Lore - Lore 234: Sunk

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

It’s never fun to misplace something. Lost objects have been a frustration and fascination for most of humanity. But one place in particular is better than all the others at making things disappear. And today…we’re going there. Written and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with research by Cassandra de Alba and music by Chad Lawson. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring for just $15 a month. No contracts, no salespeople, just simple and easy security. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 20% off your order with Interactive Monitoring. Stamps: Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at Stamps.com/LORE. Squarespace: Build your own powerful, professional website, with free hosting and 24/7 award-winning customer support. Start your free trial website today at Squarespace.com/lore, and when you make your first purchase, use offer code LORE to save 10%. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ©2023 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Have you ever lost something? I'm willing to bet that you have. For me, it was a box of childhood Christmas ornaments that went missing years ago. Inside it, I had tucked away all sorts of small, magical objects that had the power to stir my emotions, and one day it was all just gone. It's honestly one of those nearly universal human experiences. We become attached to something only to misplace it or forget where we've tucked it away. That loss often comes with feelings of frustration, grief, and even fear. Losing things leaves us shaken.

So much so that there's even a patron saint devoted to the idea. Anthony of Padua is the saint of lost items. Lost money even lost souls. And popular culture is filled with thrilling examples, all built on lost things. The lost ring of Sauron, the lost arc of the Covenant, the lost colony of Roanoke. I could go on and on. People lose things, and whether that's a bit of treasure or a significant historical object or a childhood pet, we can all agree that it hurts.

But it also begs the question, what would you do if the act of losing seems to take place in the same spot over and over again? How long would it take and how many lives would need to go missing before an unfortunate happenstance should be treated like an actual risk? Amazingly, one such place exists, and it's been active for about as long as we've been paying attention. If the stories are true, entering its borders is a dangerous game of chance, one that might just cost you your life.

And most frightening of all, it covers more than a million square miles. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. They have been away from home for a very long time, so it's not surprising that they were starting to see things. To be fair, they did go looking for extraordinary sights. One thing to keep in mind is that the captain of the ship wasn't the most honest of guys. His crew was pretty nervous about the length of the voyage, so he had been keeping two different journals of the trip. In one, he logged the real actual mileage they'd covered. In the other, he listed shorter, falsified distances. Then he only let his crew see the fake one. The first weird thing they saw happened on September 15th. They were floating through the darkness of night when something bright

appeared overhead. They would later describe it as a branch of fire falling from the sky, and it sets everyone on edge. Two nights later they were trying to make a course adjustment, but their compass wouldn't match up with the North Star. It was as if the laws of nature had fallen apart, and the crew didn't take it well. The captain had to wait until dawn to make a second adjustment, and thankfully this time it worked. Three weeks later, on October 11th, they were starting to get depressed when they spotted

evidence of land nearby, in the form of debris that could have only come from a coastal region. Among the torn plants and sticks floating in the water around their ship, they even spotted a branch that had been carved by human hands, but scanning the horizon. There was still nothing but water. That night though, they spotted something else. The captain described it as a tiny light, almost as if it were miles away on the shore of some unknown country, but it would fade in and out of view, so he called a couple of other

crewmates over to get their opinions. Was it just his imagination or something real? One of them could also see it, but it was far from definitive. Those who could though describe the light as sort of like a small candle, and it seemed to move, too, rising up from beneath the surface of the water, up into the air, above it. Now, these men had reason to worry about the unknown. After all, as far as they were concerned, they were on the very edge of the world, and each new mile they sailed could be taking them into some uncharted danger. How do I know?

Because this voyage took place in 1492, and the captain was Christopher Columbus. Now over the years, people have speculated about what Columbus really saw, but there are a couple of important things to know before I tell you. First, remember the guy's willingness to lie in service to his own mission? He was keeping a fake journal of distance traveled, after all. And second, we don't even have the original journals. All we have today is a manuscript from the 1530s that quotes and summarizes passages from that original, which is frustrating,

but given all the centuries between then and now, also not too surprising either. The two things that people have debated for decades are the branch of fire and the floating light that seem to rise out of the water toward the sky. As usually happens, some people have blamed those events on aliens. Some have gone as far as to claim that Columbus actually witnessed a USO, an unidentified submerged object. But unsurprisingly, those who push that idea seem to be very good at misquoting the second hand journal from Columbus, often taking words or phrases out of their larger context,

which twists their meaning. It's that old but true adage. When you take the text out of context, all you're left with is a con. I think you get the idea. And that branch of fire they spotted in the night sky? The best explanation most historians can come up with is that it was nothing more than a meteor. A short trail of light was probably all the sailors needed to notice it, and think it

sort of looked like a branch. Honestly, there's no evidence that they thought it was anything supernatural, although to them it probably would have seemed like a bad omen, which explains their uneasiness about it. Oh, and the other reason all these theories have been proposed at all? Well, it has a little bit to do with the things described in them, and the person they are attached to. But mostly it has to do with the location in the Atlantic Ocean where all of them were said to have taken place. A location where nothing is safe, anything can happen, and the unexpected is assumed. A place called the B design, the better.

