Proteus, also disappeared with all hands lost in the Atlantic.

At the time of her disappearance, the Nearius was on the same route as the doomed Cyclops, end quote. Of course, the Navy did a full investigation, but they could only conclude that her loss remains unknown. This doesn't stop theorists from trying their hand at figuring it out, Some believe the ship was sunk by a German naval vessel near St. Kitts, though there is little reason to think this. Some think there was some explosion or rogue wave or something that happened so quick it prevented any SOS signal from being sent. We don't know. Ultimately, we can't know either way.

But one of the more interesting ideas is that it's just another in a long list of massive vessels to fall victim to the Bermuda Triangle's traps, disappearance without a trace. One reason for thinking this is a highly contested report given by some semen on a molasses tanker named Amalco. These guys are rumored to have seen the ill-fated Cyclops on March 9th near the coast of Virginia. Before going any further, know that the Amalco captain completely denied these sightings, but not all of his crew did. This would require a truly crazy explanation, though, because Cyclops was scheduled to arrive in Baltimore on March 13th. The Virginia coast is less than a day's journey from Baltimore. So how would the ship have been able to travel eight days worth of ocean in only five days? Remember, she was seen on the Virginia coast on March 9th.

At any rate, heavy storms off the Virginia coast were reported that next day on March 10th. So the rumor is that if Cyclops somehow got there in that time, maybe these violent storms what did her in. But again, how could she have traveled so far? and so short a time. Now, here's the answer, Ben. What is the answer? Tell me, it was a time warp. It was a time. Please let us at least speculate about some timey, whimy things. All right, here's the thing.

We know that time warps could exist. And that means they do. Murphy's Law, anything that could happen doesn't. And that the Cyclops was swallowed by one and spit out by Virginia before sinking. And that the Cyclops was literally a cyclops. Brian and I are pretty blessed guys. I mean, we get to make this podcast together for all of you. And because of that, we get introduced to a lot of really amazing other podcasts.

One of those that we've come to know and love is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. That's right, Ben. The 10-minute Bible Hour podcast is hosted by our friend Matt Whitman. In this project, he's got going, it really is awesome. His passion for God's Word has driven him to release an episode every weekday morning. That's insane. You heard us right. Every weekday morning where he goes through whole books of the Bible in single episode

summaries or multiple episodes series. And he breaks the Bible down quickly and concisely, keeping the episodes short. I mean, it is called the 10-minute Bible Hour and very easy to digest. The 10-minute Bible Hour podcast is a great way to make fun, deep-dive Bible study a part of your daily rhythm. And you can find the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you prefer to get your shows. Or better yet, go to www.v.v.h.com. That's thetmbh.com, and there's a link in the description for that, by the way,

to find all of the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast episodes. While you're there, tell Matt that we said hello. Cheers. Our sponsor, Private Family Banking Partners, is on a mission to help Christians live out the Dominion mandate by making a stealth-like move away from the mainstream banks and into their own privatized banking system. This innovative system is designed to guarantee uninterrupted compound interest and tax-free growth without exposure to typical stock market risks. To join this growing community that has already building wealth into future generations and converting post-mill talk into

postmill action. Contact private family banking partner, Chuck DeLadarante, at his email, Chuck at privatefamily banking.com. That's Chuck at privatefamily banking.com. To set up an appointment and receive a free copy of Chuck's new book, protect your money now, how to build multi-generational wealth outside of Wall Street and avoid the coming banking meltdown. Go to the links in the show notes below. Like everyone in the, the rumor is that everyone in the crew only had one Because of the time travel. Okay. All right.

I've read Einstein's essays on relativity. All right. I've read Black Holes and Time Warps by Professor Kip Thorne of Caltech. He's an emeritus professor at Caltech. Okay. He sounds like a real person. And he is a real person. I can confirm.

He was actually the consultant, the physics consultant on the movie Interstellar. Really? Yeah. What a great film. So good. Oh, man. Man, that movie's amazing. Absolutely tremendous film.

