Infamous America - BERMUDA TRIANGLE Ep. 3 | “Electronic Fog”

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

In the 1960s, writers began to theorize about the causes of the disturbing stories related to the Bermuda Triangle. Pilots and passengers stepped forward to report bizarre experiences. As the number of reportedly strange occurrences grew, one writer in particular embraced a phenomenon known as “Electronic Fog.” Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In 1970, pilot Bruce Gernan and two others mapped out a quick flight. Their plan was to take off from Andros Island in the Bahamas, then fly over to the island of Bimini, and then up to Palm Beach International Airport. They lifted off at exactly 3 p.m. At first, they encountered only a light mist, which was not unusual. But then, the skies turned angry. Soon, violent storm clouds formed over the Gulf Stream. Gernan tried to fly around the storm, but the storm encircled the plane.

He made a run for clear skies and flew toward what looked like a tunnel in front of him. Three minutes later, Gernan emerged from the strange tunnel. He contacted Miami air traffic control and reported that he was not sure of his plane's position. He told him he was about 45 miles southeast of Bimini. But the controller came back and said there were no planes on radar between Miami, Bimini, and Andros. The controller told Gernan he was directly over Miami Beach, nowhere near his destination. Gernan was sure the control tower made a mistake. He still should have been over the waters of the Gulf Stream.

And if the tower was right, it meant he'd traveled more than 100 miles in three minutes, which was impossible. His plane would have to fly at a speed of over 2,000 miles per hour to cover that much ground. To this day, 50 years later, Bruce Gernan is still investigating the experience of he and his passengers on that flight. Oddly enough, it happened on December 4th, just one day short of the 25-year anniversary of Flight 19's disappearance, and it happened in the area where Flight 19 is thought to have vanished. Gernan believes he and the pilots of Flight 19 experienced something known as electronic fog, and they're far from the only ones.

From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling some of the most infamous stories about one of the most mysterious places on Earth. The Bermuda Triangle. This is Chapter 3. Electronic Fog Bruce Gernan was an experienced pilot. He and his father and a business partner were scouting the island of Andros as a potential

location to build a resort. They'd already flown the route back and forth to West Palm Beach more than a dozen times. But on that day in December, 1970, as Gernan flew into some kind of tunnel to try to find clear skies, he felt completely out of his depth. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. Strange lines formed all around the sky. The clouds began to swirl around his plane. His instruments malfunctioned. For about 10 seconds, Gernan felt a strange sensation. It was like he was both floating and being thrust forward at the same time. He estimated the tunnel was about 10 miles long. But then, 20 seconds later, Gernan's plane emerged into clear blue skies again, but only for a second. Almost immediately, the blue skies turned a grayish,

yellowish color. When he made it through that phase, something even more bizarre happened. Flight control picked him up on the radio. That's when he learned he was actually flying over Miami. Gernan and his passengers landed safely that day. And about a year later, he first learned about Flight 19, the unsolved disappearance of five Navy Avengers in 1945. He suspected that the squadron flew through an electromagnetic storm similar to the one he'd

experienced. Gernan knew that weather conditions tend to repeat themselves in nearly identical form, season after season, year after year. So we wondered if the conditions he experienced in December 1970 were almost identical to the ones Flight 19 experienced in December 1945. Both storms seem to have started around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and they both seemed to have dissipated about 30 minutes later. Gernan theorized that the speed of the storms was so fast they weren't noticed on radar.

Gurnan estimated that the storm he flew through was about 50 miles in diameter. He concluded that its northern extremity was in the same path as Flight 19s. He also estimated that Flight 19 entered this storm at about 3.30 p.m. and left it about 10 minutes before flight leader Charles Taylor made his first distress call. Geron guessed that Flight 19 penetrated too deeply into the storm. By staying within the storm for close to 10 minutes, they were overexposed to the electromagnetic energy. That energy had a dramatic effect on the outcome of Flight 19.

Gernan felt lucky that he and his passengers had escaped with their lives. They began to believe they had experienced a breach in the time-space continuum. And while their story was unusual, Well, Gernan wasn't the first to write about the phenomenon. Ten years earlier, a pilot wrote about events that sounded eerily similar. In fact, in the 1960s, John R. Hawke said he experienced not one, but two, breaches of the space-time continuum. Hawk spent years in the British Royal Air Force and had flown over all the world's oceans.