So let's start with some of the larger ideas, shall we? The Bermuda Triangle is a massive area of ocean that, depending on who you ask, ranges in size from 500,000 square miles to over 1.5 million square miles. It's called a triangle because, well, that's the shape of it. The three corners are Miami, Florida, running southeast of Puerto Rico, and then north to Bermuda. Exactly where those points are on the map varies from source to source though. Like I mentioned a moment ago, it's a big patch of ocean, more than a million square miles, and parts of it cross over very deep sections. In fact, the deepest spot in the entire

Atlantic is the Milwaukee depth, and it's located right in the Bermuda Triangle. Not important if you're looking for causes behind the mystery, but it sure does mean that anything sinking right there is going to end up a long way down. And a lot of things have sunk there too. According to most records upwards of 50 ships and 20 planes have entered the Bermuda Triangle over the years and simply vanished. But that's just counting all of the prominent cases, usually military in nature, or industrial ships. Some researchers think that the number could be a lot higher once you count small personal watercraft, the sort of boats that don't make the news too often. The area has gone by a lot of names over the years, the Devil's Triangle, Limbo of the

Lost, the Houdou Sea, even the Triangle of Death. But it wasn't until 1964 when the name Bermuda Triangle first appeared in print in a pulp magazine called Argosi, but that doesn't mean that its reputation is new. Far from it. In fact, there's a line in Shakespeare's last major play from 1611, the Tempest, where he references the still-vexed Bermuthus, which a lot of people see as a reference to a shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda in July of 1609. For a long while, the crew were assumed dead, until 1610, when they sailed into Port in Virginia, aboard a homemade ship that they built to make it home. And of course, all those disappearances and mysterious encounters have caused people to propose theories about the place.

I mentioned aliens a little while ago, and it's kind of amazing how many people subscribe to that idea. A lot of the blame for that might actually rest with the 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Burlitz, but then again for a lot of people the answer is always going to be aliens. Following close behind our stories of Atlantis, what better place to locate a lost city that slipped beneath the waves than a legendary body of water known for swallowing things, right? It doesn't help that in the 1930s, the famous psychic Edgar Cayce stated

that Atlantis was indeed waiting off the coast of Bimini, claiming that it would be discovered in the late 1960s. And guess what? Researchers in 1968 discovered what they believed to be massive limestone blocks under the water there that had been cut and laid by hand in a line that extends nearly half a mile. It might not be Atlantis, but it was exactly what Casey had predicted, and that alone is pretty spooky. Other theories claim that sea monsters

are patrolling the water there, even giant squid, which sounded fantastical for a very long time. Until scientists finally caught a real giant squid on film in 2005. Believers in the Bermuda Triangle often point to that as evidence that old superstitions can sometimes be based in fact, which occasionally is true. Maybe Mother Nature is to blame. Some folks have pointed to recent research into geomagnetic conditions there in the triangle. Apparently, it does sit near something called an egonic line, where true North and magnetic

North line up, and while I don't have enough knowledge about the science behind that to make a call, it does remind me of the compass troubles that Columbus recorded. Tropical storms, rogue waves, even something referred to as oceanic flatulence. All of these have been proposed as reasons for the disappearance of so many ships and planes. But what all these theories accomplish is simply guesswork. None of them perfectly addressed the events that have taken place in the triangle. None of them offer satisfying answers to all of the disappearances, and none of them have been conclusively documented. What has been recorded though are some truly amazing stories.

She was built to haul coal. In the days when so many ships in the ocean used coal for fuel, the USS Cyclops was essential, sort of a floating version of those refueling jets they used today. The Cyclops was launched in 1910, and it had a pretty standard route for a long time, running between the east coast of Mexico, up through the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic to the Baltic Sea. It had a pretty uneventful career for a number of years. Then, World War I arrived, and suddenly a coal-carrying ship was more than just a bit of industry.

It was part of the essential wartime supply chain, so the Navy leaned heavily on it to move troops and coal to places that needed them. Everything was going fine until March of 1918, when something unexpected happened. The Cyclops disappeared. The ship had been hauling a much heavier cargo, manganese ore, which seems to have presented the crew with a challenge, but just after stopping in Bermuda for supplies, and then sending a transmission that read, whether fair, all well, the ship, its cargo, and the 300 people on board, simply vanished. After three months of searching for the vessel, the US Navy declared it's lost at sea.