So we know that time warps can exist. And the reason that we know that is because we know that black holes can and do exist. And so you have this fabric of space time, right? And if you think of it like a, we've all seen this illustration. More like a wibbly wobbly, timely stuff. It's a wibbly wobbly bridge. Have you seen it yet? You don't know the reference yet.

I'm sorry, listeners. Ben hasn't listened or why. I mean, Ben hasn't watched Doctor Who yet. No, but did you? I also made a Britter reference just now. And I didn't get it. The wibbly wobbly bridge. It's from the Grand Tour.

Okay, so anyway, we know that time warps can exist because you know that black holes can and do exist. And so the idea, we've all seen the illustration, you have a sheet of paper and that's space time. It's just a two-dimensional version of a three-dimensional thing. So you poke a hole in either end of it, and you have to travel the whole sheet of paper. But if you bend the paper up,

then you just step from one hole to the other. It's like the desk. Cap for Cutty song. So true. I'm not a death cap for Qaeda. Which goes like this. I wish the world was flat like the old days. So I could travel just by folding the map.

No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways. There'd be no distance that could hold us back. Great line. Here's what I don't like about that line. Yeah. It's actually not what you're describing it. Is that even when the earth was flat, the people still used highways. Well, fine.

So it's it's it's called poetry. What the heck? It's called poetry. No, but that is, it's basically what the theory is describing in a simplified visual example. Yeah. So the problem is, is we don't know without some massive amount of energy that we're not capable of producing. Yeah. We don't understand how a time warp could, could ever be made.

Because the difference is a black hole can just be made by some really heavy object that's sitting in space. It's so heavy that not even light can escape. gravity. Yeah, right. But a time warp is different because you have to have both a really high amount of gravity, but you also have to have a funnel, basically, that the thing can pass through and go to the other side. So one of the ideas has been that you have black holes that are entangled. Do you know, entanglement? Like quantum entanglement? Yeah. So black holes can be treated, even though they're so massive. They're so simplistic in their nature that they can be treated as big quantum particles. Yeah. And so you can have the idea is that you can have entangled black holes.

Entanglement for our listeners is when two quantum particles affect one another. When one is affected or moves, the other one moves as well. In the same way. The same way, even across vast distances. It's not like there's no discernible. It's not like one is strung to the other one in some physical way. Right. It's weird. Yeah. So Einstein called it spooky action at a distance.

What a good. That's a haunted cosmos. Trademark. Actually, I'm stealing it. Hey. We know Einstein said it. Trademark haunted cosmos, I think is what you just said. But go on.

So you can bring these two particles together and they share information. The information that they share, by the way, is their degree of entropy. Okay. That's what they share. And then by sharing that degree of entropy, they now have the same characteristics. so they're essentially the same particle. There's nothing that would distinguish. This is just spooky.

I mean, it's really difficult to even conceptualize. Yeah. But they're so much the same that what you're saying is right. You can separate them by light years. By the universe. And you can move one by an inch. And the other one will move an inch in that same direction. Not being touched by anything, except the entanglement that it shares with this.

So the idea is that if you do that to a black hole, two black holes. If you fall into one, you'll be. in both. Okay. You'll be in both. Will you be dead in both? Yes. Yes. So the trouble is that you now have to leave the one and get out of the other. Without dying. But the... Which light can't even Right. You have to be able to do what... You can't do it. Even the speed of light cannot accomplish. Yeah, you can't do it. This sounds really plausible. But that helps conceptualize how this would be like possible, theoretically, conceptually. In a way that kills everybody and is completely impossible. Yes. But it's conceptually possible.

Okay, I like that. The idea is that if you have enough energy to hold up what's called an Einstein Rosen bridge, okay. You can pass through the two different. They wouldn't be black holes in this case because of how we've changed it. Yeah. Because of all the energy you've pumped into it. But you could pass through and emerge on the other side.