He could fly just about anything. His first incident had to do with missing time. It happened when Hawk was flying a Riley Dove aircraft from Miami to Bermuda. About halfway to his destination, he became enveloped in a glassy yellow mist. He couldn't see the horizon in front of him or the ocean below him. His description of this state of being was very similar to that described by Bruce Gernan. Hawk was a skilled pilot, so he was sure he could reach Bermuda if he used his instruments to navigate more than his vision. but the sticky yellow mist persisted for another three hours,

which was the estimated time to reach Bermuda. He was unable to see land or water. He forged ahead, flying for another five hours until he finally broke free of it. When he flew into the clean, bright sunlight, he was astonished to see Bermuda directly in front of him. He'd flown for five hours longer than it should have taken to reach the island, but yet it was right there below him. Hawk contacted the airport tower and made an uneventful landing.

But then a second, even stranger thing happened. After he landed, Hawk refueled the plane. He figured the tank should have been nearly empty after such a long flight. He was surprised to find out that he had landed with almost a hundred gallons of gas in his tanks. That was just about the amount he estimated would be left in his tanks if he'd flown for only three hours. His extra five hours in the air should have consumed nearly all the gas, but it didn't. And the same thing happened to Bruce Gurnan ten years later. When Gurnan unexpectedly landed in Miami, he had an extra 10 gallons of fuel in his tanks.

Gurnan started to ask questions that seemed more at home in science fiction movies, things like, was it possible he had flown into the near future, while Hawk had flown back in time? Gernan wondered if space and time had warped or frozen for Hawk. Conversely, he wondered if space and time had sped up for himself. Either way, he thought they'd both experienced a distortion of the space-time continuum, but in different ways. And if all that sounded strange already,

Hawk's second experience with the space-time continuum was even more puzzling. Hawk was flying a twin-engine Piper Aztec from Fort Laud. Loderdale to Bermuda. It was a delivery flight and one he didn't think would be a challenge. Weather reports told Hawk that he could expect puffy, cumulus clouds between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. If he wanted to fly higher, he could because there were helpful tailwinds at 11,000 feet. Hawk described his experience in a 1991 book. He remembered that he was on autopilot, with everything going smoothly, until he looked at his magnetic compass. He couldn't run. He couldn't read it. The compass card was spinning so fast that it was a blur, and then Hawk started feeling

woozy. He lost his sense of balance. His peripheral vision began to get dark. He was used to something called a gray out that occurred when high G forces dimmed the edges of his vision. But in this instance, there were no G forces, yet he felt like he was going to pass out. Hawk drew on his experience to save himself. He was already flying on autopilot, but he knew that. that wasn't good enough. He pushed his seat back as far as it would go. If he was going to pass out, he was determined to avoid falling on the yoke. That would send the plane into a tailspin. But before he could do anything else, he felt himself losing strength. He leaned back against the headrest and looked up through the windshield. All he could see was a yellow fog. He couldn't

see the clouds, water, the horizon, or blue sky. The last thing he recalled before losing losing consciousness was that he looked at his watch. His arm felt like lead, but he fixed the numbers in his head. When Hawk woke up, he saw it was 59 minutes later. If his gauges were correct, he was still flying northeast. He could now see the sun, and he felt his gauges were accurate. Hawk felt drained, but otherwise okay. He looked up and saw the contrail of another airplane. He radioed the airplane, told it he was underneath, and asked where he He couldn't believe what the pilot of the other plane told him. He was 400 miles from where he had been just an hour before.

In that hour, he'd covered more than twice the distance his plane could travel in that amount of time. Hawk turned due west and landed in Virginia. Ten years later, Bruce Gurnan estimated that the space-time distortion hawk encountered in the electronic fog had moved him ahead an hour and 52 minutes. After reading about Hawks' experience, Bruce Gurnan thought that he, too, might have passed through a breach in the space-time continuum. He likened their experiences to aspects of what some scientists had purportedly been able to do in labs, manipulate tiny particles forward in time. They did it by manipulating the gravity around the particles.

Gurnan wondered if planes and boats passing through the Bermuda Triangle could be subject to natural wormholes, tunnels in time and space that allowed for time travel. And Hawk was just one of many examples of strange time space travel that Gernan became aware of after making his own experience known. People from all over the United States wrote to him to recount their own bizarre encounters with electronic fog. In 1995, a woman set out to fly her aviation club's Piper Warrior from the Florida Keys to Ormond Beach in central Florida. She made the trip up from the Keys without incident. She met her daughter at the airport and the pair planned a day of shopping and lunch. On the return trip,

things were different. The woman dodged scattered clouds on her flight south. The sun was just about to set as she flew over Tampa. As she neared Naples, she saw the lights of Miami in the east. As she passed over the Everglades, a haze started to form in front of her. She later told a magazine that it was as if someone had thrown a blanket over her airplane. Worse than that, she couldn't tell if she was right side up or upside down. She got even more confused when she looked at her instruments because the compass was spinning. Her cockpit lights flickered on and off, and the altitude indicator began to roll. There was a high-pitch buzzing in her headset. At that point, she remembered a conversation with a jet pilot in the Navy Flying Club.