And a year after that, its story was already being described as a mystery in publications. One of the unusual things people brought up was the utter absence of evidence of a shipwreck, no small debris left floating on the surface, no wooden objects or life preservers. Nothing. One chilling addendum to the Cyclops story is that the vessel had three other sister ships. One would be sunk by Japanese fighter planes in the Pacific in 1942. And while tragic, it was a normal end to a long career. But the other two, the Proteus and the Narius,

sank within three weeks of each other. Both were carrying around 60 people at the time, and both were on a journey from St. Thomas to the southern coast of Maine, and both vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Then there's the infamous story of Flight 19. It was called that because it was the 19th training mission that day, all working out of Fort Lauderdale's naval air station.

Each mission had been a success, with nothing odd or unusual to report. But when the 19th flight took off at 2.10pm on December 5th of 1945, that record would change. There were five planes in the flight group, with a total of 14 men between them. The flight leader was a World War II combat veteran pilot named Charles Carroll Taylor, and his mission was to guide all five planes 64 miles east to a spot called the Hen and Chicken Shoals for a bit of bombing practice. After that they were supposed to fly 73 miles over Gran Bahama Island and then 73 miles north, all before

heading back to base in Florida. But aside from managing the bombing exercise, everything else went off the rails. It was the compass that presented the first problem. Sounds familiar, right? Taylor reported that his head stopped working, showing that they were flying in the wrong direction. He believed that he was flying west when he should have been flying east, passing over what he thought was the Florida Keys, and then the Gulf of Mexico, the opposite direction from where they were supposed to be going. Then, Mother Nature got involved in a storm blue in, bringing thick cloud cover, along with wind and rain.

One of the other pilots sent the mysterious message that everything looks strange, even the ocean, which highlights just how confusing their situation was. So Taylor hatched a plan for all five planes to intentionally crash into the ocean in order to stay together. I have to believe it was a maneuver that they hope to survive, a sort of last-ditch effort

to stay together and stop moving until help could arrive. But the flaw in that scheme is that the type of plane they were flying, the TBM Avenger, was incredibly heavy even without fuel. Chances of surviving the crash were slim to none. Flight 19 sent one final message at 7.04pm, telling the base that it looks like we are entering white water, were completely lost. After that, they were never heard from again. Just 23 minutes later, two search and rescue planes took off to find them, each carried 13 men, a necessary crew if they hoped to rescue the men on board the five missing planes. But 20 minutes into their mission, one of them went silent and vanished as well.

The only evidence anyone could find in the aftermath was an oil slick on the water off the eastern coast of Florida. As soon as the sun came up the next morning, the Navy went into full search mode. Over 300 ships and planes began combing the area, running the grid back and forth to make sure every bit of the 300,000 square mile search zone was covered. But after five days, they were forced to call it off. Nothing related to Flight 19, or the plane that went after them, was ever seen again. There's something so very tragic and frustrating about losing something important, and when that important thing is human life, it becomes almost unbearable.

Every day around the world, people go missing. Hikers in the woods, travelers in a foreign land. Here one minutes, gone the next. But a few missing person stories earn as much attention as though centered in the Bermuda Triangle, which is odd, because there's nothing truly unique about that particular corner of the ocean. Statistically, it doesn't have a higher death or disappearance rate than any other spot. According to the Navy, the only thing weird

about it is just how busy the place is. And the busier the road, the more accidents it's going to have. But it is a big area, and we can't keep watch over every square foot of it. Which is why researchers keep coming back to an idea called rogue waves. These are occasional freaks in the ordinary sequence of waves, where every now and then, enough of the motion combines to form one big wave, sometimes as tall as a hundred feet above sea level. It's a theory that just might offer some explanation. And recent research points to rogue waves being a lot more common and dangerous than first believed.

Some scientists think that at any given moment around the world there are ten rogue waves active, rising and falling without anyone there to spot them. But if you were on a ship when one of them formed, say a ship that's been awkwardly loaded with heavy out of balance cargo, perhaps, a wave like that and the trough that precedes it could be game over. At the end of the day, maybe science is our best hope of brushing away the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle for good. At the very least, it's offering answers to some of the other unusual reports there,

specifically Christopher Columbus's mysterious lights. One theory about that faint light is that it was nothing more than schools of bioluminescent worms. They're known as fire worms, and although they spend most of their lives on the ocean floor, they rise to the surface on a regular basis to perform a mating ritual. The process involves the females swimming in circles while glowing with a faint light, while the males follow along and flash some lights of their own. We want so badly for there to be some definitive proof of the supernatural qualities of the

Bermuda Triangle. We secretly, or not so secretly, dream of learning that the true cause is something beyond our wildest dreams. No science, no reason, just solid evidence of something bigger and more powerful than we could ever imagine. But so far, we haven't found it. All we have are ideas and theories, a net of guesswork tossed into the dark waters in an effort to snag the prize.