Okay. As if you just took one step and you'd be in a completely different place. Now, the problem is that we don't have enough energy to accomplish this. Right. Not even close. So the Trump card that scientists are using these days. is that you can use dark energy. Okay.

And dark energy is supposedly what makes up something between 80 and 90% of the mass of the universe. Dark energy is something that we made up. Dark energy is 100% something that we made up. Because the math didn't work. Yes. So we were like dark energy. Now it works. Yes.

We were like that. The reason that we call it dark isn't because it's dark. Right. By the way. It's because we don't know what it is. It's like the dark ages except the dark ages weren't really dark ages. We're actually full of vibrant light and color. Yeah.

All right. So the idea is that. There's this other thing that's permeating the spacetime continuum that is pushing something. Yeah. And, you know, gravity pulls and this thing pushes. So it actually helps keep everything from collapsing in on itself. That's the idea. But they have no idea what it is.

You know what it sounds like? What? Have you watched The Office? Oh, yeah. You know when Kevin is fired late in the show, and he's fired, and Oscar's explaining, he was an accountant. In Kevin on the show, he inserted this symbol and he called it a Calevin. All right. And it was his way of making the math work when he had done the math wrong somewhere.

Dark energy, Dark matter, I'm sorry. Dark matter has always struck me as this. Yeah, it's 11. Or physicists are like, oh, no. They're British, by the way. Calevin. Oh, no. We've made some sort of error.

And we're calculating that the universe must weigh about 80% more than it currently does, according to our projections. We can't be wrong about any of the other presuppositions because they work in our mathematical models. There go, like such as the Iraq, we will say that there is the clever. There's a dark. I mean the dark. The dark energy is the force, and it pushes instead of pools. Which, by the way, dark energy is dark matter,

because it equals MC squared. So they're the same thing. And I'm sure that it's all sciencey and that there's a lot of math and that they would be like, oh, it's not quite like what you just described. I don't even have a British accent after all. I went to MIT, and I've, I've, I've, have six. degree. I have cleverity degrees. And that's what this all makes me think. I mean, I've read it. I haven't like done the math because I didn't care to. But I've read the reports and that's that is what it is.

But here's the idea though. But I'm totally sold. All that said, it's true and I believe it 100%. Well, let's call it, let's call it dark energy. What it is is that there's something about the world that we don't know. We don't understand. And that's always going to be true. Okay. That's what we're saying. There's something about the world that we don't understand yet.

But it's something that tends to push where gravity would pull. Okay. Or would cause things to fall, a dark energy would lift. You know, that's the idea. And so let's say you have an object. Let's say you have, for example, a airplane. An aeroplane. An aeroplane.

Okay. And it's flying in the air. Yeah. That means it's flying in space time. Right. Of course. Right. And let's say that this dark energy thing starts pushing it to go faster.

Well, what do you hear when you're standing on the sidewalk and an ambulance drives by? Classic Doppler effect? It's the Doppler effect. Yeah. It gets you. Oh. Yeah. You hear it.

And then you hear it at a lower pitch, even when it's really, really far away. Higher pitch on the way towards you because the speed of it's on, the speed of coming compressed. It's like. red shift, blue shift. Yes, of stars. Which that is way more, way more complicated. So thanks for bringing that up.

I'm just going to say that. But anyway, so it's the same deal. So you have a space time graph, right? And then you have something pushing it. Yeah. So that at the front of this plane, it's really compressed. So time goes much quicker. And then at the back of it, you have Doppler effect where the time stretches back out to its normal length.

Yeah. That's the idea, is that there is somehow in the Bermuda Triangle, ships and air, airplanes are getting pushed by something such that they're not going any faster in terms of like airspeed, they're just covering massive amounts of distance in a really short amount of time because space and time are being compressed. Yeah. That's the idea. So, and it's confirmed.