He told her there was dead airspace in the area over the Gulf between the mainland and the the islands of the Keys. She thought maybe this was what he was talking about. She shifted radio frequencies and was relieved to hear the voice of an air traffic controller, but her instruments were still out and a dense darkness surrounded her plane. About 20 minutes later, which felt like a long time, she saw lights on the horizon. She followed the Florida Keys that led her to a naval air station. In later cable documentaries, she said she felt extremely lucky to escape the fog and avoid what flyers call the dead man's spiral. The spiral happens when inexperienced pilots fly in conditions with poor visibility. When they experience spatial distortion, they tend to repeatedly

pull back on the yoke to avoid crashing. Eventually, the plane spins into a deadly spiral that's difficult to escape. The woman was lucky, but others were not. On February 1st, 2001, two volunteer pilots agreed to participate in a training mission with the Coast Guard. They were going to use their small, single-engine Piper Cherokee 6 to act like they were drug smugglers who were flying contraband into the United States. In the exercise, the Coast Guard's Falcon Jet was supposed to sneak up on the Piper and get close enough to capture a tail number without being detected. The two men who volunteered to play the roles of drug smugglers were highly regarded in their communities. Both used their personal savings to fly toys to underprivileged children, but their training mission

ended in a mysterious tragedy in Florida Bay. According to Bruce Gernan and other sources, the two volunteers were flying at 1,500 feet in their Piper Cherokee. As their plane approached the Ranger Station in Flamingo, which is on the southern tip of mainland Florida. The Coast Guard asked if they felt comfortable continuing an extra couple miles. The pilots said it was no problem. They could see the Marathon Airport about 25 miles south in the Keys. Not long after that conversation, the two planes successfully completed their training mission. Then the two crews decided to do another practice exercise before landing for the day.

A minute or two later, the Piper pilots reported they were surrounded by a haze. The Coast Guard crew didn't think much of the comment. They radioed back to the Piper to follow them as they turned north. Strangely, the pilot of the Piper responded that he would continue to fly south. The crew of the Coast Guard jet was puzzled. The jet responded with more detail. They were well ahead of the smaller plane, and they were in clear weather. there was no conflict. Again, the Coast Guard issued instructions, fly north. A short time later,

the Coast Guard jet called the Piper. This time, no one answered. The Coast Guard tried again and again to no avail. According to radar data, the Piper continued to fly south. At 747 p.m., the smaller plane was at 1,600 feet. For the next several minutes, it made a total of 7.7.7.5 p.m., it made a total of 7. seven unexplained maneuvers right and left. Four minutes later, at 7.51 p.m., the plane vanished from the Coast Guard's radar. A search was launched for the missing pilots, and eventually the plane was recovered from six feet of water. The National Transportation and Safety Board found no evidence of mechanical failure or faulty instruments. The pilot's son reported the gas tank of the plane had been filled before takeoff, so they didn't run out of gas.

Even though the pilot had reported fog and poor visibility, weather conditions at the time were clear. The NTSB concluded the pilot had become spatially disoriented. It was dark outside, and he was flying over dark water. He was unable to tell which way was up, and he crashed. But as Bruce Gernan and others pointed out, the pilot was experienced at flying in such conditions. He'd flown many times at night and was comfortable only using instruments. Gernan believed a better explanation was that his instruments had temporarily failed as a result of electromagnetic anomalies. Over the years, people who watched him on cable documentaries wrote to Bruce Gernan.

They were relieved to know they were not alone in their experiences with electronic fog. One man recalled his experience in the 1970s while he was aboard the USS Harold J. Ellison. It was a beautiful, clear, calm day at sea. Suddenly, the crew saw a cloud in front of them. As soon as they entered it, they found themselves in huge waves and high winds. They lost radio communications, and all their compasses failed. So did their radar. St. Elmo's fire and balls of lightning bounced all around the ship.

But the weirdest thing of all was what the crew purportedly saw on their radar when it started functioning again. It showed a cloud formation that amazingly spelled the word help. One of Gernan's friends felt like he could finally talk about his own experience with electronic fog. He and a friend were fishing one night in 1992. They were in a small boat five or six miles off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida. Around 1 a.m., they noticed glowing lights on the horizon to the northeast. The lights got brighter and turned greenish. At first they thought it was a ship.

