Gravitas Plus: The Bermuda Triangle

The human race is inquisitive by nature. Mysteries excite all of us. But there are very few mysteries that have the power to captivate and terrify us at the same time. The Bermuda Triangle is that kind of mystery. Hello and welcome to Gravitas Plus. I'm Palki Sharma Upadhyay. I'm here to talk to you about one of the most terrifyingly fascinating places on our planet. A place that has stumbled us for decades. It's been called a lot of things. The devil's triangle, the hoodoo sea, the limbo of the lost. It has been subjected to many paranormal theories. Some say it's a gateway to the underworld. Others say it's a wormhole to another dimension. A lot of credit for these bizarre theories goes to Hollywood. Movies that have made the place rather fancy and only added to its mystery. Movies like Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, Lost in the Bermuda Triangle, Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, Satan's Triangle, The Triangle, Triangle. I could go on about these movies based on this triangle, but the question here is why are we discussing it now? Because on the 28th of December 2020, a boat with 20 people on board left Bimini in the Bahamas. It was supposed to arrive in Lake Worth, Florida on the 29th, but something went wrong. The boat traveled around the area that encompasses the topic of our story and it went missing. We are in 2021 now. The boat has not returned. The U.S. Coast Guard searched at least 17,000 square miles. It has now suspended the search. Our thoughts go out to the families of the missing people. This incident has once again put the spotlight on the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. What's up with this place? Where exactly is it? And who exactly do we blame for these disappearances? Sea monsters, aliens, an ancient curse or an Illuminati conspiracy? Let's try to demystify this mystery and do me a favor now. Draw up a map. Trace a line connecting the island of Bermuda, Florida, Puerto Rico and back to Bermuda. What do you get? A mysterious triangle with an area close to 500,000 square miles. This is the Bermuda Triangle. It is believed that radio stopped working here. Compasses spin like crazy. Electronics start wigging out. Some say they've spotted UFOs. This sinister polygon has swallowed 75 aircraft, more than a hundred ships and close to 1,000 humans. In fact, the numbers depend on who you ask because the history of the Bermuda Triangle is rather long, all the way back to the 15th century. On his first voyage, Italian explorer and America's first illegal immigrant, Christopher Columbus, traveled across the region and reported that a great flame crashed into the sea and that a strange light appeared a while later. It could have been anything. A meteor perhaps. Nobody knows. Then in 1611, the famous playwright William Shakespeare, the man who did not believe in happily ever after, based his play The Tempest on a Bermuda shipwreck. This further enhanced the area's aura of great mystery. But it wasn't until the 20th century when the Bermuda Triangle really captured the public's attention. In 1918, a 542-foot long U.S. Navy ship called the USS Cyclops sank between Barbados and Chesapeake Bay. The ship was carrying more than 300 people. They vanished into thin air. More mysterious vanishings followed. In 1945, five American torpedo bombers and a plane that was sent to find them vanished without a trace. Then in 1964, American author Vincent Gaddis, no he did not disappear, he officially coined the term of this enigma. He outlined several mysteries of the triangle in a pulp magazine article called The Deadly Bermuda Triangle. Coming back to the disappearances, besides the boat disappearance from December 2020, the most recent tragedy was in the year 2015 when the cargo ship SS El Faro disappeared in the region. It was traveling from Florida to Puerto Rico. It disappeared from the radars on the 1st of October 2015, and it was found on the 31st of October, wrecked 15,000 feet below at the bottom of the Atlantic. Mysterious? Certainly. Terrifying? Yes. Paranormal? Not really. Most scientists have attributed these disappearances to severe weather changes, shallow waters, water spouts, and human blunders. But the most commonly accepted theory was presented by a team of scientists from the University of Colorado in 2016. They analyzed satellite images of this infamous area and noticed a series of hexagonal clouds, which they said might act like air bombs. These air bombs are believed to cause deadly blasts of air which can exceed 170 miles per hour. You can call them hurricane force winds. They can really blow up the air. They can also trigger sea waves as high as 45 feet in the air. Most ships fail to survive such a storm. Most aircraft fail to survive such winds. According to scientists, clouds do not really form straight edges. But the Bermuda Triangle is an exception, an unexplained anomaly, and it's not alone. There are at least 11 other places like the Bermuda Triangle across the world. 11 other vile vortices. What are they? In very simple words, vile vortices are strange regions on the earth where strange things occur or used to occur once upon a time. A lot of credit for identifying these regions goes to Ivan T. Sanderson, a traveler who was a huge fan of the paranormal back in the 1960s. He coined the term vile vortices to record the strangest experiences during his travels. He mapped at least 12 vile vortices spread all over the world. Six of them lie almost perfectly in line above the equator, and so do the six vile vortices below it. First on this list are Algerian megaliths in the Sahara Desert. These are burial grounds and an architectural anomaly made by the Zing Empire in 15,000 BC. Second on the list is Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, an advanced ancient society that dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization. Third, the Dragon's Triangle, also known as the Devil's Sea near the coast of Japan. It lies above an underwater city popularly known as Japan's Atlantis. The fourth vile vortex, the Hamakula Volcano located in the Ring of Fire in Hawaii. Fifth, Easter Island in Polynesia, one of the most isolated places on the planet. This is where you can find 900 Moai statues created by the Rapa Nui people. The South Atlantic Anomaly, a rather dangerous zone where the Earth's magnetic field is the weakest. Seventh, Great Zimbabwe, an ancient city in Southeast Zimbabwe. Eighth, the Wharton Basin on the western coast of Australia. Ninth, the Loyalty Islands on the eastern coast of Australia. The tenth and eleventh vile vortices are the North and South Poles. And lastly, the twelfth and the most infamous of them all, the Bermuda Triangle. Much of what happens at the Bermuda Triangle and all these places I just mentioned can be logically and scientifically explained. But then again, most of us like to romanticize things. Rational explanations are just so boring. So accept my sincere apologies for I may have disappointed you. Gravitas Plus, co-presented by ŠKODA. Simply clever.