So one of the theories is that it is the weather patterns that are contributing. There's some sort of strange. confluence of energies, at this place, physical energies, I mean. And then when you have storms, storms are full of energy. Yeah, yeah. Full of massive amounts of energy. That there's some sort of ionizing of the air causing these effects. That's causing some huge, like way outpunching its weight class amount of energy to form in the storm.

And the energy isn't being put into necessarily the things that you can see in the storm, like a lot of lightning or rain or sound. instead it's being put into the magnetic energy of the storm or the light rays in the storm that are outside the visible spectrum. So is this the David Perez phenomenon? Yes. Is this the theory? Why don't you tell us about that?

So David Parrott, he's a meteorologist, but he dabbles. He dabbles in some esoterrorica. In the same way that I dabble in pie eating. Okay. Which is to say I'm a big fan. Okay. And I know my stuff. he's a meteorologist, and he says that the key is in the weather patterns.

And basically, the bad storms are harnessing all of this electrical and magnetic energy. And doing some various opening of weird phenomena. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So ionizing the air, creating polarity in the air is what that means. So you have a lot of positive and negative charge going on, which this is what causes lightning. Right. He's just saying that it's ramped up to 11.

It's like high, low pressure. It wants to equal us. Yes. Yes. It will when it has the right. circumstances, it will equalize in some way. A storm is equalization happening. Of pressures and you know, like a lightning storm is what it looks like when things need to equalize and they're working itself out. And he believes that it's this ionized, this polarized air that's affecting all the compasses. And so he's saying, okay, well, if it's affecting the compass, what if there's just

really high concentration of it and it can affect much more than that? Sure. Because when you a compass is a magnetic field defect. And anything that affects a magnetic field is energy. That means that it's also, to some extent, affecting the space-time continuum. So if you ramp it up to 11, you get insane amounts of it, then space-time can be warped in such a way that it's actually perceptible by man, or it's measurable. So that's the idea. Whoa. And it's been, this phenomena has been described as an electronic fog. So it's not like, it's not necessarily like a misty morning that you can see, you know, when you go to

school. It's an electronic fog where all the air around you is polarized and it has to work itself out. But it's so polarized that it can't just like flash lightning and be done. It has to completely alter the physical structure of the universe for a time and then it'll disperse and it'll all be back to normal. And there's one story that embodies this theory. And really all of the stories that we've already told could be answered by something like this. But this one's a little bit different because the guy survived. He made it. Actually, three people.

Yeah, made it. The plane didn't go down. Yeah. And so, Brian, you have to close this out tonight. All right. With the story of my guy, Bruce Gernan. Bruce Gernan. And the electronic fog.

In the electronic fog. And the electronic fog. And the electronic fog. Everything that you just said would be completely insane to me, if not for this story. Yeah. And so I still think it's wild. I still think it's insane. We're going to go out with it.

Guys, we're going to literally drop the mind. on this, and then you have to deal with it. You can make your own conclusions. Our show notes, this season are going to be better than last season. Yeah, so check our show notes. Yeah, look at the show notes. You can go look at some of the links to more expanded versions and different interviews and things that Bruce Gurnan has done.

But here's the story. By the time Bruce Gurnan was 23, he'd been flying pretty frequently for some time, at least a few years. He lived in Palm Beach, Florida. And the reason he flew so often was because he and his dad were real estate, developers in the Bahamas, Miami, and the Florida Keys. Like, what were you doing at age 23? You were probably playing Minecraft in your basement.