But when it was about a mile away, they saw it was a luminous bank of fog. It kept coming toward them, and they started getting anxious. When it was a couple hundred yards away, they started the engine of their boat. The fishermen described it as a translucent green wall. It wasn't wispy like regular fog. It was flat on top and rounded on all sides and was about 400 to 500 yards across. To their surprise and horror, the fogs seemed to keep pace with them as they drove their little boat back toward lane. Finally, according to the men, the fog made a beeline right toward them.

By that time, their boat was moving at about 25 to 30 knots toward shore. When they were about 100 yards from land, the fog began to break apart to their great relief. Whatever it was, it didn't catch them. In Gernan's opinion, he wasn't the first to report this strange kind of magnetic haze. That honor apparently belonged to someone much more famous. In 1927, just one year before his historic transatlantic flight, Charles Lindberg got lost in a strange fog. He was piloting his plane, the spirit of St. Louis. He got lost somewhere between Havana, Cuba and the southwest coast of Florida.

It happened in the middle of the night, and Lindberg was alarmed enough to include the incident in his memoir years later. Over the Straits of Florida, the aviator found that his magnetic compass rotated without stopping. He had no idea whether he was flying north, south, east, or west. Looking up through the haze, he could see a few dimly visible stars, but he couldn't recognize any particular constellations that he could use to orient himself. Lindbergh thought that if he started climbing upward, he would eventually reach clear sky. If he could find Polaris, the northern point of light, he could navigate by it with reasonable accuracy. But as his altitude increased, the fog only thickened.

Nothing on Lindbergh's map of Florida corresponded with the features he'd seen. He asked himself, where on earth could he be? He unfolded his hydrographic chart, which was a map of water with coastlines, reefs, wrecks, and other structures. He saw that he'd flown almost at a right angle to his proper heading. It was then that Lindberg realized he was close to 300 miles off course. course. Lindbergh almost never spoke about the incident. Obviously he survived it, but it left an impression, and it was another example of a strange occurrence in the Bermuda Triangle. But Gernan and many others believe that this electronic fog is not exclusive to Bermuda Triangle. In fact, he

believes it's a phenomenon that appears all over the world and has been around for a long time. Off the coast of Japan lies a body of water that's as notorious as the Bermuda Triangle. For more than a thousand years, the Japanese have known about Ma Naomi. In English, the name translates to the Devil's Sea, but it's commonly known as the Dragon's Triangle. Like the Bermuda Triangle, it's a place where compasses sometimes spin or deviate from true north. Radio communications break up or go dead, and electronic equipment fails. Intense electrical storms and whirlpools wreak havoc on ships and planes. And like its counterpart in the Atlantic, there are purportedly sudden appearances of fog

and bumps in the space-time continuum that alter ships and aircraft for miles from their previous positions. Like the Bermuda Triangle, the Dragon's Triangle has claimed countless ships and planes, and usually leaves no trace of them behind. Interestingly, the Dragon's Triangle is located at geographic coordinates that are exactly on the opposite side of the planet from the Bermuda Triangle. Gurnan believes the Dragon's Triangle has its own famous victim of electronic fog, just like the Bermuda Triangle tried to claim Charles Lindberg.

On June 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart's flight around the world was cut short when her Lockheed Electra disappeared over the Dragon's Triangle. That day, she and her co-pilot took off from Papua New Guinea. Their goal was to reach Howland Island, about 2,500 miles away. Barely 800 miles into the flight, with no warning, their plane vanished. Dozens of explanations have been offered for Earhart's disappearance. They're usually variations of navigational error resulting in running out of fuel or crash landing on a deserted island. Sometimes they involve kidnapping or murder by Japanese soldiers.

But given his own experience, Bruce Gernan wondered if Earhart and her co-pilot entered a fog and found themselves. far off course, just like Lindberg did nine years earlier. If they had, who knows what might have happened after that. Maybe they crashed in an area that felt totally out of the realm of possibility to searchers at the time. Or if you want to subscribe to the Close Encounters Theory, maybe there's an otherworldly explanation. But in the season finale, we'll flip to the other side of the conversation and hear from people who think there are simple, rational explanations for disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Next time on Infamous America,

we'll discuss government responses and the opinions of skeptics to all of the strange events of the Bermuda Triangle. We'll also take a look at why. For some, this just isn't enough. That's next week on Infamous America. And if you're a member of our Black Barrel Plus program, you already have access to the full season.

If you're not a member, you can sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, Blackbarrelmedia.com. Members receive access to each new season in its entirety one week before the season begins for the general public. And members receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up today for just $5 per month.

This season was researched and written by Julia Brickland, original music by Rob Valier, audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, Black Barrel, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.