Episode Four: The Bermuda Triangle

 Episode summary: Nimoy throws shade at Nova and a Coast Guard cutter encounters fog . . . in the Bermuda Triangle. 

Bike summary: 3.3 miles. This is the last episode I forgot to record calory data for. 

When people think of In Search Of, it's probably episodes like this that come to mind, versus that first one about psychic plants. 

I don't think I've heard anything about it recently -- the universal adoption of GPS for navigating for ships and boats, as well as the fact that Bermuda, the Bahamas and Miami were hubs of a huge tourist trade may have finally killed it in popular culture -- but when I was a kid in the 90s there were still shows about it appearing with some regularity (I seem to recall having my parents videotape one two hour long one that connected the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis that must have been shown at 9:00 pm. Update: it might be this one, hosted by Richard Crenna, with this the Atlantis one ). I think TV crews like justifying trips to the Bahamas as work trips. Nowadays the only things that disappear mysteriously in that part of the world are the tax liabilities of certain high net worth individuals and businesses. 

Anyways, we open with Nimoy throwing shade on a rival documentary crew that concluded there was no mystery to the Bermuda Triangle by engaging in what can only be described as moving the goal posts. It's very subtle, but he says something like "Not to investigate is undermine the essence of science itself", even though the rivals (which turned out to be Nova) concluded that there's nothing paranormal going on, not that there's nothing to investigate. Of course missing planes and ships need to be investigated, for the sake of the families and insurers if nothing else, but there's a huge difference between saying to a greiving widow "Your husband's ship disappeared. It probably sank with all hands, but we can't find any remains because the ocean is big, deep and dark." and "Your husband's ship disappeared and we don't care." 

I do wonder if multiple TV crews have ever turned up to make dueling documentaries somewhere and they end up trying to sabotage each other and rewrite the scripts to include disses and take thats. 

It's a way of making skeptcs sound callous, dogmatic and incurious and it's still done today. UFO believers have won a huge victory by getting the US military to release a bunch of videos taken by planes, get these videos into mainstream publications like The New York Times and get ex-CIA director John Brennan to say things like "Some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be the result of something we don't yet understand . . ." But press them on the explanations advanced by skeptics and they say they just want to investigate.

To demonstrate that there's still a mystery to solve, we are presented with a few stories we're told can't be explained: a plane crash, a Coast Guard cutter encountering a white wall that left people on board feel cold and clammy and someone with a mid-Atlantic accent calling in to a radio station. 

The Coast Guard cutter seems to have come across some fog and they don't offer many details about the crash. The voice on the radio was genuinely creepy, though. It said that every living thing has an aura, as does the planet itself, and the Bermuda Triangle is like some kind of communications device for the planet's aura to contact the "Millionth Council" that governs it. Ships and planes get transported to "the timeless void" if they're in the triangle when the thing is on. A) This sounds like something from a film (or TV show, eg The Fantastic Journey, B) Why are "precursor" or advanced civilizations always so damn negligent? In fiction they'll mark their abandoned superweapons or the repository of an evil warlord's consciousness with temples or shmuck-baity warnings, but these Millionth Council jokers can't even bother to put up a single pyramid of skulls. I guess in space no one can hear you file a civil suit. They're doing a great job of governing the planet, too. 

Podcast summary:

I like Smith's Razor: "Never attribute to the paranormal what can be attributed to your misunderstanding of statistics."

Of course, as any baseball fan knows, even massive sample sizes don't mean that the nigh-impossible doesn't happen, only that it will evantually happen to a Mets team in a close playoff race -- just ask Jeff Francoeur.

In the show notes they mention that writer Gian Quasar speculates that the "Millionth Council" caller is either Peter Tompkins (who wrote about psychic plants, ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle) or Carlos Allende (he invented the Philadelphia Experiment).

I think Jeb says the whole phone thing is very Mothman-y, which gives me an excuse to post this picture, from the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME.

Blake also talks about some of the ships that "mysteriously" disappeared in the Triangle and it turns out that they were old, slow cargo ships operated without much regard for safety in a part of the world known for hurricanes. One of the ships was on fire so much the alarms were turned off! Wikipedia goes him one better and points out that a ship cited as disappearing in the Triangle actually exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles away. 

In the end, the real mystery is if I'm ever going to get this Barry Manilow song out of my head.