I was losing at RuneScape. Ben was graduating college with an engineering degree he no longer uses and packing up a U-Haul to move west with his wife. At that point, I will be honest, Ben, I was not considering building a high-end luxury resort on an island in the Bahamas that I just negotiated the purchase of from the British Commonwealth. off. I was not anywhere close to that. But to each his own. So that's Bruce Gernan and his father. They were involved in this project together as real estate developers of all sorts of interesting

projects. And they were well off enough. They own their own plane and flew quite a bit. And it was necessary for their business. So anyways, Bruce and his dad really liked this island in the Bahamas called Andross Island. It had a small key in one of its bays that they purchased. In fact, they got a great deal on it since they were basically promising to develop it into more resort land for tourists, which is beneficial to the government of the area. And so they're trying to encourage this sort of development. For as many years as he'd been flying, Bruce had made the short jump from Palm Beach to the Bahamas at least once per month. Since closing on the island and beginning plans and groundbreaking for the resort, he'd started making the flight weekly. Pure convenience demanded that he get his pilot's license.

His dad already had one. So he started training for that, and it was going really well. Plus, he already had a master captain's license from the Coast Guard. So he knew how to buckle down and work through the licensing process. This was going to be far more efficient than hiring a pilot, far safer to have two licensed pilot in the plane. A lot of good reasons why. But the bottom line is, Bruce knew his stuff.

He knew how to captain a ship, a boat on the water, He knew how to fly a plane over the water. So anyways, on December 4th in the early 1970s, Bruce, his dad, and one of their business partners hopped into their brand new Bonanza Beachcraft airplane. And Bruce at the helm as chief pilot on a flight and started gearing up for a normal calm ride back to Palm Beach after visiting the construction site out there on the island.

Takeoff had been delayed that morning due to some heavy rainfall. But it was clearing up now. and so they got ready to go, and they left the ground at exactly 3 p.m. There's a known time they left the ground at exactly 3 p.m. The flight plan was very simple. They were going to take off from Andross Island, fly northwest towards Bimini Island.

From there, they would keep flying that same course until landing in Palm Beach, not rocket silence. This is not a difficult navigational exercise. The whole thing was 210 miles, should take less than or right around 90 minutes to complete. Plus, they'd made this trip literally dozens of times in recent months, totally familiar with. Everything started fine. They climbed up in the sky, still experiencing some very light rain.

As they reached the western shore of Andros, they'd taken off on the eastern side. The clouds parted and the sky looked all clear, except for one little thing. Bruce could see that, directly in front of him, between he and Bimini Island, there was a lone cloud very low to the ocean surface. But it didn't look like a low-altitude cloud. It was very smooth and almost spherical like a lenticular cloud that stays up very high in the sky. At any rate, it looked harmless enough. Bruce would just climb a little bit and fly over it.

As he began his climb, he contacted Miami Radio to review his flight plan with them and get an updated weather report. They okayed his flight plan and said that the weather was all clear where he was headed, nothing to worry about. Breathe a little sigh of relief and started to relax before looking down at the cloud. beneath him. During that call with Miami radio, things had changed. Things changed very fast and in a very bad way. According to Bruce, the cloud was totally different than it had been just moments before. Now it was looking more and more like a massive cumulonimbus storm cloud expanding with insane speed.

The cloud grew at the same pace as his attempt to climb over it. He was making very little progress and actually getting above it. A few times the cloud swallowed his plane and then sort of spit it back out with a gust of wind from underneath. He was playing leapfrog with a giant storm cloud in what must have felt at that point like a tiny toy prop plane. Eventually, as they were forced to continue climbing, Bruce's dad floated the idea of turning around and just heading back for Andros to wait the brewing storm out. But Bruce didn't want to risk getting caught by the cloud again if it moved that way, and he didn't know if the rain over Andras had worsened in the time since. he cleared it. He kept climbing and stayed on course. Finally, after climbing 10.5,000 feet,

they broke completely free of this weird superstorm's clutches and were riding the top of the cloud like a wave. He turned around and saw that the cloud had indeed expanded quickly behind him. It was now 10 miles plus wide, utterly violent looking, squalls of rain and lightning flashes spitting out of it. To give you an idea of how wild this storm was becoming, Bruce's forward speed was about 105 miles an hour, about half of what his plane could do at top speed. But the storm started catching up to him, clearly going much faster than that hundred-plus miles an hour. Bruce estimated the storm to be moving at over 300 miles per hour