And all we have to show for it so far is hope. I don't know about you, but I've always felt like the ocean is hiding something. Some people think it's an alien race, or the remains of a lost civilization, while most just think it contains a lot more for us to learn. That's what exploration is all about, after all. But a lot of things go missing there, leaving us guessing about the cause. I hope today's tour through the Bermuda Triangle showed you just how complex and confusing that journey can be, and we're not done just yet. We have one last story to share with you about things that were once here, but have mysteriously vanished. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

This episode of lore is sponsored by SimpliSafe. Hey, who's squeezing in one last getaway this summer? Before you take off, though, protect your home with the latest innovation from SimpliSafe Home Security. There are 24-7 live guard protection. It's designed to help stop crime in real time. Now, if an intruder breaks into your home, simply save professional monitoring agents can actually see, speak to, and deter them through the new smart alarm wireless indoor

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You probably already know this, but building an episode of lore is an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing. From pitching stories and researching them to the writing and promotion, it takes an entire team. And when every person moment and penny counts in your business, you can't afford to take any of them for granted. Stamps.com gets it because for the last 25 years, they've been helping businesses like yours and mine save time and money. So you can focus on your business knowing Stamps.com has all of your postage needs covered with premium discounts and great rates. With stamps.com, all you need is a computer and a printer. They even send you a free scale so you'll have everything you need to get started. And because running

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the code lore. Stamps.com. Never go to the post office again. And finally, this episode was made possible by the good people over at Squarespace. It's natural to want to show off the creative things that you make. I know that all the talented folks who work with me at Grimm and Mild are proud of all the shows they help me build, and they deserve a showcase for all of that hard work that's just as amazing as them. And for that, I turn to Squarespace. Why? Because Squarespace has everything that I needed to build the perfect website, go see it for

yourself, go to grimandmild.com, and check out what I was able to make there, the same for lorepodcast.com. All of that was done with zero web coding skills, just a lot of powerful drag and drop tools that make Squarespace so easy to use. And if you need creative help, Squarespace has a massive library of gorgeous templates, powerful e-commerce features, web hosting that's free, then award winning 24-7 customer support. Honestly, Squarespace is more than just a website to me. It's a secret weapon. So what are you waiting for? Build your new website today. Just visit squarespace.com slash lore to start your free trial website. And when you're

ready to launch it, use the offer code lore at checkout to save 10%. Squarespace. Build something beautiful. Like so many other stories in the Bermuda Triangle, this one begins with lights. Christmas lights to be precise, because apparently viewing them from a boat off the coast of Florida is something worth bragging about. Our bragging light lover was a 42-year-old named Daniel Burrick. He had retired early after building a fortune in the hotel industry, and one of his favorite things to do was to spend time on his 23-foot-long cabin cruiser, named, I think, appropriately, for this show,

The Witchcraft. Now, one thing to know about this boat is that it was deemed unsinkable thanks to some advanced flotation technology that could keep the craft above the surface, even if it had taken on enough water to sink other vessels. But I'm starting to get the feeling that the only reason anyone would ever declare their ship unsinkable is to test fate. On the evening of December 22nd, 1967, Daniel and his wife had a friend over for dinner, a 34-year-old Catholic priest named Father Patrick Horgon, and during the course of the conversation he mentioned how nice the seasonal Christmas lights

looked from out at sea. Then, on a whim, and probably much to his wife's annoyance, Daniel said, hey, why don't we go see them right now? So the two men got in the car, drove to the port, and started the engine in the witchcraft. Around 9 p.m. though, the Coast Guard received a distress signal. It was Daniel Burke, still onboard the witchcraft, and there was a problem. They had been moving along when something beneath the surface of the water struck the boat, causing the power to go out.

But true to his belief that the ship was unsinkable, he told them that he wasn't worried about taking on water. To be safe though, he gave the Coast Guard his location, fairly close to buoy number 7, still within Miami Harbor, although technically I might also add within the Bermuda Triangle too. They, in turn, asked him to fire his flare gun to help guide them when they arrived. The trouble was, no flare gun was ever fired. And when the Coast Guard reached Bui number 7, there was no ship in the water nearby. It hadn't taken them that long to get there either, just 19 minutes from the time of the call,

then yet in that short span, the witchcraft and both men on board had vanished. And you know the drill by now. Daniel Burke was an experienced sailor. His ship was equipped with all the necessary navigational and safety equipment he could possibly need. And of course, it was unsinkable. Yet the Coast Guard would spend the next six days scouring a 25,000-foot section of the ocean looking for him and turn up nothing but empty water and a whole lot of frustration. It seems that despite all the reasons why the witchcraft could not disappear, that's exactly what it had done.

And to this day, the most common reason people hold tight to is the place where it all happened. The Bermuda Triangle. It's never fun when we can't find things. Lost is an experience that has a way of punching holes in our hope, forcing us to take on water. And without hope, we're sunk. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Erin Manke, with research by Cassandra DeAlba and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for lorepodcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.

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