relative to the Earth's surface. He described it as similar to a gasoline trail being ignited by a match. It was like a mother's storm in labor pain. giving birth to some massive destruction and we'll find potentially other far more strange things than mere strong winds and lightning They'd been in the air for no more than 26 minutes when Bruce saw that the storm had reached around him and was now closing up again in front of him like a ring of gasoline again being lit on fire Both ends traveled quickly around to close in on the other side And this time it had grown much taller to reaching up to 50,000 plus feet far above the capacities of his little craft He couldn't go over it, he couldn't go under it.

In a last ditch effort to avoid diving right into the belly of this beast, Bruce turned directly due south in the complete wrong direction of where he needed to go, hoping to find a way around this circling mass of dark cloud. His desperate act worked for a moment. He broke free of the storm's path and informed Miami of his troubles. But this repose was short-lived. The storm continued closing around him, and he would have to just go right through it. He noticed a part of the storm that looked at.

a little bit thinner and headed that way. At this point, he had corrected his course and was heading back northwest. As they neared this part of the storm, it grew thick and black like the rest of it. Too late now, they were committed. They would have to rely on the plane's instruments to help them navigate through it as they'd be flying virtually blind. But right before they entered the cloud, they noticed a small hole forming in the storm. Aiming for it, they entered it in their plane and quickly saw that this was a horizontal tunnel

running through the entire thickness of the storm. It seemed like a literal artery of safety piercing through the chaos like a blade. Bruce maxed out his plane's speed up to about 220 miles an hour and drove straight through this tunnel. They'd been in the air for 30 minutes at this point. They were at least 100 miles off the coast of Miami when they entered the tunnel. Once inside, they immediately noticed that it was getting smaller, closing in. They would have to hurry. but the plane was already pushed to her limit.

And then a radical curiosity happened. These strange, very thin lines of cloud formed inside the tunnel that looked almost like the rifling of a gun barrel. What on earth was going on? None of these men had ever seen or heard anybody else had seen anything like this before. Given the width of the storm, Bruce knew that it should take him about three minutes to reach the other end of it. But lo and behold, 20 seconds passed, and they were spit out on the other side.

He looked back and saw that the tunnel had collapsed as they left it, and the area was now spinning counterclockwise. For about 10 seconds, Bruce had a sensation of floating in zero gravity while hydroplaning across a glassy pond. At the same time, the blue sky that had just invited them back to peace disappeared, and it was replaced by a thick, yellowish-gray haze that completely shrouded visibility. On top of this, none of the instruments were working.

The compass was spinning frantically counterclockwise, and none of the electronic instruments were working. His dad began to get visibly and audibly upset. The radio was working, though, and so Bruce contacted Miami and said, he didn't really know where they were, but they should be about 90 miles off the East Coast, but they weren't.

Miami didn't see a plane anywhere near that area or anywhere at all between Andross and the coast. Confused and afraid, they sat in silence. After about three minutes, little slits started to form in this electronic fog that surrounded them. The slits grew and grew until finally they could see clearly. The whole ordeal was over. As they cautiously breathed relief,

the Miami controller came on and was screaming at them. You're right on top of Miami Beach. You're right on top of us. Bruce looked downed, stunned. There was the beach. He checked his watch. The dial read, 3.48. In a flight time of 47 minutes, Bruce, his dad, and their partner,

had traveled 250 miles. That should have taken 80 minutes. Took almost half that instead. They did the quick math in their head. Bruce entered the tunnel 100 miles from Miami. The controller confirmed that. He exited the tunnel. 10 miles from Miami after flying for a mere 3 minutes in 20 seconds.

90 miles in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. For those wondering, that would require an average speed of over 2,000 miles an hour. Wind speeds were not even tropical storm levels. The beachcraft's top speed was barely a tenth of that. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content and regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself.

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